I saw this movie on Friday, and really wish I hadn't, although my friend and I did have an hour of amazing laughs picking apart all the glaring plot holes, tropes, and shitty dialog. It sucks because the special effects are awesome, the actors are great, and the lulls you into thinking this is going to be a great movie, but it's really just not. There's no good reason why it couldn't have been a great movie, I'm certain that most of the people on this site could write a better technical or emotional or action plot. I'm amazed that like a thousand people, some of them obviously really technically competent worked on this thing and *nobody* said "Wait, this is stupid, maybe we shouldn't make this."

I am convinced that they pulled up the scripts for every Humans vs. Robots movie of the last twenty years, fed them into ChatGPT with the stipulation that the US is the bad guy, and filmed the result. Everything in this movie is an overdone trope, all the characters are one-dimensional, the dialog is stilted and weird, and there is no attempt at even making a decent backstory or technical explanation for *anything*.

Spoiler alert (like you should care, you already know the entire plot of this movie anyway):

- You know the cool special effect with the hole-in-the-head robots with the cool spinny cylinder-gear thing? Want to know what that's about? Too bad. Seems to only exist so you can tell the "robots" from the "humans", which really doesn't matter because they're identical, except all the US humans are white or Black, and all the Asian humans and robots look Asian.
- Notice the capital-A Asian there? Yep, in this movie there is the US and Asia. All the Asians and and the Asian-looking robots live in Asia in either: rice-paddy trope villiages, buddhist monk trope mountain villages, or Cyberpunk Trope City. Also they eat, or I guess the ones with mouths do.
- The US Army can apparently fly its giant bombing platform over all the forests in Asia, dropping bombs and driving giant tanks everywhere and killing people. Not only does Asia apparently not have a military and just sends their police in to epically fail time after time, but evidently no other government on the entire planet has a problem with this.
- The whole premise of this is that the US is deathly afraid of "AI" since robots nuked LA, but they obviously use AI in their bomb robots, robotic limbs, and a bunch of other technology that probably wouldn't work without it.
- You remember that cool effect with the flying bomb platform painting this bright white-light thing on the ground? Apparently that's a... target. This mega-bomber that is the super-high-tech pride of the US Army has to move over the target and paint it with the white light so it can drop a bomb straight down. Except when it doesn't, and the bomb/missile things go shooting off horizontally to blow up something somewhere else, apparently without the target.
- The floating bomb platform is obviously flying around at light mountain-height, except in the last scene when it is suddenly an orbital platform and there's no atmosphere, but there's still gravity. Also they have to grow crops on this thing for some reason.
- The US Army evidently likes to try hiding in dark fields at night while wearing insanely bright lights.
- The US Army is apparently deathly afraid of this "ultimate weapon", which turns out to be a robot kid. (trope alert). In five seconds of looking inside this robot kid's head-cylinder, tech-guy can determine that this kid is the highest-tech thing he's ever seen, that it can grow (presumably something like a human), that it can magically control technology, and that when it is grown it will be able to control all technology everywhere.
- Every robot in this world has an off switch conveniently next to their ear which plays the mac shut-down sound and then erases their personality and memories. Unless you put them in standby somehow with the same switch, then they're fine. Except the magic weapon-kid who apparently doesn't have a switch because nobody ever shuts her off and they keep letting her escape, although she can apparently put herself into standby mode when asked to protect her head from a point-blank EMP blast.
- The whole premise is that the US needs to destroy this kid-weapon that is going to blow up the mega-bomber. Except, so what? The mega-bomber is destroyed, but the US is just going to keep driving its' enormous tanks around and using all of its obviously much better technology to keep blowing up the Asian robots in their rice paddies and Buddhist monasteries.
- Everyone in this movie likes to build 15-second delays into their bombs in order to give their targets a good chance to run away. Even the garbage-can robots with legs have a delay, even though they're smart enough to stop for whatever reason to check out weapon-kid. For some reason everyone is surprised when these things explode.
  - You remember that teaser dialog about whether robot-kid will go to Heaven? Think there might be some deep philosophical conversation going on about how robots and people are really alike and might have souls, or maybe that the US solder humans are the bad guys and all going to hell, or that it doesn't matter if you're meat or AI, you're all people? Nope. There's like three sentences about heaven, and they're all lame. Robot kid (who just magically learned English after staring at everyone for the first half-hour of the film) apparently has deep convictions that robots should be free, even though she's been locked in a vault watching cartoons and has never seen another robot before yesterday, and all the robots in Asia are perfectly free when they're not having the shit bombed out of them by the US. Also robot kid doesn't think she's a person.
- The US apparently has suitcases that can scan your brain after you're dead and put the image on a USB stick. Somehow you can then put the USB stick into any random "dead" robot and it will play back the person's entire self and personality at the moment they died. If the person has been dead for like two hours then you only get like 30 seconds of runtime, but you can only do this once though (no pulling out the USB stick and trying again, or making copies, or anything else that would be intelligent). Except wife-who-has-been-in-a-coma-for-five-years, whose memory image is perfect and somehow results in a personality that was not in a coma. Again, there's no explanation for any of this.

So, if it is your jam to pick apart the plot holes in movies and mock them mercilessly, then oh boy is this the movie for you. Otherwise warn all your friends to not see this. Seriously we don't want Hollywood to think that this is the type of drivel that we will pay money to see, because then they might make more of it. I seriously feel bad for all of the great special-effects people and actors who have to put their names on this travesty of film.

I'm also convinced that any positive reviews of this film were also written by AI.

Everyone batten down your kitchen appliances and put boots on your cars.

That trillion tons of ice melting off the poles? That's becoming a trillion tons of ice water, which is slowly drifting towards the equator, causing extra-cold weather in the higher latitudes, and is slowly being heated by the zetajoules of energy mentioned above.

When we run out of ice at the poles, things are going to heat up even faster. This could happen in the Arctic by 2035, but Antarctica will take a while longer.

We've doubled the population of the earth over the last 40 years, we can cut it in half again even faster.

When I was in college I switched my keyboard to Dvorak and trained myself to use it. I rapidly discovered two issues that led to my giving up on it:

1. While typing letters on a Dvorak keyboard is arguably more efficient, all of the Windows shortcut keys have been developed for a qwerty keyboard layout. For instance on qwerty, ctrl-c ctrl-v are done with your left hand. On Dvorak you have to take your hand off the mouse to hit ctrl-v. I'm sure I could have remapped all of my shortcuts as well, but it wasn't worth it to me.

2. Every time I went to a class or a computer lab I'd have to fight against my new training to use the qwerty layout again. I was constantly messing up one way or the other whenever I switched, and it just got too painful.

You have to be careful.

The president of the United States intentionally hired a guy into the White House as his Chief Strategist who said this:

"Let them call you racists, let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor."

And bookended his political career running a "news" website that hosts articles like these:

The Solution To Online 'Harassment' Is Simple: Women Should Log Off - Breitbart

How To Make Women Happy: Uninvent The Washing Machine And The Pill - Breitbart

Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy - Breitbart

If it were *just* policy differences we can talk, but it's not. It's the people in the highest positions of power in our country intentionally being as racist and misogynistic as possible.

How can he be sure the moon is actually there? I mean, all Trump has is the word of scientists! There are Americans here who believe the Earth is flat and what we experience as gravity is caused by the Earth constantly accelerating through space! Don't we need to hear all sides of this debate?

We can't even trust those scientists to figure out if the Earth is warming up or not! How can we trust them to stick God-loving Americans on the front of a rocket, shoot them into space, and land them on the @#$% moon?

Epson makes an EcoTank printer which supposedly just has a "tank" of ink that you refill *gasp* from a bottle. They charge you more for the printer because they're not recouping costs by jacking you on ink, but once you buy it you can put in whatever ink you want.

And in six months buying a $25,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $12/hr...
And in a year buying a $15,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $9/hr...

They're going to replace employees with robots anyhow, I don't buy that increasing the minimum wage to whatever has anything to do with it.

I actually think this could be pretty cool if Comcast would offer customers *something* in exchange for them hosting a public hotspot out of their house.

How about a free modem, instead of charging them $3/mo to rent one?

I own my modem outright, so have negative incentive to upgrade. But if they were to offer me a free basic IP phone line, or a free upgrade to the next speed tier, or free access to this service I'm hosting, or *anything*, I'd certainly consider it.

But otherwise, yeah, it seems like they're forcing everyone to pay for their network electricity as a requirement of getting their own internet, with no added benefit in return.

"Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide."

From the NY Times Article

The corollary to the "you shouldn't worry if you don't have anything to hide" argument apparently is "you'd better not ever have anything to hide or the government will use it against you".

God no! Never lose the helmet. Never, ever. When on a bike, at any point, no matter how safe you are, you're about a half-second from smashing your forehead into the pavement. Never forget that.

I love bike commuting, and would love to do it if I didn't have a 30-mile commute over the hills. As a paranoid driver though, I've noticed I have some technical problems with bike lanes.

In Portland, many streets have bike lanes along the right side of the road, between traffic and the sidewalk. All in all, I think this is preferable to forcing cyclists to ride in traffic. However, it puts me in the position of, if I want to make a right turn, effectively having to turn right across a lane of a traffic, which would be otherwise illegal if that were a lane of cars and not a lane of bikes.

If I'm in a car stopped at an intersection next to a bike lane, and want to turn right, I have to do the following:
Look left for oncoming traffic
Look ahead for oncoming traffic turning left (my right)
Look at the far-right corner for pedestrians
Look at the near-right corner for pedestrians
Look to the right of me to see if there are any cyclists also waiting
Look in my right-mirror to see if there are any cyclists approaching from behind
Look over my shoulder to double-check my blind spot

By the time I've done that, enough time has passed that I want to look left again.

There are also places where, in order to turn right, you have to move to a new lane on the other side of the bike lane (which is now marked with dotted lines). This makes me paranoid to no end. It puts me in the position of effectively merging to change across an entire lane of traffic, which again would be otherwise illegal. Bicyclists generally go slower than cars and don't maintain the same spacings, so it is harder to judge at a glance how many cyclists there are and how fast they're going (one may have been passing another) to make sure they're all out of your blind spot before you quickly barrel across their lane.

I don't know if there are better solutions aside from creating entire bike-only roads and bridges, but I think there are technical problems with bike lanes that are likely to result in accidents that are not entirely the fault of either party. I do my best as a driver to be paranoid, and still constantly worry I'm going to not manage to spot a cyclist just that one time.

If you're not familiar with The Long Now Foundation you should check them out. They have a project to build a clock that will last 10,000 years (about as long again as there's been civilization on earth), and are making progress constructing it in a cave in a mountain in Nevada.

Of course, the next questions are things like "well, who is going to be around to read it?" and "how will they read it?", and "how do we maintain a level of civilization where people can create replacement parts for it?"

Neal Stephenson consulted with them for his book Anathem, which I highly recommend, which is based around these sorts of questions.

Mother Jones recently published an article America's Real Criminal Element: Lead, detailing the correlation between decrease in environmental lead levels (mostly due to unleaded gasoline laws) and the decrease in crime rates (with a 20-year delay). The numbers are impressive, and they've correlated across areas of the country that enacted lead control laws at different times. The research is thorough and they make bold claims: "Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century." I highly recommend giving it a thorough read.

Right, there's no immediate threat to the environment. That's why they keep trapping radioactive wildlife.