Gah! I have to agree. I did the canonical A/B test with Google and DuckDuckGo, and found that there's no good solution.

I had heard that Google was getting pretty bad, so switched to DuckDuckGo. I found that google's search was much better for technical things, if you ask a direct technical question on google you'll be sent to StackExchange or Reddit or Quora or somewhere with a direct answer. Not as much with DuckDuckGo. I kept using DuckDuckGo but frequently re-searching on Google for technical questions, and that was annoying so after about a year I switched back to Google.

And now google is so awful that I'm thinking of switching back. I sometimes have to go down about 2 pages before any reasonable links come up. Search for "$some-equipment user manual" and find dozens of links for $some-equipment (not the manual) for sale on ebay, used equipment dealers, AliExpress, and so on.

DuckDuckGo isn't as politically biased as Google, either. Search for "political cartoons" and DuckDuckGo has TownHall.com is the first or 2nd result. Google doesn't even list that site on the first *three pages* (!) of results. Lots of times I've seen completely inflammatory news highlighted on Google, with DuckDuckGo taking a more measured approach.

(Meaning: Both political sides should be available ranked by page-rank, and not arbitrarily slanted by outrage or politics.)

So I don't know where to go for results now. Google is getting so bad that using it is taking up a significant amount of my time trying to wade through the bad results and rephrasing/retrying searches hoping for a better result.

Does anyone know if yahoo still working?

It's all the style to paint the current supreme court as conservative, and list all the really awful decisions they make along with their political leanings. It give us so much outrage and clicks!

In reality, if anyone ever took the trouble to *read* their decisions, they would find that the court makes really well-researched decisions based on the law.

Let's reiterate that point: the court doesn't rule on whether something is *right*, it only rules on whether something is *legal*.

So in the OP, the term "costly and ineffective" is used. Do you want a court to uphold something that's both costly and ineffective? The term *ineffective* is important here. Even if the law can be framed as intending to be a good law, should we still support it if it's ineffective?

And about the legality, the legislature has full power to make laws to correct any decision that the Supreme Court makes. The legislature can even rewrite parts of the constitution, which have to be ratified by the legislatures of the states, but still...the legislature can change anything, up to and including the constitution, and has done so in the past.

And finally, framing the decision as the political leaning of the court is the fundamental attribution error. The article tries to paint the court's decisions on their individual political leanings, and not the legality of the bill in question.

It's far more likely that the examples listed - vaccine mandate and student loan forgiveness - were simply unconstitutional, and not struck down due to political leanings.

Not everything in the sun is the result of political partisanship.

Sometimes, a decision is reached for other reasons.

The implant isn't reading the person's internal monologue, it's trying to interpret the "intention" of the person.

The implant measures the firings of various nerves in the brain. The researchers tell the patient "imagine moving the mouse to the left", the person then visualizes doing that in whatever way they like, and the computer copies down the impulses that are measured.

All the impulses for when the researcher is *not* imagining moving the mouse left are also copied down, and a big neural net tries to figure out correlations that are true for "move mouse left" and not true for every other action.

There's probably also some human training here as well, so that the person can *probably* adjust their thinking patterns in a way that the computer can more easily detect - in the manner of those "alpha wave" devices you can get to train your brain to think in a more alpha-wave manner.

(So for example, if the person discovers that thinking about dogs makes the mouse go left, the person (and not the computer) can "learn" that association for mouse control, and this will eventually become automatic in the person.)

The intended use is, of course, for disabled people to gain some control over a computer, and by extension some control over their lives.

Okay, just to be clear: climate change is an existential threat and we should be doing everything possible to address it, and you're good with punishing Elon Musk because he's right-wing.

And he's stated that his position has never changed, only that the left has moved so far to the left that he's now right of center.

So effectively you're saying that Elon being right wing is more important than everything he's doing to combat climate change.

That's your position - yes?

Interesting framing.

His position was that children did not need to be vaccinated, and forcing the vaccinations led to more deaths than letting the disease take its course among that slice of the population.

Medical professionals disagreed with the CDC conclusions, which is not in itself extraordinary, but then the government suppressed the opinions online.

And note that of course the CDC is absolutely correct in what they did... but also note that everyone here has been receiving a skewed and one-sided version of the facts, because opposing opinion was suppressed by the government.

The whole thing is simply opening the door to the suppression of free speech. Start by declaring certain forms of speech a "special case", then ban those special cases, and then start skiing the slippery slope from there.

Speech is free, and should continue to be so.

There's a direct relation from selling crap to personal harm, I can see how getting crap can harm someone; at the very least it deducts money from the person and gives no value. That's the best case scenario, it can also cause more severe harms. A good example would be those 512GB memory sticks that are the cheap much-smaller-sized sticks with a tricked-out partition table that makes it seem like 512GB, but once you fill up the much-smaller-size it starts to overwrite the beginning of the volume.

There's also a direct relation between posting calls to violence against individuals and direct harm: making someone feel unsafe, ginning up enough outrage against someone to cause an attack, giving people "ideas" about what to do, and so on. In the US it's OK to call for the death penalty for abortion clinic doctors, but it's *not* OK to call for the death of a specific clinic doctor.

Beyond that, I can't see any direct relation between Nazi memes and direct harm. As distasteful as it may seem, letting people with extreme views air their position has several benefits in the direction of making things better, while suppressing their views leads to making things worse. Lots of analysis of this online that I won't bother to review, but for a brief example consider that allowing them to air their views allows others to counter their arguments, while suppressing their views allows them to recruit new members in a vacuum - with no push back.

And even beyond that, the history of free speech shows conclusively that speech deemed offensive is basically a fad, subject to the whims of the public and prone to political ideology. Enough examples of this has happened in the past 8 years that everyone reading this should be able to remember, and consider. In recent years the slightest mention of race, sexual orientation, or certain religions was deemed hate speech, and the completely political statements of a certain politicians was deemed hate speech by many people.

Essentially, hate speech is defined by the court of public opinion, is a moving target, and attempts to suppress it are counterproductive.

So, yeah, EU trying to suppress people saying bad things will not help, will make things worse, and will result in a handful of people getting caught up in the political system over the next decade or so. We'll have lurid reports of someone posting something technical related, getting their lives destroyed by running afoul of this law, and the resultant outrage from hearing the news report.

Completely ass-backwards from what should have happened.

Depends on the model. A Tesla 3 might generate $42,000 of pollution.

You have good days?

The "Great Firewall of China" is run by roughly 50,000 people, it's reasonable to expect that a couple of thousand look around on American websites and post propaganda of various sort, and it's reasonable to expect that a couple probably look at Slashdot from time to time.

This *has* to be some sort of Chinese plant to try to discredit capitalism or something.

I mean, it's blatantly absurd on it's face.

Elon Musk did a lot of work making Tesla, which is a) getting other manufacturers to take EVs seriously, and b) weaning us off of gasoline (and diesel) in an S-curve adoption.

How, exactly, is that not moral and responsible?

Elon Musk is putting humans back into space, bringing internet access to rural communities, and gave free StarLink to Ukraine when Russia cut their internet lines.

How, exactly, is that not moral and responsible?

(He didn't allow StarLink to work in Crimea, that was by direct ask from the state department, because the administration views Crimea as a part of Russia now.)

And for X/Twitter, note that twitter was losing $4 million per day at the time of takeover, was largely losing money each year (with the exception of 2018 and 2019) and has had a steady increase of users. Musk has also stated the the number of bots was 20% at the time of takeover, and is lower now.

He also ripped out all the government censorship from what has become the new digital town square.

How, exactly is that not moral and responsible?

That's just one person, I can cite lots and lots of billionaires who do charity work.

I don't think it's likely that people who are not capable of moral, responsible decision making would become billionaires in the first place.

What specific moral and/or responsible decisions are you talking about?

Care to give a few examples of decisions you would *like* to have seen some of them make?

Avi Loeb's blog is an interesting read, at least the entries related to this issue - especially this one.

1) The spheres were found close or nearby to the path of the meteor, no spheres were found in runs more distant to the track.

2) The spheres were mostly iron and no nickel.

3) The spheres were consistent with a droplets from molten explosion in the atmosphere.

4) The meteorite is almost certainly interstellar. NASA is 99.99% certain, and the only push back (that it comes from our solar system) requires new science not in evidence.

If volcanic, then the spheres would be found over a wide area, and not localized to the area of the explosion.

Raw iron always has Nickel, because the two elements are formed at the same time with the same process. No known astrophysical mechanism will separate the two elements, so you need to explain why there is no nickel in the spheres. Unless the spheres were from metal smelted to make steel, which both humans and aliens would do.

The elemental proportions of the spheres does not match the proportions found anywhere in our solar system - by a wide margin. Some elements had hundreds of times the proportion of that same element found in our system.

Making this issue about Avi Loeb is a complete mystery to me. He lays out his evidence and invites comment. Those comments *should* be of the form: this can be explained *this* way.

And not "the conclusion is wrong because you're a whacko".

And on a final note, his expedition (to recover bits of an interstellar meteorite) cost a mere $5 million. That's peanuts, and easily funded by private donations. He wants to go back to see if he can recover a larger piece, which might take a little more money - maybe twice as much? - and I personally think that's a fine goal.

I'm not entirely convinced of that. Saying someone is the "Sandusky of climate science," who "molested and tortured data", a clear reading of this in English implies that the person is *not* a child molester, but that the writer is using the term as a metaphor for imagery. Actually, as imagery goes that's a pretty good phrase, in the creative writing sense.

Implying that someone is not a child molester would not be defamation.

Defamation is a civil case, so it'll be "preponderance of the evidence" and not "beyond reasonable doubt" as it is in criminal cases. I don't see the Sandusky comment rising to the level of defamation, and Mann's published 4 books and over 400 publications, so I think he can reasonably be considered a celebrity, so the bar will be that much higher.

Maybe there's something else in the suit, but from the description it sounds like simple resentment.

If the SAT score were racist it would under predict the success of black students. It does not.

Most topics are multivariate and can be marginalized to highlight certain aspects with the intent to mold public opinion.

For non-math people, the data of a concept is usually multidimensional: if plotted, it becomes a multidimensional object. You can shine a flashlight on the object and look at its shadow on the wall - effectively collapsing the multidimensional object to two dimensions by ignoring the other dimensions. Since the object is multidimensional, you can shine the flashlight from a number of directions and get a number of shadows, each of which shows a particular aspect of the object without regard for its overall shape.

Taking capitalism as the object of example, we can show any number ways that capitalism is bad, and this is regularly done here in this forum by people who advocate for change, and in particular advocate for throwing out capitalism entirely in favor of communism.

Capitalism results in wealth inequality, and this doesn't seem equitable. Corporations can downsize and put people out of work, and this doesn't seem fair. Corporations are greedy and this leads to corruption.

But capitalism as we practice it today is finely tuned to create the most wealth with the least suffering. Capitalism has resulted in a worldwide reduction of poverty by over 40%. Capitalism has driven our scientific advances in medicine, food production, and lifespan. Capitalism gives everyone a chance to amass wealth.

So which is it? Is capitalism good or bad?

This is how citing facts is equated with activism and ideology. Cite only the facts that support your ideology, don't consider countervailing issues, and use personal attacks to humiliate your opponents. ("You're a science denier!")

Citing facts is easy and shallow. Instead, cite in-depth studies backed by trial runs with a way to measure the results.

Lack of journalists - are you nuts?

Everyone with a cell phone is now a journalist. Many high profile, highly regarded online news/opinion bloggers started out when someone with a cell phone went to a newsworthy event and discovered that the reality didn't match the MSM reports.

As one blogger noted (don't remember who), early on he went to a political rally and it was unimpressive relative to the MSM reporting. He then went to a rally for the opposing side and noted that it was a) much larger and b) completely unreported in the press. He said something like "wow, I'm reporting real news" and that feeling/experience led him to a career in amateur journalism.

The MSM is trying to promote a narrative, both left and right, all the while bloggers are showing unedited clips of things actually happening.

Lack of journalists? You must mean lack of "professional journalists at legacy media".

We can do without most of those.