FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

This isn't some kind of 'our neutrino observatory is bigger than your neutrino observatory' contest.

That's exactly what it is. When your science depends on a big expensive piece of hardware that most or (best) nobody else has, that's what you tend to talk about. Especially in press releases and grant applications.

Neural networks generally don't extrapolate, they interpolate

You could test that if someone were willing to define what they mean by "generally" I suppose. I think it's fairly safe to say that they work best when they're interpolating, like any model, but you can certainly ask them to extrapolate as well.

I thought not. Your "main point" is based on two logical fallacies. You might be familiar with the saying "two wrongs don't make a right." Your "reply" was a third.

It was based on solving a maths equation.

True.

There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".

Ehhhhh

Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites

Technically true, but they were definitely doing experiments. The inconsistencies in Maxwell's electrodynamics and previous physics were the hot topic of late 19th century physics. To the point where various people thought resolving them would put the finishing touches on physics. Even the popular account includes the Michealson-Morely experiment.

Einstein himself says in "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. the special relativity paper):

It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the
present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do
not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the
magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two
cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion. ...
Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover
any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the
phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties
corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has
already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of
electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the
equations of mechanics hold good.

There were a whole bunch of relevant experiments. Lorentz reviews many of them in "On the influence of the earth's motion on luminiferous phenomena”, published in 1886.

Anyway, the author's point is not that AI can't think because it can't find the consequences of equations. Regular old numerical simulations and logic engines are pretty good at that, no AI required. His point is that AI can't think because it cannot generate ideas out of thin air, presumably the "pure reason" of ancient greek philosophy, and he uses Einstein as an example.

And as a supporting argument he used a fallacy. That's my point.

There is also the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California.

It has been opened and closed several times as the Feds and state of California tussle over it.

California greenies want it closed. The Feds want it to operate, even at a loss, for supply chain security.

It is currently operating with DoD subsidies, but production needs to be ramped up.

They sure do:

https://aws.amazon.com/federal...

Oh, sorry, linked the wrong company.

As such, they remain functional because nobody is weaponizing their state of indebtedness.

No weaponization necessary. For domestic debt, as long as your citizens keep buying bonds you're fine, and Japan's citizens keep buying bonds. If they stopped then you'd have to cut back government services. It's kind of a tax, maybe.

Foreign debt requires foreigners to keep buying your bonds. If they stop then you have to cut back not their government services, but those of your own citizens. It's not entirely unlike the sitation Saudi Arabia is in, except with debt instead of oil.

The US has the additional issue that a decent amount of that foreign debt is held by countries they have declared to be their enemies, which does add the possibility of hostile action. Most of it is held by allies they have decided to attack though, which I think in American baseball is called an "unforced error."

$207 billion over five years is one Northrop revenue.

Ah, clever. Would you also care to argue that rocks can't do arithmetic, which is what I actually said?

I'm not sure how any of that makes "it right though." It rather sounds like you're arguing against the author's apparent point that such things emerge out of whole cloth from the magic that is human intelligence.

I don't think we're having the same conversation. The OP asked about how not buying stuff decreases productivity. I explained that "productivity" in this sense is GDP / capita and not buying stuff decreases GDP. I'm not discussing social policy and certainly have not "missed the wealth gap." If you would like to discuss social policy, there are lots of Slashdot articles where such things happen.

You know, Slashdot has this great feature where messages are shown in threads. The message I relied to, for example, is shown immediately before mine. If you read the message (the one that mine is a reply to), and engage that vaunted human thinking ability, it might make more sense.