A tariff is a consumption tax. It's paid for by consumers of imported goods.

This was IMO a dumb move on Carney's part. He should have suspended the tax just so long as negotiations were under way. Now Canada has one less point of leverage.

Though I suppose if things go badly, the tax can always be resurrected.

And selfishly, the tax would not cost me anything because I don't buy or use products or services from any companies that would be affected. :) (No Netflix, Amazon, Meta, etc.)

Most of the colleges used to have pubs on campus before the drinking age was raised to 21.

Beer and wine only. Students and faculty frequently had fraternity and lively debates.

Now states take federal highway dollars in exchange for enforcing the 21 age so most drinking occurs in fraternity basements and dorm rooms and it"s often the hardest cheapest booze available leading to alcohol poisoning and death.

So, yeah, states knowingly trade student lives for asphalt subsidies. It's horrendous and that's even if you ignore the absurdity of having an adult with lesser legal rights.

They won't raise everything to 25 because they want what would otherwise be called child soldiers. So they make mental abstractions and kids die. It's crazy.

The research is actually pretty good but that's now "biohacking" and 95% of physicians will refuse to engage in it because it's bad for the business model and they're afraid of lawsuits if they use their own judgment. "Standard of Care" is the new medical tyranny.

Maximum effort should be placed on upsetting that business model so that the research can flourish and get out to clinic.

Part of this is that retirees who die quickly help extend the inevitable collapse of the Social Security system.

I was surprised but high Medicare expenses for a few years is cheaper than long-lived healthy seniors.

It's morally abhorrent but the government people don't seem to have problems with this kind of strategy.

To be fair, you can't work from 22-62 and then live on the dole on the golf course from 62-120 and expect that system to still exist.

Something's gotta give.

> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change

Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:

Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?

Those models may have been the right ones. And nobody is including the accelerating pole shift.

I am surprised the Europeans aren't hedging that one hard. +4 in Britain is nice; -15 is total devastation.

Is there anything better for TTS, STT, and translation?

Problem I recently worked on:

Here is 20,000 hours of audio. Make it queryable.

Back in the 90's when I was doing some grad classes in Information Retrieval this would have been considered nearly insurmountable.

On the other hand I had 16MB then, now this takes 128GB of RAM.

That's mostly Python being obscene with RAM.

Probably an AI editor.

I use AI for the following tasks:

(1) generating cartoon-like illustrations for my web site, because I have no artistic talent and the output of AI good enough for my tiny personal site.

(2) Transcribing speech to text to generate video captions (using whisper-cpp

(3) Generating speech from text with Piper TTS because it generates really high-quality speech.

(4) Removing the backgrounds from images with RemBG because it does a decent job with very little effort.

All of the processing is done locally on my computer (except for the image generation in point 1.) I do not use LLMs such as ChatGPT or coding assistants because I find them useless and untrustworthy.

You need to invent propellentless drives, either solar or zero-point first so you can afford the Delta-V necessary to afford this.

And it's actually the small, fast, difficult pieces that ought to be addressed first in terms of risk but that blows the costs out of the realm of possibility. At least with chemical propellant.

I briefly glanced at a video that was about some hobbyists who find abandoned and commercially unreliable satellites and contact them and spend some time reverse engineering the protocols to toy around (if and when they are responding).

I didn't go too deep into it as I ain't that kinda time but whether or not this satellite ia such a case it's something for radio astronomers to keep in mind.

Deorbit burns seem to be the reliable off switch.

I've never used Uber and never will, so I have no personal experience. Just going on what I read.

Just last month I was in Boston with family at a huge event and the trip back was 2.2 miles. Most of them waited in a huge line for the train or queued for an Uber.

Two of us walked instead, grabbed some Pho at a takeout place, and got back two minutes after the first Uber arrived.

It wasn't snowing though.

Sound more useful than a machine.

UV dye is actually meant for this - I have some for car air conditioners.

You'd need a way to isolate the module and vaporize it with enough air to leak out and then an ROV with a UV light and a camera.

These are all normal engineering problems except for the ROV.

Do they have an ROV or do they still make astronauts go outside?

It always seemed weird in Star Trek that they didn't have maintbots like on B5.

The issue is that Uber is hiding how it prices its services, which means consumers (and drivers) can't make an informed choice.

If Uber were totally transparent about its pricing, I'd agree with you.