That is a good point. And it really drives the point home that what we want is reduce and reuse, but what we are sold is recycle. Thanks.

Smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the United States with approximately 500K deaths per year. That is more than twice more than alcohol (200K) with less smokers in the U.S. than drinkers. The mortality data for smoking marijuana is less clear (mostly because it is illegal in most places), but it carries many of the inherent risks as smoking. Any of the papers that talk about the actual risks of smoking marijuana cover this in detail.

It turns out that lighting stuff on fire and then breathing that smoke directly into your lungs is not a good idea. It's 2024, this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone anymore.

Edibles are probably considerably safer than smoking. The probably is because we really don't know. Heck, it is even possible that edibles are good for you, or that they are worse for you than smoking. Feel free to be a guinea pig.

That data is very hard to come by, as we don't really have good numbers on how much marijuana gets used. Canada has very good data on how marijuana impaired accidents nearly quintupled when they legalized marijuana. The doctor that wrote that paper had this to say about comparative deadliness of the two substances:

On it's face this would seem to agree with your assessment that marijuana is less deadly than alcohol. From a driving perspective it probably is. Although the paper went on to talk about how very few of the people who tested positive for marijuana only tested positive for marijuana. Most also tested positive for alcohol and that combination was significantly more deadly than alcohol alone.

It turns out that people that get stoned and drive tend to also be drunk, and the combination makes them even more dangerous than simply being drunk.

It also doesn't take into consideration increased risk factors long term for cardiovascular and other health related issues arising from marijuana use. Right now, admittedly the science behind that is murky. Numbers are hard to get for criminalized substances, and it is very difficult to separate the effects of marijuana from the effects of other drugs that often get used in combination with marijuana (alcohol being a prime example). That being the case smoking marijuana probably has most of the same health problems that smoking tobacco has. From the limited studies that have been done marijuana smokers can probably expect similar if not worse mortality rates. Not to mention the fact that while most marijuana users don't go on to use other "harder" drugs. There is a statistical link between marijuana use and later use of other drugs. Some of that makes sense. I have several friends that have told me that they have been given marijuana spiked with some other substance at one time or another.

It turns out that drug dealers are not nice people. Hanging out with them is a very serious health risk.

Just for the record, I am personally in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana, and I have even helped my niece get a medical marijuana card. I recognize that the science on some of this is still out. I just don't think that when the research is done, that marijuana is going to turn out to be as benign a substance as many marijuana advocates currently insist that it is. I think that it is at least safe to say that it is probably as harmful to your health as cigarette smoke, and long term cigarettes are invariably an early death sentence.

Interestingly enough the U.S. actually tried criminalizing alcohol distribution and use. You can read the history of prohibition if you want. I personally am a tee-totaler, and I spend a fair share of my time trying to convince youth to never drink alcohol. That being the case, even I think that criminalizing alcohol was a mistake. Alcohol is simply too easy to make, and too much a part of most people's culture to successfully make illegal.

That being the case just because criminalizing alcohol was overzealous does not mean that decriminalizing other drugs is a good idea. Oregon has basically proven that it is better for society for some substances to be illegal. Yes, alcohol kills more people, but most drugs (including marijuana) are more deadly. Fortunately all other drugs are simply far less popular than alcohol. The last thing that we want is for these other drugs to become more popular.

As an aside, you really should consider giving up alcohol as well.

I remember when almost all glass bottles were recycled. Milk came in glass bottles that were refilled over and over. Soda came in glass bottles which were refilled and used over and over. These bottles were worth money to retailers, not because the government put some sort of tax on them, but because they would resell them to the distributors who would wash them out and reuse them.

This system lasted much longer in some parts of the world than others. Recycling soda bottles was the norm in Latin America clear into the 90s, maybe longer. I moved back to the United States and I stopped paying attention. Of course, they weren't melting the bottles down or anything crazy like that. They simply washed them out. After a while the bottles would get so worn that they would get hazy on the outside. The still held Coca-Cola just fine.

I suspect that even the most granola of today's customers would be put off by this sort of recycling. And there is no question that gathering and washing glass bottles is definitely more expensive than simply manufacturing brand new plastic bottles. Before plastic, however, that was simply the world that we lived in. Even 30 years ago recycling glass was still economically viable in locations where the packaging machines hadn't been upgraded.

Part of the reason that I am so skeptical of any sort of recycling program is that recycling proponents always seem to gloss right over the history of what societies did before plastics were widespread. Humans have already solved how to package goods in a world less reliant on plastic. But instead of pushing for well known solutions to the problems of plastic we would rather point the finger at Big Oil and blame them for our plastics problem.

The license that Youtube has content providers agree to is incredibly broad. Youtube can basically use that content however it would like, including sublicensing it, monetizing it, and retaining it after you have deleted it from the service. People uploading stuff to Youtube give Youtube an incredible amount of rights over their work.

Github's license, on the other hand, does not grant them extensive rights. Heck, they treat most repos as private. Worse, many of the Free Software licenses that they probably could use to train the AI might potentially create derivative works that would also be copylefted. The lawyers at the FSF has definite beliefs about this (here's the link), and their beliefs just happen to line up with the beliefs of most content creators. I suspect before too long we will have either legislation or case law that will spell this out concretely. To this point the folks training AI models have just moved forward under the impression that they could train their AI with whatever content they wanted, whether it was licensed to them or not. That's unlikely to stand long term.

Either way, however, Youtube has direct access to the motherlode of data when it comes to video, and it is all licensed to them under a very lenient license. That advantage actually is likely to be hard to beat.

I personally don't want to pay for everyone to have the ability to stream at 8K. I don't even see at 8K. Why should I be paying taxes to guarantee that my neighbors can watch their sportsball at ridiculous resolutions? What's the other use case for such ridiculous amounts of bandwidth?

There is a certain amount of broadband that I feel that we should subsidize, but I think that it is very easy to get carried away.

Believe me, I would be upset if I found out that my auto maker was using my driving data against me. That's part of the reason that my daily driver is a 96 Honda Civic. I drive carefully (as evidenced by the fact that I have been driving the same car for nearly 30 years), but that doesn't mean that I want anyone keeping tabs on how I drive. I especially don't want someone keeping tabs on how I drive without my knowledge. Worse, the automakers are profiting by sharing that information and I don't get a cut.

That being the case, if what you are upset about is that your insurance agency doesn't know who is actually driving your car, then I can't sympathize. They don't care who is driving the car. They simply want to know how badly the car is being driven. If you loan your car out to someone that is a terrible driver then I actually think that the insurance agency should get to know about that. After all, they sold you insurance based on the risks they perceived from you, not someone else that might be driving your car.

As an example, I have a 16 year-old daughter that just started driving. I made it very clear to the insurance agent that she wouldn't be driving my wife's car (a late model Honda Odyssey), and instead she would be driving the 2006 Kia Sedona. Mechanically the Kia Sedona is still sound. It has new brakes and tires, and it has been well maintained. It's a big vehicle with ABS brakes and side airbags. When (not if) my daughter gets in an accident she will be as safe as I can make her. I still got a discount from specifying that she wouldn't be driving the Odyssey. Insurance companies just want a reasonable idea as to how much risk they are taking on. Personally, I think that is fair.

I would consider using a telemetry app for her when she drives. It would have to be phone based, and not based on the information from the vehicle, as there is no way that I would put her in a vehicle new enough to support telemetry. The biggest reason that I wouldn't want to share her driving information is that I have driven with her and I suspect she is in the lowest quartile of new drivers. In fact, I suspect that if the insurance agency knew how terrible she was they would charge me more to insure her. On the bright side she is getting better with practice, and she is cautious about driving places that she isn't already familiar with. That makes a big difference in practice, but it is unlikely to show up on any sort of telemetry app. Hopefully she can avoid any accidents and improve her skills to the point where I don't feel like I am taking advantage of my insurer.

They don't care. They aren't trying to prosecute you for bad driving. They are simply trying to charge you more money if the vehicle that they insure gets driven badly. If you let knuckleheads drive your vehicle then you probably should be charged more in insurance.

You could also start with:
  - two molecules that (moderately) accurately copied each other (though getting them both at the same time makes the time scale to the big event much longer.)
  - A molecule that makes NEARLY always inacurate (but occasionally acurate and complete) copies of itself. (This also drastically pulls in the time to a two-molecule solution.)
  - A molecule that makes inaccurate copies but with string of typical errors that occasionally loops back to an accurate and complete (mod a few errors in unimportant places) copy of a previous version.

These could eventually mutate into a version that can perform a one-step copy-itself loop.

=====

I've always been partial to an RNA-only origin. RNA can do it all (self-copy, enzymes, energy transport batteries in at least two sizes with self-pluggin-in connectors: ATP/ADP and UTP/UDP, expression regulation, directed genetic code editing, etc.). It's also still doing a lot of that in current lifeforms, especially in key parts (such as many of the components of the DNA duplication, DNA repair, DNA-to-MRNA copy, gene expression regulation, MRNA exon-eliminating editing, and MRNA directed protein synthesis machinery)

Here's that first sentence with them...

They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

On Jan 1 2020 a new IMO (International Maratime Organization) regulation went into effect. The shipping industry drastically lowered the sulfur content of its fuels and the SOx content of ship exhaust plumes dropped by about 77%. (Other aspects of the fuel change also reduced some particulate pollution, too.)

The COVID sequestration also reduced shipping (and cloud-seeding exhaust from it), along with aircraft contrails and upper-atmosphere dust, and dust-generating industrial processes and transportation activity, which (like volcanic dust) also reflect sunlight over the ocean and lower temperatures.

I've seen claims that the reduction in ship exhaust plumes, alone, are enough to account for ALL the sea temperature rise since 2020, and that with the low-sulfur fuel in continued use the bulk of that excess heating will continue even as activity ramps up post-COVID.

Once Plex started trying to charge me for casting to my SONOS devices I moved to emby.

https://emby.media/index.html

They do have some smart TV support:

https://emby.media/community/i...

Regarding the "hockey stick" graph. (Taking absolutely no position on whether Mann was honest or not, competent or not, etc.)

I was under the impression that the Hockey Stick graph had been shown to be defective as an indicator of warming, primarily because it took tree ring data as one of its proxies for temperature, but carbon dioxide concentration increases alone have been shown to substantially promote tree growth even in the absence of temperature increases. So how much of the sudden rise in the graph is from temperature increase (if any) and how much just from increased CO2 levels is unknown.

But I don't have any links to reliable scholarly articles examining this issue. Do any of you?

There is no true Scotsman. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

This is a classic.