Seriously, put a camera on the front of a bus with a big ol' button on the dashboard labeled "In case of asshole", and let the driver push it. Give 'em a $30 bonus each time they capture such a picture with a car clearly in a marked bus lane. You'll get your tickets, no need for "AI" to get involved.

It does not understand math. It's synthesizing a terrible understanding of math from people writing about math, and since it doesn't understand the material it's synthesizing from, it can easily be misled. It doesn't actually understand division, factoring, primality or any of that, it's just very good at paraphrasing its sources to pretend it does. Just because it's better than prior systems for searching bulk data, doesn't mean it really understands what it's barfing up.

Uh, if you already had Basic, this will mean you lose it, instead of keeping the cheaper service. And if you didn't have Basic, you were already paying more, you just lost the option to pay less. Your "option" is nonsensical; refusing to sign up makes sense, but for existing customers, there's no added incentive to cancel.

The movies alone are getting pretty close to the complete length of some of the longer TV series people rewatch "all the time". The 30 movies to date are 4116 minutes, which equates to roughly 96 episodes of a "one hour" TV series (40-44 minutes after subtracting commercials and skipping the credits most of the time), or 4.36 "seasons" (under the pre-streaming definition where a season was typically 22 episodes). The entirety of, say Babylon 5 (a series I have in fact rewatched multiple times) is five such seasons, so yeah, I could in fact bring someone up to date on all the movies with a similar time investment.

It's even a similar comparison, because the MCU is tied together such that it is harder to appreciate some of the movies without the ties to the older movies. And if it were just the movies, I'd agree with you. But now, to be "fully" engaged with the movies, you need to not only watch all the movies, but most of the TV series. Or do you? I don't know which ones I can skip. The Netflix Marvel is probably all skippable, as are the "young adult" series, but I know some of the seven seasons of Agents of Shield are important, maybe (I've heard it ties in with Winter Soldier? Maybe others?). What about Loki, Wandavision, She-Hulk, Agent Carter, Inhumans, the ten other series already released or releasing by the end of 2024 on Disney+, etc.?

The problem is that by adding so, so, many TV shows, with varying degrees of quality, across multiple genres (even within the Marvel continuity, She-Hulk is a very different show from Wandavision, which in turn is quite different from Loki), and essentially making all of them unpredictably important to "keeping up", it's easier to drop away from full engagement. When I (re)watch Babylon 5, the new episodes build on my existing attachment to the characters and that style of show. With all the MCU content, you need to get attached to brand new or loosely characterized folks over and over and over. I kinda like Loki as a character (still haven't bothered with the show), but I have zero built-in interest in She-Hulk, and Scarlet Witch has been a fairly boring character in the movies (I saw Multiverse of Madness, and yeah, I feel like I missed a lot by not seeing Wandavision first, and no, I have little interest and no intent of going back to watch it).

It's not a single continuous story you're asking people to engage with (as with the comparison to a single long, but beloved, TV series you rewatch multiple times), it's dozens of different stories that are just connected enough to make you feel like you're stuck with the choice between watching crap you're not interested in and missing key references in the movies. Once people lose interest in that level of engagement even once, for just one TV show, the bar to reengaging gets higher and higher. From personal experience, I can say that Multiverse of Madness probably signaled the death knell for Marvel for me; on top of underdelivering (it's really just two universes, plus a 30 second montage of CGI barf to tell you there's more than just those two; I like Sam Raimi, but it was pretty meh by Raimi standards), the whole premise clearly required meaningful investment in at least one Disney+ TV series to get the full emotional impact. I'm not going to do it, so why bother showing up for movies where, by virtue of not doing my homework, I feel like I missed anywhere from 5-25% of the impact?

To be clear, I'm not asking for a "what to watch" guide to catch up here. I'm a parent, with three young kids. I don't have the time or energy to catch up on a dozen (moderately child-inappropriate?) TV series just to add more movies that I'll have a hard time seeing to my queue. And I suspect there are a lot of other people in the late Gen-X and Millennial cohorts (read: Roughy half the target audience for these films) in my same situation; it's easier to just write the whole MCU off and reclaim some time than to use what little time we have to keep up. The MCU fun, but it's not good enough for me to really regret the loss.

The vaccines in development target the strains of malaria with the highest death tolls, and those strains are almost exclusively found in Africa. Plasmodium vivax, the strain found in the Americas, has an absurdly low death rate, it's just not a priority for vaccination, relatively speaking. It's main issue is that it's not just a one-time deal when you get infected; you get recurrence for years unless stronger treatments are applied to burn out the reservoir in the liver.

Four inches is the low end (if it sinks 1mm/year). The high end (for the faster sinking regions) would be nearly 16 inches, and that's before you account for the sea level rising to meet it. It's an island; there's quite a lot of it that will be underwater on the regular if the combined effect of sea level rise and sinking puts it three feet lower.

Did you miss that Brian Hood is a mayor now? He's a public figure on that basis.

That is not at all the standard, legally speaking, in the U.S. New York Times v. Sullivan established a much more forgiving standard. The false defamatory statement must be made with "actual malice", meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. Essentially, simple mistakes aren't defamatory. If this were decided under U.S. laws covering the press, ChatGPT's literally lacks the ability to exhibit actual malice (it has no idea it's inventing defamatory "facts", and its creators in no way intended for it to do such a thing). Obviously, U.S. laws don't cover the whole world, and I believe the bar for defamation is lower in Australia, but while publishing falsehoods may be frowned upon, it's not a legal standard worldwide.

There are in-between options though. You needn't impose universal rent control, just rent stabilization. Forbid rent increases exceeding pick-your-favorite-CPI-inflation measure +0.5% or whatever (ideally tied to wages, so rent increases are tied to what people can pay, not what some arbitrary basket of commodities cost). Perhaps allow slightly faster increase between tenants, but not completely unbounded increases even then. Existing rents don't go down, they simply stop rising above general inflation. Initial rent for new dwellings? Market rate (with the market rate increase effectively slowed by the rent stabilization only if demand is met by existing supply). There's still an incentive to build new housing (initial rents aren't capped), zoning can prevent repurposing the land for something other than housing, renter's protection can protect against exploits like tearing down existing housing just to rebuild it, etc.

You can also just use the tax code to punish landlords leasing units above a certain size. Home price inflation lately has been driven in large part by (older/richer) people buying additional homes as rental income properties, raising the price of homes beyond what (younger/poorer) people looking to buy for the first time can afford. When they can't afford to buy, they rent, and the system self-reinforces; it's profitable for the old/rich to take more housing off the market for sale and collect rent from the folks they've priced out in the process. Deny the existing tax deductions for depreciation, property taxes, etc. when the unit is, say, >1000 sq.ft. and not occupied by the owner. Deductions for actual repairs made are fine, just no pretending the property loses 1/30th of its value each year no matter what you do. If you want the tax code to subsidize your rental income, you need to be making high-density apartments, not just taking single-family homes off the market.

School was actively working against my reading enjoyment even when all the books were by white men. I was in K-12 in the '80s and '90s, and by the time we reached high school is was all terrible books, all the time. The Sun Also Rises and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were two I particularly hated. Catcher in the Rye supposedly appeals to high schoolers, but Holden Caulfield was the most unsympathetic, self-involved asshat of a protagonist, and I couldn't get past that. etc., etc.

The problem is not diversity, or abandoning the classics, it's that they choose books that are interesting to people with English degrees for deep analysis. If that's your thing, you'll have a great time. But if it's not, and you're not already the type to read voraciously for pleasure (I am, come from a family of librarians), I can absolutely see how you'd raise a generation that thinks all reading is boring. I doubt I had a single assigned novel after 6th grade that was truly enjoyable to read (Lord of the Flies came closest, and I'd label it more on the interesting than enjoyable end of the spectrum), and of course pre-6th grade, they weren't really assigning full novels.

Depends how tall/fit you are? I'm 6'1"; when I'm trying to walk at top speed I go just over 4.25 MPH (and that's on a route that has a couple points where I need to wait for stoplights, adding a wait of a minute or two typically; 2.5 miles long, takes 35 minutes), and even when I'm not trying to go particularly fast, I go around 3.3-3.6 MPH (same route, 42-45 minutes. 3.5 MPH may not be "leisurely", but it's not all that fast.

They were asked, by the EPA, nearly 20 years ago at this point, because it was already well-known these things were bad news:

In 2006, EPA invited eight major leading companies in the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) industry to join in a global stewardship program with two goals:

• To commit to achieve, no later than 2010, a 95 percent reduction, measured from a year 2000 baseline, in both facility emissions to all media of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), precursor chemicals that can break down to PFOA, and related higher homologue chemicals, and product content levels of these chemicals.
• To commit to working toward the elimination of these chemicals from emissions and products by 2015.

And there was some pretty big clues on this well before then; there were investigations back in 1980 when male employees of a textile producer that used PFAS were experiencing impotence and “polymer fever”. This isn't new, the news cycle about this was triggered by investigations finding larger amounts of PFAS pollution than expected, and finding that many companies either lied about phasing out PFAS, or while they did actually phase out one specific PFAS (e.g. PFOA), in many cases they did so by just replacing it with some other PFAS (it's a large family of related molecules), adhering to the letter of the EPA rule without adhering to the spirit of the rule.

You didn't hear about it because it wasn't in the news much, but it was absolutely a big deal for the industry and environment protection organizations. The industry slow-rolled and weaseled out of voluntary compliance, now the hammer comes down.

Of course not, it happened in Florida.

Except we know no such thing. Sure, the risk to the child assuming they're already infected was lower. But infectiousness matters; in the same way we worry less about Ebola than about the flu, despite even the weaker strains of Ebola being far more lethal, simply because Ebola isn't that infectious, COVID is in many ways more of a threat than flu, even to young children. As of the end of 2022, there have been precisely 1600 recorded pediatric COVID deaths; the 2019-2020 flu season immediately preceding COVID (which set a record for recent flu seasons) recorded 199 pediatric flu deaths. COVID took about three years to do the damage that would take eight years of back-to-back "worst pediatric flu seasons ever" would take. That's with mitigations and (for the last 6 months to 1.5 years) vaccinations for the school age population.

And that's ignoring the fact that COVID spread in schools doesn't stay in schools (and that schools contain more than just children). There's a reasonable argument for letting COVID spread in schools once vaccination protected the adult population, but until the vaccines were in wide deployment (summer of 2021), your calculus had to include all those parents and grandparents being exposed through their children.

Eh. 8% is a believable consistent target return; the S&P 500 has averaged 9.77% (assuming reinvested dividends, before inflation) for the last 30 years after all. Given that they use hedging words "as much as 8%" (so, possibly below 8%), that's entirely believable, you just assume they're using some moderately hedged investment strategy and skimming a bit off the top as profit. It's when you start seeing claims of guaranteed returns (meaningfully above what a long term U.S. treasury offers) or extremely high projected returns well beyond the S&P 500 that your scam radar should start pinging.