Smashing the US' formerly world-leading biomedical research industry sure has improved our freedumbs! Sorry about that knock-on effect on the economy.

[Narrator: RJK Jr and Melon Husk were not in fact sorry]

Only 8.2%? I'm shocked that any international tourists still travel there. Sure, there are places in the USA I'd like to see, but there are places in Iran and Afghanistan I'd like to see as well, and not likely I'll ever get there in person. And the USA is at around the same level of "want to visit" as those countries.

"That's not justice, that's basically a kill switch for the entire industry."

Stealing, e.g., book authors' work, mashing it up using an "LLM" algorithm, and selling it in a deliberate attempt to undercut the original, content-creating authors would seem like a 'kill switch' for human creativity and livelihoods, no? Ursula K. LeGuin was 101% right when she fought Google and the what was supposed to be her own advocate, the SFWA, on this 20 years ago and everything she predicted about the destruction of authors is coming to pass.

What we might call the "Financialization Generation", which held the reins from ~1975 to at least 2021, deliberately and knowingly destroyed the conditions under which the great majority of people could experience anything known as 'career success' [1]. That they are now paying researchers to bemoan that those so undermined lack "Conscientiousness" about their work environment is a bit rich.

[1] yes, we all know some successful entrepreneurs, the guy with 17 money-earning patents, and the super-hustlers who are on track to retire at 35 by dint of working seven jobs 120 hours/week. Those are far distant outliers to the mean

I'd argue that while you might be gaining something here (time) you could also losing something and that is expertise.

If you aren't reading the documentation yourself, then you aren't absorbing things that could be valuable later (even though they might not be relevant to the particular task you are doing now) and are therefore "stupider" at least by that definition.

All the time I'm involved in conversations where it is useful to have information in my head to either
- immediately answer a question (and avoid a follow up meeting), or
- prevent time being wasted on some course of action that isn't viable, or
- to suggest a neat solution I am aware of
all because of some detail I have read that hasn't previously mattered.

Of course, perhaps you are reading the documentation first, then pointing the AI at the relevant bits so it can complete some task and then reviewing the output for sanity, in which case I think you probably aren't losing out.

In the real world though I am seeing more and more information coming my way where it is pretty obvious that the person presenting it hasn't actually done their homework and doesn't really understand what they are proposing or working with.

"Trump is a liar who destroys every thing and particularly every one he comes in contact with"

Pin that in your clipboard and paste it into discussions as needed.

The Devil: This is where you will spend eternity winding the clock
Me: Akshually I'll be winding the frequency standard; it requires additional mechanism to keep time
The Devil:
The Devil: You know that's why you're here, right?

Most of the world's oil technology was developed using coal power
Most of the world's coal technology was developed using wood power
Most of the world's wood technology was developed using driftwood and animal technology

and so on and so on. These gotcha-memes never really stand up to examination of any kind, much less close examination.

This type of supply chain breakage is why I think we have already passed peak automobile lifetime (cars built 1990-2010): in the future when critical parts fail there won't be any spares, and unless one is willing to take on 10s of thousands of dollars of firmware modding no workarounds either. I would not expect cars sold after 2010 to have lifetimes of more than 10 years or so.

Everything RFK Jr does is related in some way to his network of scam companies making money. Trying to figure out how this seeming nonsense fits into that MO.

There used to be a nuclear power plant in Brazil that at one time locals called The Firefly due to its operating history. Clinton Nuclear Plant is the US' closest equivalent to that. ComEd, which has a long and large if not always 100% successful of running nuclear plants, spent years resisting all pressure from the ICC and state government to take it over from its original owner and then when their new corporate parent forced the issue spent years and many careers trying to make it work.

Matches the non-existent brain cells in RJK Jr's skull.

And he failed to pay her, as per his usual SOP.

Unclear why one of the traditional routes of population increase in US states - for the last 425+ years in most states, closer to 525 years in what is now California - is deemed to be "propping up" the population. Almost as if there is an agenda and a narrative to declare more recent immigrants as not real citizens or not real people. As opposed to, say, a German family that immigrated to the United States in 1904.

In the Old Days(tm), say 1990, electric power companies depended on Bell System wires for the most critical protective relaying applications, and the Bell Operating Companies provided nine 9s reliability with latency approaching the speed of light. Television networks likewise: national distribution in as close to atomic time synchronization as was humanly possible.

Today one is lucky to be able to make a voice call from one medium sized city to another without dropouts, jitter, disconnections, and other digital voice garbage. Latency? Ha ha ha ha. Reliability? Not even funny.

Progress!