Gridlock is a function of people not obeying the law, not signal timing. The solution to gridlock is providing actual disincentives (traffic enforcement) as opposed to what is being done right now (no traffic enforcement).

I agree, but that's not the concern anywhere. No one is saying that using AI in a measured manner decreases work or education value. Instead, everyone's concerned that AI work will replace human thought.

In an educational environment, over-using AI is devastating to the production of competent experts. Remember, the goal of education is to make smarter people. Completing assignments and exams is part of that process, but not the end goal. Yes, you can have a generative AI write a paper for you, but you will have failed the educational assignment of learning and exhibiting what you have learned. You might be awarded a degree on the basis of submitted work, but your will have cheated yourself out of actual competence and when you're asked to demonstrate your knowledge, you will be no more valuable or useful than any other person asking chatGPT to do something.

That's the risk. That's where educational programs have the opportunity to completely fail-- by not regulating the use of AI to prevent incompetent people from gaining a degree.

Short answer, CO2 is bad for the environment. On average, it's also bad for plants at present-day levels.

CO2 is plant junk food, on average plants only benefit from it up to 400ppm (which we've already exceeded), beyond that it begins to harm crop nutrition. Certain plants can benefit from higher CO2 levels at particular growth stages but that doesn't mean those levels are good for most plants most of the time.

And that's without getting into the possibility of the plants being destroyed by a flood or wildfire or drought brought on by global warming that comes along with the higher CO2. CO2 levels that would be ideal for plants growing in a theoretical greenhouse would be too high for everything else in the environment, directly unhealthy for any humans inhaling the air, and catastrophic to established human settlements.

That someone is a group called TIGHAR. News outlets don't treat them with the level of skepticism they deserve because it isn't easy to see what would motivate this group to mislead. TIGHAR only seeks to achieve fame by "finding Amelia", and the funding that comes with promises to do so and any clues they claim to have found is a nice bonus. The trouble is that they're quite willing to bend the truth to get there.

The theory that Earhart ended up anywhere near Nikumaroro is implausible:

https://skeptoid.com/blog/2016...
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/...

First, a vocabulary check--

Fertility: The measure of the number of births per 1,000 females.
Fecundity: The measure of the ability to get pregnant/give birth.

While people associate "being fertile" with "being able to reproduce", these statistical analysis measure the rate of actual reproduction. No one is saying that we are less ABLE to reproduce, but that we are electing not to.

Teen Pregnancy
Healthy economies have done well to reduce teenage pregnancy. In the US, births to teenage mothers have gone from 62 per 1,000 females in the early 90s to 13 per 1,000 in 2023. That's a half million fewer babies born per year in the US and well over 50% of the fertility reduction.

If the various influential powers REALLY want move local fertility, they need to make sure that people ages 20-30 are sufficiently financially stable that they will CHOOSE to have children instead of relying on teen girls getting pregnant and getting STUCK WITH children.

Came here to see if anyone posted the correct answer (inequality), leaving satisfied.

I would donate an embarrassing amount of money to Slashdot for the ability to edit my posts.

Do to changes like this, I foresee universities more loudly advertising that their CS programs are accredited because I'm pretty damn sure that using GPT to create a program will not be worthy of a CS degree in most peoples' eyes.

Americans do not fund protections against (or warnings for) low-probability events. They don't care if the severity is high-- a significant part of the population can't imagine something RARE happening to them and thus don't want to pay for it. Moreover, the idea of funding something that benefits others but not yourself is labeled as "evil socialism" by said population.

* Hurricanes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, highly predictable, and deadly. They get very specific warnings and calls for evacuations.
* Tornadoes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, moderately predictable, and deadly. They get regional warnings and calls for taking shelter.
* Wild Fires: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, highly predictable once started, and deadly. They get very specific warnings and calls for evacuations.
* Earthquakes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, no seasonality, highly unpredictable, and rarely injurious. There are no earthquake risk warnings-- only alerts that earthquakes are happening or have recently occurred.
* Flash Floods: LOCAL risk (flood planes), LOW frequency everywhere, seasonal, and deadly. They get general risk warnings, but the primary protection is "Don't be in a flood plane".

They're complaining about stability.

Again, they're complaining about stability.

Remember-- these are people who make money from people buying and selling pieces of companies based on what changes they're able to foresee. If everything's stable, there's no money to be gained from sudden spikes in value or or shorting business failures. They will sometimes WANT mass layoffs because investors are taught that layoffs are simply reduction of expenses while maintaining output (resulting in greater profits).

These are vultures.

Most public universities aren't that expensive. UCLA, for example, is $15,700 per year. Is that worth it? Well, let's consider what you get-- UCLA runs on the quarter system (10-week terms plus a week for final exams) and your average student takes 4 classes per quarter at 3 hours per week. That's approx. 396 hours of direct education or examination per year, so if you want to break it down to the simplest cost-per-hour for education, it's $40/hour. Of course, there's much more expense that goes into the education that the instructor. There are the buildings and their maintenance, the utilities, the physical infrastructure of the campus (pipes, conduits, roads, walkways, etc.) and its maintenance, the landscaping, and all of the administrative work that goes into managing the extremely variable schedules, goals, and actions of 50,000 people on a single campus.

When you look at the whole picture, the cost of the university is pretty darn defensible.

Where I find the most egregious expense is in the cost of housing near major universities. All around these schools, you'll find a mass of investors (big and small, corporate and mom & pop) who buy up all the housing, turn it into rentals, and crank up the rent at every single opportunity. Food and housing is expected to be around $20,000 for a UCLA undergraduate this coming year-- and "housing" implies a shared bedroom among other shared bedrooms of an apartment or house.

This is why college campuses put so much work into building on-campus housing for their students and why some campuses (like UC Irvine) house the majority of their faculty on campus.

While there's a modicum of truth here, this the opinion of someone who knows nothing about universities. Honestly, a theater major will not have many job prospects after college by comparison to a civil engineering major. But, the arts are worthwhile and one's education at a major university is REQUIRED to be more than their major. History, math, writing, sciences, etc. -- those all take up ~1.5-2.0 years of a college education regardless of major as "breadth" courses or "general ed."

And then there's whole idea of "translatable experience". A person can go to school for a Computer Science degree, not actually like the exploitative patterns of the corporate world, and simply choose not to pursue the use of their degree in their career. Does that mean he's a useless human being? Of course not. There are MANY jobs out there that just require someone with an analytical mind to make/find solutions which those CS skills will directly benefit.

People with philosophy or English backgrounds tend to go into contracts, law, and policy because they're taught the importance of words, logic, meaning, and secondary effects. People with sociology degrees often move toward working with and for people in need. They use their education in more developed ways than simply being taught how to put a round thing in a round hole so that when they graduate they can put round things in round holes very quickly indeed.

I will say, thought, that too few students seek out on-campus jobs during their undergraduate careers. Yes, MANY do, but I think at least 80% of students should hold a campus job for at least 3 months prior to graduation. Mentorship, good wages, resume building, adjustable schedule, etc. It's hard to match that after graduation.

I don't know how many undergraduates you speak with daily, but I speak to at least 20. None of them have the expectation of getting a 6-digit salary right after graduation. Most of them are painfully cognizant of the financial future that's been created for them and most are just hoping to be able to make rent.

For those that DO hold out for higher pay, that's their choice and hopefully mom and dad support them in that choice.

We have had very different experiences. My 20 years of professional life have shown that people with a 4-year degree from a brick-and-mortar school tend to be those people that are able to learn on their own and will only ever ask for help when they're stuck. The ruggedness or grit of the person comes out in their work experience and interview as well.

The fuel intended for a prop plane with an old-fashioned gas engine is avgas, which at this kind of airport would be an oddball fuel that comes from what looks like ordinary gas station pumps in an out-of-the-way area. It would be completely out of the fuel trucks' workflow.

Contaminated fuel isn't totally impossible but is highly unlikely since no other planes had an issue that day, and even with contaminated fuel the odds of the two engines shutting down so close together are quite low. The theory of the jet fuel being contaminated with avgas is also pretty much impossible at a big commercial airport like the one this jet took off from.

Something weird may have caused an electrical or electronic failure that took out both engines at once. Highly unlikely again but not impossible.

Another greater possibility is that one engine failed for some reason and the pilots reacted incorrectly causing the good engine to be shut down. This is the most likely and there have been other crashes caused by this kind of mistake. Pilots spend their whole careers maintaining equal thrust between a plane's engines, but then when an engine failure happens they have to go for maximum unequal thrust.

I read it as All Pies.

These stories on the supposedly shortened British working week are never specific as to whether they're working less hours per week for the same pay. If hours per week are the same, then the only thing workers may be gaining is some scheduling flexibility.

Today's workers should be down to about a 30-hour work week based on productivity improvements since the '70s. Either that or about 40% more pay.