Consider a number of Microsoft products, such as VS Code, have had the AI on by default, leaving people looking for ways to disable it. So, it is not out of line for people to not catch that Microsoft did the opposite first once. And even then, people are going to be suspicious that it won’t “accidentally” become the default in a future update.

The problem I have is they are being shoved stem our throats whether we want them or not. In many cases they work out to an investor jerk-off feature than real value.

The marketing item âoeuses AIâ comes off as more of a bio hazard symbol to me than anything useful. I interpret it as a lot of hand waving instead of real value. If AI is solving something useful then sell me that point, otherwise itâ(TM)s going to signal to me something that is cloud dependent and potentially near future e-waste.

He put money into the companies he wanted to support, by purchasing parts of them. He could retract his money at any time by selling the shares. That is either an endorsement of what they are doing, or an endorsement of what they plan to do.

The majority of what Musk claims is not true. He's had at best a shaky relationship with reality for some time. He happily endorses and propagates - amongst other things - the false narrative that he launched Tesla. Don't count on his narrative of "sleeping in the factory" to actually mean anything beyond occasionally yelling at employees there and then leaving to go sleep in the nicest hotel in town.

I can't speak to all cases of "administrators", but I can very much speak to one case in higher education where I was employed for some time.

Where I worked, employees were grouped into three different bins, depending on their role. There were "faculty" (rather self-explanatory), "civil service" (mostly janitors, along with lab techs, some librarians, and other roles), and "professional and administrative (or P&A)". The P&A was often misconstrued in the public to be composed entirely of administrators, which was nowhere near correct, it had far more professionals - especially professional research staff which were largely non-faculty scientists with advanced degrees.

Even more so to counter your point, *nobody* in the P&A category were union. All the unionized workers were "civil service" - though lots of civil service were not unionized. The union couldn't have cared less about the count of administrators.

If you go in - as an adult - to a mass shooting event at a school, how do you expect to survive? The police are trying to stop the shooter and will reasonably expect that anyone who is not a student could potentially be a shooter. Police have mistaken cell phones for guns in other situations, don't expect to be exempt from that possibility in something as high stakes as a mass shooting.

If your kid is laying low and keeping quiet, their odds of survival are far better than if they are calling you on a phone.

I don't know if you're building some strange straw man argument here or if you're just out to waste my time with that, but I'll also point out that a kid on a phone is only going to be making noise and end up doing more to draw in the attention of a shooter. Smart phones in the hands of kids don't do anything to help this situation; I could just as easily ask if you're shilling for Samsung, Apple, or the phone companies in pretending otherwise.

Some people throw around the term "screen addiction" very casually but it is a very real thing and the kids that are suffering from it are facing a much greater hill to climb than some of us realize. It's not better because they grew up with screens in front of their faces at all times, in fact it's worse. Beyond the obvious social implications of screen addiction we have the issues they are having with day to day existence without screens. These kids need help, and our nations economy will soon depend on us getting it to them.

Do you not remember Columbine? The school was able to lock down before smart phones even existed. Or for that matter Sandy Hook? That was an elementary school; it's highly unlikely any kids there had smart phones but they were able to lock down as well. We don't need smart phones to protect students from mass shooters. More so, this applies to students and not teachers; teachers will still be able to communicate and coordinate.

The academics you want most for consulting are the ones from research universities. However, those academics generally work 80 hours weeks already just to keep their jobs.

I know this first hand. I was a postdoc at a major research university, at the time intending to follow the academic career track. This was after doing my PhD at another - albeit much smaller and less prestigious - public research university. What I saw as a postdoc while rubbing elbows with junior faculty really opened my eyes.

Junior faculty at major public research universities are working at least 80 hours a week. 40 hours go to grant writing, lab management, and departmental obligations. Another 20 goes to teaching. 10 goes to managing institutional requirements (including negotiations for how much they pay to their institution for space, utilities, etc - and consumption of those resources). Another 5 goes in to actual research. The last 5 goes to attending local seminars.

When a most junior (assistant professor) faculty member makes it to the next level they are still working 80 hours, but they're making slightly more money. Now they are putting more effort into making their pitch for tenure (if it exists at their institution), or looking at where they want to work next (if that's a better career path for them). If they ever make it from medium level (associate professor) to senior (professor) - and many never do - they still need work 80 hours a week but now they have a larger presence on campus.

At what time do we expect American faculty to have more time available for this?

Some people who are about to be fired train their replacement. What do we do when AI is good enough that it doesn't require intensive training and an army of support people to calm users down when it fails?

Unfortunately right now there are a lot of people making careers out of doing exactly the opposite of those things. While one could hope those people would be replaced by AI - or even better be replaced by people who follow those principles - that does not seem to be priority right now.

Considering how much language has been morphing - often along political lines - to mean different things to different people, it would be great to have a single source that people could go to. Of course what we find though is that if someone of affiliation A points someone of affiliation B to a dictionary website, the person of affiliation B will tell them their source is wrong and brush them off. Finding one source that all people can trust is a challenge.

True, now I need to look at what research says. Is it CO2 only, or is there a combined effect?

Though at the same time, human heat engines will have some sort of impact on the environment. To claim otherwise is fallacious.

Imagine your house at 10C and you turn your 2000W computer on, then you'll be warming that space to above the initial 10C. If enough human made machines are generating heat, then the environment will heat faster than what the environment will be doing without our influence. In the end, it is the humans and the other living species that will suffer from the resulting climate change. To the Earth we will just be dinosaurs V2, to be replaced with major species V3. At least the dinosaurs could claim they didn't know better.

True. Should be mandating businesses to use metric or dual unit display.

A lot of this is probably still an influence of the US being a trade partner, but given current politics, maybe this is a good time to further push the missing metrification?