Not really. Plastics require hydrocarbons that can be sourced from anything, including coal or wood. Oil is just the most convenient source, but it's certainly not the only one.

And anyway, only 6% of oil is used for plastic production. Even increasing the demand for plastics won't materially affect oil consumption. Fossil hydrocarbons are also used as a feedstock for other industrial processes (fertilizer production mainly), but adding up all these uses accounts for just about 15% of global production.

I don't want to stop buying plastics. I want to have the option to buy actually recycled plastics that actually get recycled. We can do this but we don't. We don't because the people with all the money who therefore control the means of production decide that we don't. "We" is a stretchy word. So is "you" and so's "can". Sure, you can choose to opt out of society, but it would make more sense to make society not shit all over everything.

That's a trick question.

Answer: None. In 2025, Everything's Computer.

I guess that makes sense, but the wheeled vehicle isn't suited for that at all. In that case they'd have been better off just making a drone-in-a-box with convenient mounting points on the box.

They probably did their research, for what people would pay, especially taking into account crazy fashion choices and the FOMO factor.

NHTSA and NASA didn't study all of the code in the PCM. Their analysis is therefore invalid. Barr Group found a significant number of paths to unintended acceleration, zero of which depended on cosmic rays and also that Toyota not only didn't follow industry best practices, they didn't follow their own internal procedures. And you think China, which hasn't ever made the best software for anything, is immune to the same kinds of errors. You literally stated that there was no other way that it could happen, which is an obvious falsehood. It's unclear why you're engaging in this level of gaslighting.

first post modded redundant

suck this dick like trump sucked bubba, cuck

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

Politicians with crazy blond hair are FUBAR machines.

Banks are financial infrastructure. If they break, they take lots of businesses and customers with them. I'm okay with lone failures, but banks have lots of hooks.Please don't gamble with infrastructure!

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%

Economists don't run govt's, moronic politicians do, and moronic voters vote them in place.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

I agree. In fact for most cable companies in particular it probably makes little sense to replace anything that can do even just 1 gigabit, because they almost surely have other regions or at least boroughs which are currently underserved.

I suspect it's mostly limited to sizable households with a lot of users. But we keep finding new ways to use available bandwidth...

This is true, but it's also dangerous. On the other hand federal law allows you to expire them after 5 years. Some states don't allow them to ever expire, but most do. So eventually you do get some of that money back.