Micro-reactors create more nuclear waste per amount of power generated than do standard reactors. But there are special use cases where they would be preferable.

Well, the army is probably only significant to it's neighbors. Transporting lots of troops is difficult and expensive. The navy and the air force, however...not to mention the hypersonic missiles.

When talking about people and environmental effect, the general rule is "your model is too simple". Probably both have a common cause AND there is some direct effect. And also something the study didn't consider (though nobody knows what..perhaps air pollution or micro-plastics).

In a literal sense you are correct...and even understating the case. In common usage, though, "processed food" refers to food that's had a lot more processing that that. The problem is that the term is so vague that it has no precise meaning. Cooking a steak is processing food. So is cutting it off the steer. Even draining the blood before you cut it off is processing. So is washing a carrot.

It's a term that has no precise meaning except as derivable from context...and that limits the precision unless the context is quite explicit.

My guess was that the effect was small enough that at one a day it was hard to disentangle from noise, so they didn't even look at any smaller amount.

OTOH, the headline is clearly not supported by the study. They only tested some kinds of processed meat. If their causal theory is correct, they may not have needed to test a wider range, but it might be wrong.

Food science is complex and difficult. You should always be skeptical of popularizations of it. They always oversimplify. (Actually, that doesn't just apply of "food science", but rather to all science reporting, and probably to all reporting.)

It's not really clear to me what "processed meat" means. (Well, perhaps the article explains, but I'm not that interested.) It clearly means hot dogs (all varieties?), and probably all lunch meats. (It seems to be looking at "sugar added" meat-food products.) So it likely includes bacon. It's not clear to what extent they were looking at nitrite-added processed meat, like ham. But I wouldn't think that hamburger purchased raw would be included.

Hurricanes often hit Florida, so blaming hurricane damage on "climate change" is clearly a gross oversimplification. It probably made the hurricanes worse, but it's not a binary switch. Similarly for a lot of those things. And there are probably some places where climate changes improved things. (A lot fewer, I'll admit.)

This piece strikes me an as oversimplification, probably for political reasons. Yes, a lot of disasters were made worse by climate change. I suspect that pine beetles have continued to spread north, as winter die-offs are curtailed. Etc. But most of the changes are incremental. And much of that "investment" needed to be done anyway.

Anthropic's recent test of having a AI run a small business suggests that CEOs are safe this year.

Whether it's a "work in progress" or "useful tool" depends on which AI you're talking about, and what task you're considering. Many of them are performing tasks that used to require highly trained experts. Others are doing things where a high error rate is a reasonable tradeoff for a "cheap and fast turn-around". But it's definitely true that for lots of tasks even the best are, at best, a "work in progress. So don't use it for those jobs.

OTOH, figuring out which jobs it can or can't do is a "at this point in time for this system" kind of thing. It's probably best to be relatively conservative. But not to depend on "today's results" being good next month.

Most of those things are either experimental, or only useful in a highly structured environment.

AI is coming, but the current publicly available crop (outside specialty tasks) makes lots of mistakes. So it's only useful in places where those mistakes can be tolerated. Maybe 6 months from now. I rather trust Derek Lowe's analysis of where biochemical AI is currently...and his analysis is "it needs better data!".

One shouldn't blindly trust news stories. There are always slanted. Sometimes you can figure the slant, but even so that markedly increases the size of the error bars.

OTOH, AI *is* changing rapidly. I don't think a linear model is valid, except as a "lower bound". Some folks have pointed to work that China has claimed as "building the technology leading to a fast takeoff". Naturally details aren't available, only general statements. "Distributed training over a large dataset" and "running on a assembly of heterogeneous computers" can mean all sorts of things, but it MIGHT be something impressive (i.e. super-exponential). Or it might not. Most US companies are being relatively close-mouthed about their technologies, and usually only talking (at least publicly) about their capitalization.

Companies change. OTOH, perhaps those that continue to have jobs at Ford will continue to be able to buy a Ford.

I think that either you don't understand AI, or you don't understand how creativity works in people. Probably both.

Current AIs don't have a good selection filter for their creativity. This is a real weakness, that I expect can only be remedied by real world experience. But they *are* creative in the same sense that people are. It's just that a lot of what they create is garbage (although *different* garbage than what most people create).

No, we aren't tracking EVERY object of that kind. (You didn't say all, so that includes the meteor that hits a gopher in his hole.)

Possible? Yeah, I think it's possible. It would be a bit expensive. We're tracking most large objects that cross Earth's orbit. New ones don't appear very often, and we rarely lose track of any. It would take multiple observatories in places outside the plane of the solar system to track all of them, so we've been surprised occasionally by "city killer" meteors, though none of them have actually hit a city. ("city killer" is a bit of an overestimate, but "block buster" would be an understatement.) There have been repeated official statements that "now we know all the really dangerous ones", but even if you believe it, asteroid orbits are subject to change, so you need to keep looking.

Ok, but evolution requires selection as well as variation. Generally one should select several from each generation to modify, and filter out a bunch that don't measure up. (Note that the evaluation function is a very strong determinant of what you'll eventually get.) Selecting "one from each generation" just looks like an extremely bad approach. Perhaps it should read "one batch from each generation".

Not always, but they tend to me more ... project-centered ... than most.