Most of the deaths are explainable.

• Amy Catherine Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the head. Her activities leading up to her death are suggestive of mental health struggles, though they're used by some people as evidence of a conspiracy leading to her death.
• Michael David Hicks died in June 2023, age 59. He worked at JPL on comet and asteroid missions. No cause of death was released.
• Frank Maiwald died in July 2024, age 61. He worked at JPL on planetary missions. No cause of death was released.
• Anthony Chavez has been missing since May 2025. He was 78 when he disappeared. He left his wallet, keys, and cigarettes on a table at home, a common action right before a suicide.
• Melissa Casias has been missing since June 2025. She was an administrative worker at Los Alamos and held no security clearance. She was last seen walking down a street. She had left her keys, wallet, purse, and both work and personal phones at home after telling colleagues that she was going to work from home. Shoes similar to those she was wearing were recently found in a nearby forest. This also lines up with a possible suicide.
• Monica Reza has been missing since June 2025. She worked at JPL in California, and went missing during a hiking trip. Her hiking companion said she was there one minute and gone the next. A fall is a much more likely event than an abduction.
• Steven Garcia has been missing since August 2025. He worked at the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque. He was last seen walking away from his phone carrying a gun and had left behind his wallet, phone, and keys. As with others above, this is a common behavior of suicidal people.
• Nuno Lureiro was killed on his doorstep by the Brown University shooter in December 2025. Motive hasn't been established, but the shooter left a recording that he had planned both shootings for years.
• Jason Thomas went missing in December 2025 for three months before his body was found in March 2026. He was last seen walking along railroad tracks, another frequent precursor for suicides. A cause of death doesn't seem to have been released so far, but law enforcement said that they don't suspect foul play.
• Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland has been missing since February 2026. He was last seen on a neighborhood surveillance camera with hiking boots and a .38 revolver. He had left behind his wallet, phone, and wearable devices. Many suicides start the same way.
• Carl Johann Grillmair was killed at his home in February 2026. He was a prominent astronomer and astrophysicist. A suspect has been arrested and has been charged in his murder, which may have happened after an argument.

One suicide (Eskridge), one likely suicide (McCasland), four possible suicides (Chavez, Casias, Garcia, and Thomas), two murders (Lureiro and Grillmair), two other deaths (Hicks and Maiwald), and one missing (Reza). Neither of the murders are linked. Reza may have simply fallen while hiking and been severely injured or killed. The two other deaths were both in the age range where sudden deaths start to become unfortunately common.

From OpenAI's engineers' perspective, the purpose of ChatGPT is to write things that appear to be similar to what humans have written, or would write. The ethics of this perspective are that OpenAI should have no liability. ChatGPT is for novelty purposes only, and it's as dangerous as Magic 8 Ball.

From a different perspective (including, possibly, OpenAI's own marketing team's perspective), the purpose of ChatGPT is to help solve problems, give people advice, etc. The ethics of this perspective are that OpenAI should be liable for what it "says." ChatGPT is more dangerous than Magic 8 Ball.

But from a user's perspective, the purpose of ChatGPT is whatever you want it to be. The ethics of this perspective are that OpenAI's liability is hard to determine, therefore, this perspective is wrong and reality should be shoe-horned into one of the above perspectives. ;-) Well, ok, I guess ChatGPT is about as dangerous as a BASIC interpreter or a screwdriver or a rock or a 30 JuggaloWatt mining phaser, which can be anywhere from not-dangerous-at-all to hey-you-just-murdered-ten-thousand-nuns-and-orphans. Since this is the hardest case to analyze, of course we're going to go this way.

Conspiracy theories are soo much more fun than boring old reality.

Also because of coal. Honestly, more as a result of coal, though they certainly have built a lot of solar. But the reason they've been building coal plants like crazy, so much so that many of them are idled from the day they go into service, is because it was their insurance against problems with the oil supply.

I'm a fan of solar power and happy to see the world is building a lot of it, but intellectual integrity demands that we also acknowledge China's investment in coal generation capacity.

2x seems possible if no government spending is replaced. However your 3x estimate is way too high, people living only on UBI would not be paying taxes (well federal and state) anyway, so you have double-counted them.

The hope (perhaps futile) is that they would remove other government programs (ie social security). Or make everybody get the same government programs (ie everybody gets SNAP and they can use it to buy food, everybody gets the same amount of housing assistance (which must be spent on mortgage/rent/property taxes/untilities/insurance). These would just be part of the UBI, with some restrictions on what you can spend that portion on.

I was able to get it to save all photos on Google Photos. But I seem to remember it was a pain, it took a long time before it threw away it's attempt to put all the photos into iCloud and stopped complaining in popups that I needed to buy more iCloud storage.

Free Google Photos is about 4x the size of what free iCloud is.

Stage 3 smog alerts were year-round when I was a kid in the 1980s. They were more common in the summer, but they could happen any time the temperatures rose, and they were a fact of life at school in the spring and fall. I spent a lot of recess and PE time indoors for Stage 2 and 3 alerts. This page shows the number of days at different air qualities for Los Angeles going back to 1980. The highest number of good air quality days was 11 in 1983. For all but two of the remaining years, it was in single digits. The combined number of unhealthy, very unhealthy, and dangerous days usually covered a cumulative six months or so out of the year.

You can see the numbers shifting to the left starting in 1989. Both Republicans and Democrats in the state government (which was run by Republicans at the time) had authorized various government agencies to make changes that would affect smog levels. Since 2002, the number of moderate or good air days has covered at least half of the year, a huge reversal from the 1980s. The number of very unhealthy or dangerous air days has been in the single digits every year (bar one) since 2007, even reaching zero in 2010 and 2013 and only one in six of the other years.

I'm pretty worried that all interdepartmental communication (those regulations, the forms for the regulations, invoices, contracts, lawsuits, etc) will transform into bloated gobbledygook that only AIs can read and write. They will have made their own language that we won't understand and will have to start trusting them to accurately translate between it and human language.

Automobiles employed a LOT of people, easily out numbering the ones that no longer picked up horse shit. That is a big difference from AI.

There actually was a push in the UK a few years ago to outlaw pointy kitchen knives, but it met with great resistance and was dropped.

However, the point remains that stabbings in the UK are actually less common that stabbings in the US. This points out that while many think that guns are the cause of the US' violence problem, the real problem is deeper: US culture is just more violent.

That sounds nice and all, but there's really no legal way to do that. The money was collected illegally, so it has to be returned (with interest) to the people it was collected from -- the importers.

It's going to take years to find out just how corrupt, and we'll never get the full story. What we can see isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

Heh. The usual metric is "mission success". For a manned flight, that includes getting the people down safely. For a typical unmanned flight the mission is "get the payload to the right orbit". If you manage to land the rocket after that, that's gravy.

NASA's Mars lander airbag technology.

Peak seems to be 9x present day. If you use the error bars then it seems to be a range of 3x-15x.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I believe they meant introducing new types of gadgets, not just make existing ones faster or more efficient.