Life started on Earth very soon after there was liquid water, yet it took billions of years before eukaryotes arose. Being a eukaryote is a big deal: having mitochondria lest us have huge genomes compared to a bacterium's, and that opens the door for complexity and sophistication. Every living creature with interesting structure is a eukaryote, and the innovation that let us attain this complexity (a successful endosymbiosis) happened exactly once in the whole history of life on Earth.

Imagine trying to eat rabbits but getting indigestion, and having the rabbits start breeding inside of you but lose almost all their rabbit-like traits, and in the process you gain superpowers of being able to metabolize grass and grow a hyper-brain that lets you out-compete every other sapient being on the planet. That's not much more wild a story as what actually happened with the first successful endosymbiosis.

The ratio of (time-to-first-life given temperate water on Earth) / (time-to-eukaryotes given first life on Earth) is tiny; maybe 1:100 or so. That's evidence that complex life might be much more rare than simple life. In fact, I would guess that successful endosymbiosis might be one of the strongest of the great filters; it might be that complex life is nearly vanishingly rare and it's only the anthropic principle that gives us a reason for finding it on Earth.

If that's true then we'd anticipate finding simple life on other rocks, but rarely anything morphologically complex. Increasing the length of time Mars had water probably increases the chances they got bacteria-like life, but I would be surprised if Martian life ever had anything like membrane-bound organelles.

I've been told by a friend who was there 10 years ago that they give an incentive bonus every time a new thing "ships". There's a massive incentive to push new things regardless of whether they're better.

Healthy people who can get the virus as a mild infection can also collectively generate future mutations, or pass it on to people who will.

If it worked that well, do you think the medical establishment wouldn't jump on it? Do you really think medical professionals are that corrupt/insane/blind? I think the sad truth is that IVM actually doesn't work, but it's too good a story that "there's no money in it for THE MAN," so a lot of people are persuaded to try it alongside (or worse, instead of) the vaccinations and mask-wearing that actually help. What a shit show!

There are about 11 independent types of observational evidence that support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... If it were only one or two then there would be lots of room for alternatives. Since so many lines of evidence all point to massive stuff that doesn't interact with light, it's now nearly certain there's some form of clear, massive stuff really out there.

Dark matter. It's not just for galaxy rotation curves anymore (TM).

Agreed! When I was a student I had a window in an apartment that cost so much ($925/mo) I had barely enough money left to eat - I had to budget $2 per meal on average. That was even after student loans and my wife and I working pretty much every day, sometimes until after midnight. She got pneumonia from the grueling schedule and life was pretty tough for a year or two.

My education was worth it in the end - I now earn a lot due to my education. Still, the cost of housing was crippling when I was a student. It would have been heaven to have had the option of less-expensive housing - I would have traded my apartment window for an extra $200/mo of food or fewer shifts in a heartbeat.

My point is that some people at certain stages in their lives need a housing option that's between homeless and swanky. There shouldn't be any shame in that. As long as this building is affordable and safe to live in (and it looks like that's up for debate), I think it's actually a great idea. My past self would have seen options like this as a godsend.

I dislike the eyeball-grabbing quality of the metric of "how many people's lives are shortened" because it ignores or hides the very relevant question "by how much". Supposing that plastics shortened 51% of people's lives on average by at least one minute. The alarmist headline would be that plastics send hundreds of millions of people to an early grave every year.

The scientific paper is much better in that it reports the hazard ratio of having high phthalates:

If hazard ratios are indeed a few 10s of % higher in high-phthalate individuals and there isn't some common cause (say, high phthalates correlating to phthalate-independent poor lifestyle choices) then the alarm would be fully justified. I wonder though if all of the common causes are properly controlled for - it would be really hard to be sure.

Your logic is sound and your heart is in the right place. However let me encourage you to be more critical of which facts you take to be true, particularly regarding the superiority of natural immunity and the small risk posed to children.

Additionally I would say in this case that reducing the amount of COVID food out there is valuable enough to all of us to make it a good idea to vaccinate children. How many additional adults would you let die in exchange for not mandating childhood vaccination? This is a judgment call and a trolley problem; everyone would draw the line at a slightly different place. Letâ(TM)s agree that there is a line; that nobody would sacrifice a million adult lives for the sake of letting a single parent choose to keep their kid unvaccinated. Where would you draw the line?

With all due respect, some HPV vaccinations have been shown to last at least 10 years. Theyâ(TM)re new enough that we donâ(TM)t know how long they provide protection. If they turn out to need boosters every few decades thatâ(TM)s not a dealbreaker either.

Sources summarized here:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-c...

Catch most of the little fish and the big fish start to get hungry. Seriously, if the incentives to write good ransomware are weakened enough then the brains of the operation will find something else to do; maybe even something usefulâ¦

Before you start hating on this idea, please check out this Kurzgesagt video entitled "Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do". https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Personally I think deliberate geoengineering (like what's proposed) isn't morally worse than the unintentional geoengineering we're already doing with our massive CO2 emissions. I think geoengineering could have some unintended consequences, which is exactly why studying our options makes sense.

I also don't think that humanity is going to be able to make do with CO2 reductions alone in the short term; Joscha Bach estimates we'd need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 1000 in order to reach a long-term sustainable level: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/.... That's just not going to happen any time soon.

Knowing what our options are is a good idea. I support programs like these so we will have studied what we might be able to do if (when?) climate change gets very ugly. COVID has shown us that not everybody is going to trust vital scientific research conducted when the stakes are too high. The longer the history of and the more sober scrutiny of geoengineering research, the better.

4kWh/mile isnâ(TM)t even close to correct. A Chevy Volt consumes about 0.15 kWh/mile.

I bet you would like "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane. It's a very recent book that brings together quite a lot of phylogenetic, chemical, and geophysical evidence to show how like likely arose on Earth - the first plausible explanation of abiogenesis I've ever seen. Also, by his reasoning, the origin of life might not have been a fluke, but the first eukaryote - that's possibly a great filter.

You say "They will not build a quantum computer capable of breaking RSA any time soon." and you're right, for some values of "soon". Unfortunately, the time scale that matters is "how long will it take for us to agree on a replacement for DH, develop it, test it, and have it flush out of all use"? How long has it taken for IPv6 to take over? This is probably worse...

The Economist posted the response Google should have sent to James Damore here:

https://www.economist.com/news...

It is far more eloquent than a typical Slashdot comment. If you're interested in this subject, and in seeing what in my opinion is the most thoughtful commentary on this subject, the above article is highly recommended.