I read the fiction novel Termination Shock a few years ago and it was about this kind of solar engineering. The premise of the book is pretty solid: it's surprisingly cheap to do this, and there's no international organization to oversee it, and in fact we've been dismantling or at least weakening the rules based global order for a decade or more. Some country or organization somewhere is going to calculate that doing this will be a net benefit to themselves, and will just start doing it. Heck we *were* doing it inadvertently with ship emissions, and when we stopped it created a termination shock of its own. There's no way that this won't happen, and then it's going to open the floodgates on geoengineering. Only *then* will we get enough countries together to make some international agreements.

Not anything. Especially when dealing with nuclear. There are some parts that once degraded cannot be safely replaced. For example, the containment unit. And others where making a new one makes more economic sense than replacing even when technically possible. What state this plant is in I have no idea, and am not qualified to have an opinion on. I just hope experts are making the decision based on economics and power requirements and not politics.

No, it isn't. You're absolutely deluding yourself. And even if it was, nobody uses it to actually write anything. Learning to write (vs read) would be, is, and has been for 50 years an utter waste of time.

Why does it matter? Microsoftâ(TM)s code was buggy garbage long before they implemented vibe coding. If the entire OS was rewritten by a buggy AI nobody would be able to tell the difference.

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

Laser Cooling is very cool.

It sounds like a tool for creating clickbait videos. CANNIBAL CORPSE IN THE STYLE OF BANANARAMA! sort of shit. But I think most people will get bored and cancel before their 30 day trial renews.

Modding me down doesn't make me wrong, mods.

My opinion as a pragmatist is that most western institutions do a passably good job most of the time, but are imperfect and need to be constantly scrutinized to make sure they're serving the interests of the taxpayers. But what I'm talking about here is trust. There are many things that institutions could do to communicate in a way that doesn't do so much harm to their trustworthiness. I think that's an area where people are still learning how to do it "the right way." We're not there yet.

Wait, I thought Tylenol caused autism. Is there Tylenol in the vaccines? What's going on? LOL

First of all, trust in institutions is falling everywhere across the western world, not just in the US, and that drop in trust is bipartisan in the US. Secondly, there are real reasons for a general decline in institutional trust. In medicine, but also in economics, with the 2008 financial crisis that was caused by a failure of the institutions that are supposed to regulate such things. The rush to label anyone who questioned the origin of the COVID-19 virus as racist, only to have most authorities eventually admit that a Wuhan lab leak was not only possible, but likely, was another example. Again, the falling trust isn't a left or right issue. Does it help when RFK Jr. is running the CDC? Obviously not. But do you really think the state governments are immune to this falling trust? Definitely not.

What's funny is that the CDC still publishes measles data but I wonder how long that will continue.

While I count myself among the tribe of people who think we should govern ourselves based on evidence-based logic and reason, I have to admit, my tribe is a rather small minority. If the majority of the people in a democracy will not buy into an idea simply because you've provided a sound and well-reasoned argument, then we're going to have to fall back on practical lessons. You'd think measles coming back would be a pretty good object lesson, but apparently not.

I am absolutely serious. I have never, in 45 years of my life, seen anyone write in cursive past 3rd grade.

Another article where we see that things started getting worse in the 2012 to 2014 timeframe. Which just happens to be when a lot of teenagers started to get smartphones. It's not a coincidence.