The "We think that some of you might be passing around illegal material, so it is imperative that we be given the power to invasively look at everyone's private communications. We're only going to be looking for this one narrow category of illegal material, and we won't look at anything else. Honest. You can trust us not to abuse this." declaration using the justification "we have to protect the children !" is one of the most abusable power grabs ever. Once a government has the power to read all your communications looking for one thing some individuals may be breaking the law by doing, there's nothing preventing them from saying "Well, we're already reading their communications to find this, so we can just look for this other thing, too, as long as we have their communications" and extending their strip-mining of those communications looking for anything else the government might want to prohibit, starting with other illegal activity and becoming more and more invasive until they're looking for anyone saying something that might be considered to be simply critical of the government.

Paying someone to review the AI's assessments will wind up being cheaper than paying out the settlements on the lawsuits for 'overenthusiastic' police officers forcing a child to their knees, cuffing them, and searching them after a false accusation. And, presumably, the number of times that the AI will trigger on such an event will be small, allowing the human tasked with reviewing AI positives to perform other duties when not actively fielding an AI system's misperceptions.

The farm-vs-city differential goes back centuries -- look at Edward Jenner and his discovery that farm girls, who worked closely with the animals, would contract cowpox but wouldn't contract smallpox afterward, and developed the technique of variolation to introduce cowpox to uninfected individuals, and acquired immunity to smallpox. But smallpox remained a threat in urban areas until variolation, and later vaccination, became common.

The EV manufacturers could always adopt the Chinese innovation to protect the occupants of an EV in the event of a battery breakdown and fire being detected -- add a mechanism to eject the battery to the side of the vehicle, where it becomes an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) -- but the occupants are safe from the battery pack immolating itself.

Don't forget the cost of the battery storage system needed to accumulate enough energy to recharge the farm's vehicles, so they don't have to sit plugged into a solar array for days to be usable for a half day. And the farm vehicles need to operate even when the weather is uncooperative -- fully overcast days when the solar array is producing at 10% of its rated capacity. You see solar operators flogging their installation of X hundred megawatts of solar panels... and never admit that that's their rated maximum capacity, and the long-term production rate will be a third or less of that rate, even assuming that they're in a location that's optimal for solar irradiance.

Corals thrive in warm water, not cold water, and have survived for sixty million years, through temperatures and CO2 levels significantly higher than what we're seeing now. The primary reasons for reef bleaching include sediment and fertilizer runoff from nearby coastal lands, chemicals found in sunscreen (i.e., oxybenzone), temporary increased exposure to UV caused by local drops in sea level in shallow reefs, and damage associated with ship traffic.

"What a wonderful idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?"

Passing good bills? In a rare-as-hen's-teeth decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California's "one gun purchase every 30 days" law was an unconstitutional *rationing* of an individual's right to self-defense guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. Yesterday Newsom AB1078, which restricts handgun purchases to _three_ guns per month, despite not having been able to demonstrate that the previous one-gun-purchase-per-30-days law had any effect on gun violence, and establishes a digital database tracking all handgun purchases with the biometric data of the purchasers, cross-referenced against social media profiles, and uses AI to flag 'suspicious patterns' by a purchaser, and gives law enforcement the authority to investigate any one approaching the three-per-month limit, even if they have no record of criminal behavior. The bill provides for warrantless searches of gun stores, mandatory reporting of customer conversations, felony charges for gun-store owners' systems not interfacing properly to the statewide system, and shares all of this data with federal agencies, creating a national gun registry through the back door.

But he's managed to sign one bill that is unreservedly beneficial to residents, so that clearly excuses all of his other actions.

Or list the charge for the basic service, with the footnote, in something actually readable instead of the "Flyspeck 3" commonly used to hide embarrassing details, that these prices do not include locally-imposed access charges, with a link to a page where the potential customer can put in their general location and get an itemized list of any and all additional charges that apply to service in their area -- if the ISP can't itemize the additional charges for an area, then they can't charge them to the customer.

What TFA doesn't mention is that "renewables" lumps hydro power and biomass (i.e., burning trees, sawdust, and other organic material for power) into the category of 'renewables', allowing the renewable lobby to jump on the claims as proof that the world is rapidly moving toward wind and solar power and away from fossil fuels. In fact, wind and solar only contributed 15% of the world's electricity last year, and is unlikely to rise significantly this year. In the article, Rowlatt declared that solar power " is now so cheap that large markets for solar can emerge in a country in the space of a single year" -- yet the contribution of solar power rose from 5.6% in 2023 to only 6.7% in 2024, hardly a transformative increase.

And it's funny how TFA does its own bowing to conventional preconceptions with "...because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory..." and completely dodges a much more visible mainstream idea -- anthropogenic climate change -- despite the mainstream adherents being much more aggressive about silencing and excluding dissenters.

Do the cost factors for wind and solar power account for the cost of the backup storage system to cover for the periods when the wind or solar systems are not producing power or producing insufficient power? If your site requires 100MW continuous power, a solar facility with a nameplate capacity of 100MW is going to be producing essentially zero power for 8 hours a day, and reduced power output in mornings, evenings, and overcast weather, and a wind turbine farm will be producing little or no power in periods of calm or excessive wind, so there will be a need for 'supplemental' power, either a separate conventional or nuclear generation system or battery backup accompanied by increased wind/solar generation to supply power when the main generation system is not producing, and industrial battery systems capable of standing in for a wind or solar facility for days at a time are definitely not cheap.

Microsoft won't be happy until they make the operating system a subscription service.

And it's gotten worse; I recently got notified by my local power company that they're 'restructuring' their charges; under the new system, the charge for your connection to the grid and the 'generation charge', both fixed fees, will now be assessed separately, so that you're paying both of those charges each month even if you're continuously selling power back to them from overproduction, where previously your overproduction could apply against those costs.

We can look at the statistics for jobs that are replaced by AI, but we don't see statistics for the number of jobs that are not being created because AI is being set up to do those jobs rather than hiring someone to fill them. BLS recently issued a correction that the US added 911,000 fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the largest downward revision on record. Without being able to get data from businesses on the reasons for smaller increases in hiring, we can't point to any specific cause for the downturn. Increased adoption of AI might be responsible for some, most, or all of this reduction, but there's no legitimacy in pointing a finger at AI and blaming it.