Congress and their powers to tax and spend in general. That doesn't vary by specific technologies like solar vs oil, etc.

Not free, paid for by large corporations. The Inflation Reduction Act raises $300 billion over a decade by requiring large corporations to pay a 15 percent minimum tax on their profits and by enacting a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks and redemptions.

It is critical to know the inner reasoning in order to determine whether something understands. A parrot can speak but I do not think anyone believes that it understands what it is saying.

If you understand the concepts behind the words rather than the pattern the words make then you can use logical reasoning to determine new information. An AI trained on word patterns cannot do this and so, faced with a new situation has no clue how to respond and is far more likely to get things wrong. This is why ChatGPT performs so poorly on even simple, first-year university physics questions when asked to explain observations or results...and this is with situations that are known and have happened before. Being able to take concepts and using them to logically extrapolate what will happen in different situations is a key hallmark of intelligence and that is something that current AI simply cannot do.

The point _was_ made: "constant rate" means that the rate of expansion remains the same with time. What you are talking about is a _common_ rate of expansion. The summary says that they are considering variations in the rate as a function of position but, by saying that the rate is constant that inplies that it does not vary with time and that is wrong: we know from multiple supernova studies that the expansion is accelerating. This even gave is a new possible "end of the universe" scenario: the "big rip" where in the incredibly distant future if the expansion keeps accelerating then possibly at somepoint the causally connected region of the universe might shrink to the planck scale at which point space-time itself will become impossible although this is all highly hypothetical since we do not understand what is driving the expansion.

Then we would know because while the universe refuses to define a common zero for velocity (velocity is relative), it absolutely does define a common zero acceleration.

It's already known that the expansion seems to be accelerating. Several supernova studies all point to an accelerating expansion likely driven by Dark Energy but, regardless of the cause, we already know the expansion rate is not a constant.

I suspect that for anything that still needs it you can use an FPGA implementation of the Z80.

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.

Perhaps not but I've a lot of experience using "AI" (although I prefer the term machine learning) for analysis it can and does do stupid things from time to time. In my case that results in some obviously wrong physics results but my code is not in control of a state-of-the-art, fully armed fighter jet.

Exactly how would this apply given that they were protesting _at_ the employer's premises and disrupting other employees who were trying to work there? It seems very reasonable to me that if you turn up at your place of employment and use your access to that place to disrupt the normal business of your employer by staging a sit-in that you should get fired for doing so.

After all, if these people really believed in what they were protesting then the honourable thing to do would be to resign from Google first, like government ministers do when they have a strong moral or ethical objections to the actions of the government of which they are part. Yes, it's a tough decision to make with financial repercussions but if you are not willing to do that then what you have is a preference not a strong moral objection.

I suspect the people who will be most shocked will be those who hold the copyright on the original works that the AI was trained on and is very likely to be partially regurgitating given an output as long as a book.

Yes but Google is not congress and they were not passing a law. That's the problem with the US constitution, unlike moden constitutions that define rights and hence stop anyone who tries to take them away, the US constitution only limits the US government and in today's world large companies often have as much influence on our lives as governments. That being said if you start publicly denouncing your employer it is absolutely reasonable for them to fire you.

The important question is what does the AI in charge of the armed aircraft think it means? One misinterpretation or hallucination and there are going to be a lot of very angry former pet owners.

I'd rather have an objective scientist trained to make decisions based on data and objective reasoning rather than either of those options but I guess that's sadly old fashioned these days.

Sadly this theory is extremely wrong because most of our surface water is in the oceans and despite water being locked up in the poles some of the driest places on the planet are Antarctica's Dry Valleys, right next to the Antarctic ice sheet just as on the Arabian peninsular and elsewhere there are deserts adjacent to oceans. Whether a place is arid is determined by the local climate which is dependent on a host of factors such as prevailing wind direction, local topology etc. not the amount of polar ice - even when that location is right next to that polar ice!