This is only one study among many which show over and over that smartphone use is bad for mental health in general, and particularly bad for tweens. I'm not sure why you're so intent on ignoring the mounting evidence, but you do you.

Except that the study says they controlled for that. So within those individual demographics, some 12 year olds had smartphones and some didn't, and the ones that did have them had worse outcomes. You're trying pretty hard to not accept the results.

Mods: To whoever went and downvoted both of my posts... none of the moderation options include "I agree with this" or "I don't agree with this" or "I don't like the implication of this" and that's for a good reason. When you're moderating, you should simply be filtering out *low quality* posts. There was nothing about my posts that was low quality. The posts stated an idea in a well reasoned way. If you disagree, you can post yourself and point out where you think the reasoning went wrong, or where you think the axioms I used were wrong, but moderating a post down just because you disagree is a misuse of the moderation function.

No, I would say... we were inadvertently cooling the North Atlantic with ship emissions, and when we stopped (due to more stringent international emissions standards) then we saw a jump in water temperatures in the ocean. So we're already geo-engineering. Some of it adds together, and some of it reduces the effect of other geo-engineering effects. If we're doing it anyway, and there's zero chance we're "just going to stop" then we need to get better at it.

I don't understand your logic. We had a huge eruption of Mount Pinatubo back in 1991. I was in high school and remember the effects that year. It had a really big impact on global weather patterns including dropping the temperature significantly, but it certainly didn't "kill a lot of flora and fauna." Yes, there was a lot of local damage around the volcano, but that was due to the ash.

We could just build more fission nuclear reactors (and we are now, finally). Fusion is still decades away, even though they've made a big advance recently due to more efficient super-conducting magnets. And renewables really need better energy storage solutions to really increase adoption.

The fact is that with deglobalization and the fall of global institutions, every country now has to guarantee its own energy independence. In the US, that's shale oil (and natural gas). In China that's coal, since almost all of their oil has to be imported from the middle east, and China has a ridiculous amount of coal. Europe would love to switch to renewables, but let's face it, they need to spend money on their military right now, and won't be able to afford subsidizing solar panels in countries where the sun hardly shines.

The problem isn't going away.

Do you have an actual workable idea, or are we all just supposed to lay down and die? You can do that if you want. The rest of us are going to work the problem.

I would much rather we just cut fossil fuels and replace them with carbon-neutral or carbon-negative technologies, but given the political reality, there's no way that's going to happen soon enough, even if we outlawed the use of geoengineering. So given that reality, is this an existential threat to humanity or not? Because if it is, then it's better to roll the dice on geoengineering than watch the end of the world, right? I believe the climate scientists when they tell me climate change is an existential threat, but it's also the climate scientists who say, "no, it's not that bad yet" when you bring up geoengineering. So which is it? And given that we're definitely not going to cut emissions in time, wouldn't it be better to buy ourselves some time before we hit those tipping points we keep hearing about?

I mostly agree with you, but I think it might be unfair to the average American voter. Imagine that you live in West Virginia or Missouri, and you're struggling to get by, as many people are. Your wages haven't kept pace with inflation. You can't afford a house, and the price of houses seems to be rising faster than wages. Big companies have left your town to setup shop overseas, and your neighbors are out of work. Your health insurance sucks and is anything but universal. One big illness could wipe you out. When your wife had a kid, she got 6 weeks(!) of maternity leave, and had to be back at work.

Then you look at the US armed forces... there are 13(?) aircraft carriers that outmatch everything else on the ocean. Stealth bombers that look like spaceships. NASA launching huge rockets at enormous expense to go land people on the moon, when they already did that 45 years ago. A huge nuclear arsenal. This is all to be the world's police, and to provide a security umbrella to Europe.

And then you look at Europe, with their two years of maternity leave, and worker protections, and way more paid holidays, and universal healthcare, and they all like to look down their noses at Americans, while they benefit from a massive security umbrella that the US provides, which frees up the funds to spend on social programs.

Everyone thinks the MAGA crowd are traditional conservatives. Sure, there are some, but the core group of voters used to be democrats. They were union workers, laborers. They saw their savior in Bernie Sanders, and when the dems wouldn't let him run, they decided to follow the other populist voice. Is Trump lying to them? Absolutely.

I don't relate to MAGA at all. But I get it. The security arrangement might have been good for the US in general, but it hasn't been good for the average American worker. That's why we're here.

And there are going to be austerity measures coming to all of Europe. Those social programs are going to shrink. Right at a time when everyone's arming themselves to the teeth. How do you think that's going to play out?

I appreciate the average American's sentiment who want Europe to pay for its own defense. However, there's a lot of American history in the 20th century and before which brought us to this point deliberately. After being drawn into two huge world wars, started by member states of a continent that had continually been at war with themselves, the United States came up with a plan to prevent it from happening again. They invited everyone into an alliance structure where anyone could trade with anyone else, and the US would guarantee free navigation of the oceans so they didn't need big navies, and would provide security guarantees so that the countries of Europe didn't feel the need to arm themselves to the teeth. This arrangement is expensive for the US, but not so expensive as a world war 3. And it worked to prevent WW3 for many decades. Now that the generations who fought those wars are gone, we've forgotten the lessons, and I'm afraid we're doomed to repeat them. European have not evolved. Their geographic and political reality encourages wars among their own states. And as much as the US wants to stay out of it, they invariably get dragged back in every time.

If you apply "old school" industrial automation to a partly manual process, then getting 40% more worker productivity is hardly surprising. China, despite its rapid growth, is still in the final stages of industrializing. There's still lots of efficiency to be had. The US has been putting robots in factories since the 70's, so most of the low hanging fruit is already automated.

Also, beware what people are calling AI. In the industrial automation space, every vendor has been calling their product "AI" for the last 5 or 10 years. When you press them on it, it's often no more advanced than a PID controller or a few if/then statements. Our plant is more willing to take on new ideas than most, but the only real AI that I've seen installed on a plant floor over the last decade were some advanced vision-enabled picking systems. I'm sure someone has hooked an LLM to a plant-floor system somewhere, but I've not seen it yet. Nor have I seen a humanoid robot or a robot dog pay for itself. Even cobots only have mediocre uptake (but we are using them).

And finally, take stories out of China with a grain of salt. Yes, there's massive industrialization going on there, and the engineers working there are smart and motivated, but the government interferes heavily in the market. For instance, I've heard first-hand accounts from people on business trips there, where a truck was offloading several brand new CNC milling machines at a manufacturer, and the story was that these were just machines that the government had purchased and provided the company with the idea, "here, put these to good use." There's constant top-down subsidies being handed out, and it results in huge over-production problems. There are parking lots full of brand new EVs that dealers have written off because they can't sell them all. There are fields of solar panels producing power that can't get to market because there isn't enough local demand, and the power lines to the major centers aren't big enough to support the whole load.

Please check your reading comprehension. I specifically said I was "in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway." As in, your odometer reading. No need for a GPS at all.

Thanks for replying to my post without even reading it. I appreciate it.

Not surprising at all. This was a concern that was raised over a decade ago, even in discussions here on /.

The fact is that road maintenance needs to be paid, and it was long thought that charging taxes on gasoline was a good way to fund roads because it was simple to implement, it scales with how far you drive, and it also scales with the size of your vehicle (larger vehicles do more damage to the roads). So it was relatively fair. It also didn't require invasive data collection, such as how far or where you drove your vehicle.

When it was first discussed here on /., the consensus opinion was that if you drove an EV, you should have a GPS tracker installed in your car that measured how far you drove. We used to have big discussions here about privacy, and the privacy advocates thought that a government mandated GPS tracking you everywhere you went would be an overreach by government. I was generally in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway.

Of course now we voluntarily GPS track ourselves and send the data to our corporate overlords, so that all seems like a moot point.

Will this new law also apply to those crazy guys that power their diesel cars off used french fry grease they get from restaurants?

I think this view gives the crypto bros too much credit. They might now be thinking about taking advantage of the opportunity to wrestle the system away from the Wall Street bros, but there was no such plan.

To intercept them you still have to identify them, which you can't do until after they perform the sabotage. Given that, what's the benefit in sinking them rather than seizing them? Sinking them gains you nothing, seizing them gains you the sabotage vessel. It probably won't be worth much, but more than nothing. I guess sinking them saves the cost of imprisoning the crew, but I'd rather imprison them for a few years than murder them.

Very much unlike an intern (the doing-over part).