The article states that they don't know the cause. They found a correlation between ultraprocessed foods and poor health, but they don't know what exactly in those foods causes the negative effects. They also cite scientists who criticize the definition, as some foods considered to be healthy are in the ultraprocessed category. So the article addresses both of your concerns.

The new law (according to the article) still allows the re-sale of tickets, but not for more than the original price.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Whichever way you spin it, it's a scam. Perhaps fraud even, though I don't know about the legalities around setting up these kinds of funds.

"It includes customer names, driver's license numbers, and social security numbers"
I'm wondering why they collected this data in the first place. Well, name and address, sure. But the rest? Maybe it is needed for car insurance and auto loans, but aren't those usually handled by partners?

BTW most (maybe all) countries in the EU have SSNs, even if they are called something else. (Here it's a "citizen service number"). But you generally don't give that to companies..

I don’t get the obsession with flying cars anyway. There’s a Dutch company working on one, that is road legal and should soon receive its airworthiness certificate. Sounds great. Until you see the price tag and realise that this thing is a crappy car and a meh airplane, and costs more than a nice car and better airplane.

All it takes to crash is for enough people to get nervous. Didn't Warren Buffett sell his stock a little while back? Couple more whales cashing out, combined with the increasing number of stories about AI being vastly overvalued, and peope will begin selling.

And it should be absolutely fine to reproduce the lyrics verbatim and in full. Copyright as gotten completely out of hand.

Countries trying to lure in top academics don't just offer money, but also facilities, research grants and such. Compensation is only part of the picture, and scientists might want to choose the country were they are going to get the most science done, not necessarily the one that pays best.

You were comparing manned missions to automated missions. The only practical result of either is science; it will be a long while before we'll see something practical being done in space. Manned mission are more expensive but they can yield way more science as well. I think we ought to at least try and get something of a moonbase established. That is attainable, and will give us a much better idea of what we can expect should we want to venture further out in a manned mission. That experience in itself is worth attaining.
If you want practical, however, space exploration has little to offer anymore, except some spinoff tech perhaps.

There is a huge difference between having a little robotic rover trundle over the Lunar service, and having some scientists present, with a lab. Though I imagine a lot of that research will mostly be useful for further human exploration of them Moon or space, so it might seem a little self-serving. But it may well drive down the cost of human space exploration.

No violence to sea creatures is to be expected. Well, except maybe the tasty ones. We'll have to find out which those are... SCIENCE!