It will push a bunch of teens off social media and it'll teach a bunch of teens how to use VPNs and hide their identities online. Both are good.

Disgusting.

All these atmospheric and space-based climate engineering proposals are stupid, dangerous, and useless. Their effects are unknown. You can't experiment with it because we have a sample size of 1. Modelling such radical changes to the climate is difficult at best and these companies have very much not spent the time, effort, and money necessary to do them right.

Furthermore, you can get similar effects by simply painting every roof with titanium white exterior grade paint. Doing so will raise the albedo of the Earth enough to offset a significant portion of current GHG emissions. It would counter something over 90% of current emissions. But doing so would be cheap, easy, effective, and also reversible if needed. All things that modifying the atmosphere are not. The reason you don't hear proposals for this is that it would utilize extant supply chains, regulation structures, and distribution channels. It wouldn't let a bunch of VC techbros siphon off large amounts of money in the mean time. Frankly, that's another positive, in my opinion.

There is a Q-factor when dealing with radiation poisoning. Different radiation types have differing quality of damage. For example, gamma rays have very low quality. Human bodies aren't that dense and most gamma rays can pass right through you without even touching your atoms. It take more grays of gamma rays to cause harm than grays of beta particles. Alpha particles can effectively be stopped by your skin; if you get an alpha emitter on your skin, you can just wash it off and be fine. But if the alpha emitter gets inside your body, that same dose starts liquefying your organs.

In the case of radioactive potassium and carbon inside your body, it's much worse than what damage you'd get if that same material was outside your body. Add to that, while the low temperature of a body won't slow its radioactive decay, it will increase the absorption cross-section of your DNA.

That's literally what Egyptian mummification was, as well. Thus my comparison.

Humans are simply too large to cryopreserve like we do embryos. The body can't freeze fast enough and so always forms ice crystals. This destroys tissues at a cellular level. Just think what happens to a strawberry you freeze then thaw. That happens inside your organs.

The technique used in cryopreservation involves replacing the blood with an antifreeze compound. The stuff is toxic and will destroy cells even if the ice doesn't get them. This is more like embalming or pickling than preserving.

The cryopreservation process has to be done after death. If you do it to a living person, it's murder. You can't reanimate a corpse, especially not one that's been pickled.

When frozen, a corpse has yet another reason it can't heal damage done to it. Temperature doesn't affect the decay of radioactive isotopes inside a body. The radioactive carbon and potassium alone would subject a body to LD50 doses of radiation inside of a decade.

Cryopreservation is about preserving a corpse as a death ritual and not a legitimate attempt to preserve a life. It should be viewed more akin to ancient Egyptian mummification than a medical procedure. And it has exactly the same chance of resulting in a reanimated corpse as following the Book of The Dead.

China is a planned economy, not a market economy. I read a report from an analyst of China that the CCP's plan was to pump up the EV market with dozens of manufacturers and then strategically collapse it, resulting in concentration of technologies in two or three manufacturers. This just looks like China following that plan to me. It's a matter of leveraging markets' tendency to over-produce, over-saturate, and follow boom & bust cycles to end up with a stable but varied market on the other end while ultimately retaining a majority state ownership of the means of production.

It doesn't beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else.

The birds are presumably native. The cat is an invasive species that's also probably a well fed pet killing for the sheer pleasure of it. Cats are massively damaging to the environment. Letting them out of your house should be illegal.

Hah! Key!

Anybody else remember MOOCs, or how much money was spent on them?

You use a VPN. That wasn't a question or a guess. It was an explanation.

It goes back further than that. During the 19th Century, it was found by Congress that the US was funding a ton of primary research through various grants. (I have no idea how they didn't know about this, considering Congress has the power of the purse in the US.) This lead to the short-sighted cancellation of a lot of research funding the in the US in the 1880s. People with most foresight managed to secretly keep funding basic research, mostly through the military. That's why the US Naval Observatory and the Army Corps of Engineers have their names stamped on so much research from the period between 1890 and 1930.

During the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal funded a surprising amount of research by funding colleges and universities. The national labs founded during WWII continued the tradition. In the post-war period, the NSF and ARPA/DARPA brought back direct funding of basic research.

So, you see, the US government has always heavily funded scientific and technological research and development in the US.

I refer you back to my premise that MBA and Economics graduates aren't actually that smart and the courses aren't all that academically rigorous. Your average Humanities major has a much more difficult academic career than your average economist. "Smart for a MBA student," is damning with faint praise.

Interesting article. Counterpoint: Any random 15-minute clip of him speaking in public. Alternate counterpoint: His two terms as president. Further counterpoint: His one and a quarter terms as governor of Texas.