That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.

As early as the 1950s, critics of the establishment's public education system said its main purpose was to produce a contented and functional workforce. And they were right. They were so right that even they themselves did not understand the full implications: they were so right that it ultimately made them wrong. And then they won, and we are facing the consequences. Not just since 2013: Arne Duncan was indeed an unmitigated disaster for American education, but much of the problem is older than him. And no one is willing to admit that what came before worked better.

This is will only make all the people that know you not able to contact you (well, you might consider that a feature, but let's say this isn't what you're going for). First you'll have to contact each of them and go through the whole "who are you?" dance, that is if you don't fall into one of the many options that makes them ignore unknown numbers in the first place, and even if they see your chat or call don't take one of the other deny/ignore/report whatever option, especially after the scary "be careful with unknown numbers like this" message. And then after you iron out who you are with each and every person you might want to chat in the future with 90% won't even save your "alternate" to their address book, and from the remaining 10% if they don't contact you often enough to be at the top it'll be 50/50 chance next time when they try to do something to be on the right number (as it's not a special address book, but the one that's shared for everything, including regular calls and SMS).

Wouldn't it be easier in the first place to not post your status like "I'm off to Maldives with my secretary, losers" and a similar profile picture (switched to "visible to everyone") if you don't want that info to be public?

Also what has anything to do with the tablets? You can have a second (and a third, and a fourth) "linked" device beside the main one. These can be other phones, tablets, desktop apps, or logged in browsers. That changes nothing, it's the same account, with the same things visible (or not), etc. If you meant to take even ONE MORE number for the tablet that's bad, for the reasons above.

They TRIED numbers and sometimes got pictures or status or whatever else people might have set to be visible for everyone (I think only the "hey there I'm using Whatsapp" thing is public by default).

The only way to prevent this was to have enough bits in the account definition, but that isn't the case with phone numbers, plus most are taken and most do have WhatsApp so the attacker won't waste orders of magnitude more efforts to span the whole possible space. What's more if one needs this information for any nefarious or semi-nefarious purposes from spam to political whatever they usually care only about local users, be it from Canada or from Quatar (for example), they don't need to brute force billions, possibly tens of billions of possible phone numbers for everyone in the world starting at the top with India.

It's daft on multiple layers, first these countries surely could get directly a list with the verification SMSes from the provider and won't have to go only for the subset of people that have a "Hey there! I am using Whatsapp" status and it's public for anyone to see (especially if this is a thing that carries heavy penalties).

This reminds me of Home Alone voicemail, except worse, just setting the message to "We're the McCallisters and will be in Paris for the holidays" but for a modern experience doing it on Meta's platform and then of course complain it's someone else's fault for the info getting public.

Huh? This is literally your public WhatsApp profile (if you want it public in the first place). It's like https://www.facebook.com/Crist... complaining OMG everyone can see the picture that I'm showing there and I set to be visible to everyone, and the name even if I didn't give it to anyone someone figured out ..../Cristiano/... is a likely page and got my picture !

I mean probably Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp itself might not be happy if with themselves if they don't like people crawling and gathering this data, but it's not something that can easily be prevented. There are SIM farms that have 100k + 200k SIM cards, and that's only what law enforcement caught in one case in one place https://www.cbsnews.com/news/f... . Also, most people are directly concerned with people they know, and they should know better that if they put "I want to hurt my boss, XXX YYY" or a picture with a person they want to hide that they're with, AND make their profile public to everyone, then not too good things will be happening to them. Or, well, if they don't know there isn't much to be done to help them.

How on earth can you "exhaustively" deidentify millions of chat logs that could contain literally any personal details, and presumably all without OpenAI's own employees also sifting through personal information in exactly the way they're claiming would be bad if others did it?

Nothing would make it “help get a little closer to making it a reality” if it’s not physically possible, and there’s a very strong argument that that’s the case. If nothing else, the maximum specific tensile strength allowed by covalent bonding - which is fundamental physics that we can’t change - combined with the reality of defects in a 36,000 km cable - is far below what’s needed to build a space elevator in Earth gravity. It might be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon or even (in the far future) on Mars, because their gravity is such that real materials could potentially do the job. But doing that involves bootstrapping an entire offworld industry, which is far beyond anything even the most advanced nations are capable of currently, let alone a technologically stunted oil state.

There’s no chance they’d actually succeed in building a space elevator. The Line is at least theoretically physically possible with current technology, even if it was always an obviously spectacularly bad idea. A space elevator is not.

Of course any revenue, including the shadiest one would be used to fund the expenses, but why not say that it paid dividends or bonuses for the execs or whatever lobby they're doing (I assume there's a fund for that (I mean a publicly known one).