You know, where the second child died of Measles? Lubbock, TX is at about half the distance between Dallas, TX, and Albuquerque, NW, and nowhere near the border to Mexico. All of the infected were not vaccinated, and most of them are under 18 years old - children, whose parents were not very keen on having their children protected. For some reason, none of the measles cases reported were illegal immigrants.

I watch a lot of PZ, but you need to take that guy with a grain of salt. Yes, he's generally correct about the overall trends, and he got famous by predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but he's also prone to wild exaggerations, and often spouts incorrect details about countries or industries he talks about.

In the case of China, PZ's biggest argument that they're past peak and falling is demographic data. Unfortunately, just like their financial numbers, their demographic numbers are unreliable too. Most of this was systemic... instead of having a central institution do the census, China relies on data from provinces and adds them up. Unfortunately it also uses that data to determine transfer payments to provinces for things like school funding. So if you were governing a province and wanted more money for schools, you had an incentive to inflate the numbers, and this is what was happening for a long time. As China has been slowly releasing corrections to the data, massive numbers of people are just disappearing from the official counts. Like maybe one or two hundred million people.

What this means is that China's much further along the path to demographic decline than most other countries, and worse, they were actively trying to suppress birth rates with the one-child policy for a good portion of this timeframe. By the time they figured out what was going on, it was too late. You can't suddenly manufacture a bunch of 18 year-olds to fill your factories. And as a nation, they're very unfriendly to immigration, so that option is off the table too.

Now, China also has a leader who likes to shoot the messenger. Anyone under him who publishes data that Xi doesn't like finds himself on the outside, and unemployed. (Which is why we were all so aghast when Trump did the same thing with the jobs numbers.)

So yes, the reliable data we do have seems to indicate that China is in a lot of trouble. But don't take everything PZ says as gospel. He's often wrong.

You do know that it is the CHILDREN of anti-vaxxers who are suffering and dying, not the stupid, manipulated parents, right?

And your point being? This is what their god wants. Let them deal with the repercussions. After all, they're better off dead.

We don't do commas any more. Slapping together words is the new norm. Forget commas when you're talking about a serial list: Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

What are you talking about? Of course image enhancement is possible using AI.

Most of the people on Slashdot have been screaming that the emperor has no clothes for a while now. Building a machine that spits out semi-plausible dialogue is very different from making an intelligent machine. I just asked Google's AI to summarize information about myself (my own name from my own town) and it rather hilariously indicated that my wife was actually my (IRL) sister. It had apparently retrieved the names from an obituary for our grandparent but didn't actually understand the relationships. We're not seeing the meaningful improvements that you would hope to see given the ludicrous capital that's been invested into LLMs. This isn't like Moore's Law in the 90's where there is constant improvement along a single axis (transistors per square mm). There have been a couple really big breakthroughs (first deep learning, and then transformers). Throwing more and more compute power at it isn't going to create the payoff that all the investors think. It's not going to get significantly better without more big breakthroughs, and those might come tomorrow, or not until long after we're all dead and gone. LLMs are a very risky bet right now.

They went from buying low to selling high and are now shorting the stocks.

They're winning either way.

I think we are going to see a 'correction' we go down 10% or or less from recent highs and trade sideways for a while.

Most of the big guys in AI are already down more than 10% in the past week. Today isn't looking any better. Once Nvidia reports tomorrow after the bell will we see stabilization, assuming they have good news to report.

Petrol cars burn 30 times as often as BEVs, according to the statistics of insurance companies. Yes, for each BEV fire, you have thirty conventional car torches.

I was wondering why a site I was on this morning decided to stop loading. Since other sites were still working I thought it might be the site itself. The hamsters got too tired and took a nap.

And that's a problem exactly why? I don't claim it to be 100%, I just point out the error of assuming 100% uptime for any type of energy source. Any power source based on heat and mechanical components has a lot of wear and tear, and components have to be serviced and replaced all the time, be it coal, gas or nuclear.

You have to pay the tariff to register the car with the DMV. I don't know how long non-U.S. license plates are accepted for a car driving in the U.S., but I would expect it to be limited to 12 month.

The most famous fire on a BEV carrying ship, the MV Fremantle Highway accident, was caused by a patrol car catching fire. But apparently, the BEVs get the blame, despite most of them remained undamaged.

You can get Chinese (and some European EVs) for half the $40,000. And in China, even Korean EVs sell for $10,000.