Very true. You do, however, frequently hear claims along the lines of "Warmists say it's all 'settled science!' Stupid warmists, nothing is ever settled in science!" This article does an excellent job of addressing that particular straw man.

Is it petty of me to wish that people who accuse their political opponents of being Nazis, Communists, etc., could live for a little while in the world of their paranoid fantasies? If they survived the experience, a month in the actual USSR under Stalin, for example, might give them much more perspective.

And claiming that the other side is claiming "the topic is settled" is almost always a strawman.

Nice job of concealing your ideological looniness until the end of the post.

In my mid-40s, and having been active online since my teens, I understand that using a pseudonym is no guarantee of privacy.

Meh. Slashdot stories have long reported Gartner's dodgy numbers at face value, even though pretty much every single such story contains multiple comments pointing out how absurd those numbers are.

Unless you get points for how you give the mannequin CPR, in which case the answer is "yes." Not all games are simulations, and not all simulations are games, but the area of overlap is pretty large.

Note that I'm not saying that making CPR classes into games is a good idea. In fact I think it's a lousy idea. But I have the feeling it's happening whether we like it ot not.

I'm not sure people from most other countries understand the "think of the CHIIIIILDREN!" hysteria that grips the Anglophone world on a regular basis. We seem to have developed this bizarre idea that people are supposed to be completely sheltered from the world until they reach the age of legal adulthood ... at which point they're supposed to know in every particular how to deal with the responsibility that entails.

Unfortunately, I had to read the rest of your post three times to make sure you weren't seriously claiming this. It's amazing the number of self-proclaimed nerds who don't seem to understand that technology actually does predate computers.

Sweet reason, or even simple politeness, doesn't work with the kind of self-righteous ideological nutballs who make up NCPPR. "Fuck off" is the only kind of response that will get through to them.

Have you considered that people approve of Google when it does good things, and disapprove when it does bad things?

Our society has become massively automated compared to the middle ages. And we have 25 times the world population now. Yet we still have plenty of jobs;

No we don't. It's be decades since any western country had full employment, or even a policy to achieve same, thanks to the sadistic neoliberal idea of NAIRU. In most of the western world, there are an order of magnitude more job seekers than there are jobs.

And that's not even taking into consideration the swathes of the population involved in unproductive, pointless, bullshit jobs that serve no real purpose (eg: most layers of management).

Within a generation, two at the outside, the vast, vast majority of jobs involving manual labour will be performed by robots, except for those targeting the high-end luxury market. I expect a fairly large chunk of today's "intellectual" jobs will also disappear towards the end of that timeframe (eg: basic engineering, software development, lower levels of management, etc) as AI capabilities improve.

Funny, I read about congress all the time. Does that make them stupid or smart?

Yeah, I know. [sigh]

I thought I was being obviously over-the-top, but Poe's Law strikes again; it's impossible to satirize people who actually think that way.

This is just the free market fighting back against heavy-handed socialist regulation. We should all cheer a scrappy little company like Syngenta for their struggle for liberty against Hayes, who like all government "scientists" is just a shill for the multibillion-dollar environmental lobby.