Mods: To whoever went and downvoted both of my posts... none of the moderation options include "I agree with this" or "I don't agree with this" or "I don't like the implication of this" and that's for a good reason. When you're moderating, you should simply be filtering out *low quality* posts. There was nothing about my posts that was low quality. The posts stated an idea in a well reasoned way. If you disagree, you can post yourself and point out where you think the reasoning went wrong, or where you think the axioms I used were wrong, but moderating a post down just because you disagree is a misuse of the moderation function.

No, I would say... we were inadvertently cooling the North Atlantic with ship emissions, and when we stopped (due to more stringent international emissions standards) then we saw a jump in water temperatures in the ocean. So we're already geo-engineering. Some of it adds together, and some of it reduces the effect of other geo-engineering effects. If we're doing it anyway, and there's zero chance we're "just going to stop" then we need to get better at it.

The jobs that pay those salaries are typically in cities with a very high cost of living. $135k in London or New York isn’t a bad junior salary but people can do better on a lower salary somewhere else. And many of them do, which is why the pyramid is huge at the bottom.

I don't understand your logic. We had a huge eruption of Mount Pinatubo back in 1991. I was in high school and remember the effects that year. It had a really big impact on global weather patterns including dropping the temperature significantly, but it certainly didn't "kill a lot of flora and fauna." Yes, there was a lot of local damage around the volcano, but that was due to the ash.

We could just build more fission nuclear reactors (and we are now, finally). Fusion is still decades away, even though they've made a big advance recently due to more efficient super-conducting magnets. And renewables really need better energy storage solutions to really increase adoption.

The fact is that with deglobalization and the fall of global institutions, every country now has to guarantee its own energy independence. In the US, that's shale oil (and natural gas). In China that's coal, since almost all of their oil has to be imported from the middle east, and China has a ridiculous amount of coal. Europe would love to switch to renewables, but let's face it, they need to spend money on their military right now, and won't be able to afford subsidizing solar panels in countries where the sun hardly shines.

The problem isn't going away.

Do you have an actual workable idea, or are we all just supposed to lay down and die? You can do that if you want. The rest of us are going to work the problem.

The problem is that graduates who know how to research and reason and write will end up working at Starbucks. Short sighted employers are going to hire people who can cut costs by doing everything with AI, not people who want to take time doing it right. It will be a business disaster in the long run, but the CEOs don't care because they will get seven figure separation payouts.

But maybe down the line the smart people will get paid to clean up the mess. Like the good programmers who are now getting paid to fix AI generated software.

I would much rather we just cut fossil fuels and replace them with carbon-neutral or carbon-negative technologies, but given the political reality, there's no way that's going to happen soon enough, even if we outlawed the use of geoengineering. So given that reality, is this an existential threat to humanity or not? Because if it is, then it's better to roll the dice on geoengineering than watch the end of the world, right? I believe the climate scientists when they tell me climate change is an existential threat, but it's also the climate scientists who say, "no, it's not that bad yet" when you bring up geoengineering. So which is it? And given that we're definitely not going to cut emissions in time, wouldn't it be better to buy ourselves some time before we hit those tipping points we keep hearing about?

China has put years of work and billions of dollars into getting people to avoid sanctions by conducting international transactions in yuan. They don't want people switching to Tether!

The USA used to have vocational schools. Many of them were high schools. They taught draftsmanship, printing, auto mechanics, and other trades. There were also one and two year schools that would teach people how to be plumbers and electricians and diesel mechanics. Over the last couple decades we lost that. Instead everyone was going to work in The Service Economy. Lots of those service economy jobs were either outshored or never even existed. Thousands of people who would have been fine with a vocational degree ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a degree that cannot pay for itself. This is a failure of leadership by parents, principals, school boards, politicians, and of course by the colleges that marketed themselves as the newer, better vocational schools. This isn't just an American problem, it's even worse in China. We need to stop pretending that college is for everyone and return to the days of educating people for a realistic future instead of pretending that there will be an endless supply of jobs for anyone with a degree in anything.

The noise probably comes from the equipment that sucks air out to maintain the vacuum.

Depending on when it pops many of the datacenters may not have been built. The ones that have been built might not have power, and (in the USA) by the time all those big Westinghouse reactors and small SMRs have been built the datacenters might be obsolete and not worth updating without big AI customers. So there's a possibility that they'll just end up abandoned building complexes in the desert.

I mostly agree with you, but I think it might be unfair to the average American voter. Imagine that you live in West Virginia or Missouri, and you're struggling to get by, as many people are. Your wages haven't kept pace with inflation. You can't afford a house, and the price of houses seems to be rising faster than wages. Big companies have left your town to setup shop overseas, and your neighbors are out of work. Your health insurance sucks and is anything but universal. One big illness could wipe you out. When your wife had a kid, she got 6 weeks(!) of maternity leave, and had to be back at work.

Then you look at the US armed forces... there are 13(?) aircraft carriers that outmatch everything else on the ocean. Stealth bombers that look like spaceships. NASA launching huge rockets at enormous expense to go land people on the moon, when they already did that 45 years ago. A huge nuclear arsenal. This is all to be the world's police, and to provide a security umbrella to Europe.

And then you look at Europe, with their two years of maternity leave, and worker protections, and way more paid holidays, and universal healthcare, and they all like to look down their noses at Americans, while they benefit from a massive security umbrella that the US provides, which frees up the funds to spend on social programs.

Everyone thinks the MAGA crowd are traditional conservatives. Sure, there are some, but the core group of voters used to be democrats. They were union workers, laborers. They saw their savior in Bernie Sanders, and when the dems wouldn't let him run, they decided to follow the other populist voice. Is Trump lying to them? Absolutely.

I don't relate to MAGA at all. But I get it. The security arrangement might have been good for the US in general, but it hasn't been good for the average American worker. That's why we're here.

And there are going to be austerity measures coming to all of Europe. Those social programs are going to shrink. Right at a time when everyone's arming themselves to the teeth. How do you think that's going to play out?

I appreciate the average American's sentiment who want Europe to pay for its own defense. However, there's a lot of American history in the 20th century and before which brought us to this point deliberately. After being drawn into two huge world wars, started by member states of a continent that had continually been at war with themselves, the United States came up with a plan to prevent it from happening again. They invited everyone into an alliance structure where anyone could trade with anyone else, and the US would guarantee free navigation of the oceans so they didn't need big navies, and would provide security guarantees so that the countries of Europe didn't feel the need to arm themselves to the teeth. This arrangement is expensive for the US, but not so expensive as a world war 3. And it worked to prevent WW3 for many decades. Now that the generations who fought those wars are gone, we've forgotten the lessons, and I'm afraid we're doomed to repeat them. European have not evolved. Their geographic and political reality encourages wars among their own states. And as much as the US wants to stay out of it, they invariably get dragged back in every time.

If you apply "old school" industrial automation to a partly manual process, then getting 40% more worker productivity is hardly surprising. China, despite its rapid growth, is still in the final stages of industrializing. There's still lots of efficiency to be had. The US has been putting robots in factories since the 70's, so most of the low hanging fruit is already automated.

Also, beware what people are calling AI. In the industrial automation space, every vendor has been calling their product "AI" for the last 5 or 10 years. When you press them on it, it's often no more advanced than a PID controller or a few if/then statements. Our plant is more willing to take on new ideas than most, but the only real AI that I've seen installed on a plant floor over the last decade were some advanced vision-enabled picking systems. I'm sure someone has hooked an LLM to a plant-floor system somewhere, but I've not seen it yet. Nor have I seen a humanoid robot or a robot dog pay for itself. Even cobots only have mediocre uptake (but we are using them).

And finally, take stories out of China with a grain of salt. Yes, there's massive industrialization going on there, and the engineers working there are smart and motivated, but the government interferes heavily in the market. For instance, I've heard first-hand accounts from people on business trips there, where a truck was offloading several brand new CNC milling machines at a manufacturer, and the story was that these were just machines that the government had purchased and provided the company with the idea, "here, put these to good use." There's constant top-down subsidies being handed out, and it results in huge over-production problems. There are parking lots full of brand new EVs that dealers have written off because they can't sell them all. There are fields of solar panels producing power that can't get to market because there isn't enough local demand, and the power lines to the major centers aren't big enough to support the whole load.

Please check your reading comprehension. I specifically said I was "in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway." As in, your odometer reading. No need for a GPS at all.

Thanks for replying to my post without even reading it. I appreciate it.