I didn't mean for my comment to be reassuring.
It is just a statement of the facts we know ...

And I do agree with you this is scary stuff, and we can't do much about it.
No spraying, no medicines, no vaccines, spontaneously happens, ...etc.

The saving grace here is that incidence is very low with only several 100s of cases per ~ 330 million. Compare that to a respiratory virus like COVID-19 or flu ...

I still think we don't know certain things about it:

• why can a protein (a relatively large molecule with ~ 209 amino acids) get absorbed by plants?
• the exact structure of the misfolded isomer is not known
• why can't it be denatured at 120C (autoclave). The disulfide bond is one factor, but is it the only factor?
• and so on and on

Even the Wikipedia article has some of these uncertainties ...

I agree that prions are scary.

Here is coverage on the topic from a virology professor, part of a virology course at Columbia University.

And a case study in Texas, and emergency room contamination causing equipment to be incinerated.

They are basically a single protein from a single encoding gene, with variation among various mammals, with genetic, infectious or sporadic occurrences.

And it has a long incubation period, decades in many cases ...

To me, all this is both fascinating and horrifying.

And it is odd that prions are not degraded by environmental factors, like other proteins.

It is also odd that it is excreted in urine, and the the whole protein gets absorbed by plant roots, and transported to the leaves unchanged where they can infect animals.

Another thing one wonders about is whether natural grassland fires kept the prions in check in the past, but now that these fires are less because of human intervention, they surfaced back?

Or maybe that is not a factor at all, and it was spontaneous rise in cattle?

Very confusing, and scary ...

The sane "right of the liberals" party is long gone in Canada.

It was the Progressive Conservatives (imagine a right leaning party has 'progressive' in its name! Compare to Trump and Republicans maligning that word just like 'socialism').

The PC party was swallowed by the Reform/Alliance two decades ago, in the "unite the right" action by Stephen Harper. That consolidated the usually sane fiscal conservatives, with the extremist ones, who now control the Conservative Party of Canada ...

Now we don't have a reasonable option for the right leaning part of the spectrum.

We seem to be heading to a Poilievre/CPC government (perhaps minority government) in a year or so ...

Also, even purely homeopathic water-based products are going through an industrial process. There can be bacterial growth in the distilling vats, or dirty containers. If you are putting this stuff in your eye it could cause problems.

I have a bachelor's degree in pharmacy, but have not practiced in almost four decades, since I switched careers to the newfangled computer stuff.

From what I remember (Industrial Pharmacy courses), all eye drops and ointments should be sterile, just like any injected medicine or vaccine. If they are not sterile when manufactured and packaged, bacteria can grow in them, causing serious issues.

In fact, there were recalls of some eye drops that were made in India, and they did contain bacteria, and caused horrible disease to some patients. Here is the FDA recall notice.

If someone (homeopathy or otherwise) is selling eye drops that are not sterile, they are risking these nasty infections, and they should be prevented from marketing any such thing.

And yes, I agree that all homeopathy should be banned too. Not sure how can the FDA or equivalent agencies in other countries go about doing this.

Windows 1.x and 2.x didn't get much use.

It was Windows 3.0 that started to be widely used starting in 1990, and then 3.1 fixed several things and added some features a few years later.

That created (or enforced) the saying "with Microsoft, always wait till version 3".

Up until that point, the PC world was all MS-DOS and a bit of OS/2.

You don't need snap nor the nightly builds.

Snap is annoying, and not the right way to manage an application that is not a big blob (i.e. it is not statically linked).

The nightly builds will require daily installs of Firefox. That is too disruptive.

The solution is to use the Mozilla Team PPA.

It is a .deb repository, and they update Firefox when new versions are released, and when security fixes are pushed out.

The same repo has Firefox ESR (Extended Security Release) as well, if you want to go that way.

Instructions in the above link.

So this hypothesis has been around since 2014. Not entirely debunked, but what they are saying is Roundup (glyphosate) in combination with hard water is toxic. Glyphosate degrades in normal water, but in hard water it forms complexes.

I am also skeptical.

The reason is this: hard water is common in many agricultural areas in the developed world.

An example is Southern Ontario.

If hard water causes glyphosates to persist AND cause kidney disease, the uptick would have been detected by now.

Avi Loeb went too fast into the deep end ...

The micrometeorites may have originated in the solar system after all.

And, more generally, it looks like he belongs to the crackpot category.

It is labelled as a conspiracy theory because that is exactly what it is ...

The major flaw of your line of thinking is that it makes an implicit assumption that there is a hidden central entity that is directing all these 'outcomes' you talk about, and that is the hallmark of most conspiracy theories.

Population growth has plateaued since the 1960s, and still going in that direction, with the exception of parts of Africa.

This stabilization in population growth is mostly due to increased education, and higher standards of living across the planet (as a whole, some places more than others). It always follows that more education = less kids, specially when it is women who are the ones who get educated, and go to work. It is not due to the 'outcomes' that you list.

There was a book some years ago called Empty Planet.
See this video interview with the author.

Many countries are incentivizing having more children (Hungary for example), and others are warning about labour shortage due to population decline. Immigration is one way of filling the gap for some countries (e.g. Germany made it easier to get citizenship a few days ago, Japan wants labor, but without making them citizens).

You say, "I _hated_ having remote reports because it was so hard to engage with them, track project progress, make sure the right things were going on or in some unfortunate cases see if they were doing anything at all."

It was "hard" to engage with them because you were not good at or preferred not to use Slack. But that is *your* preference. You can't track project progress or make sure the right things were going on?

I too hate Slack, and all scrolling messaging platforms (including IRC) when more than one person are posting, and there is no rule to wait for the other(s) to respond before several people go on. I simply can't keep up with conversation.

I prefer voice conferencing where people know not to speak over or past each other. Make things much more intelligible.

But that is not my main point. My main point is that the original poster said he is an executive who is an 'introvert engineer'. I have had managers who are like that and they are really the WORST KIND OF MANAGERS to have. You need to be a peoples' person to be a successful manager, and introverts, like myself are not built for that. A long time ago, I became a project manager for nearly two years, and REALLY HATED IT, and switched back to technical jobs that better suits my personality.

I got a development job and then a team lead for a technical team, then left all employment to do consulting and work for home for over 15 years now. Much better for me overall.

I think that this is the main issue here, and that the original poster is better off finding something that better suits his personality.

So sad to see that DEC's Digital logo is now used for generic 'digitial' ...

And I wrote about this three years ago, almost to the day, in Slashdot's Downward Slope Continues: Ignorance of icons/logos.

Stop with the ad hominins.

That is a nice one ...

I resemble that remark ...

I should note that 1.1 Mya there were no anatomically modern humans yet. Even Neanderthals were not present in that far off past.

Oh, I see that the paper says Hominins, not Humans ...

That is what you get when the 'editors' post science articles from the Financial Times.

The industry has referred to them as 'hallucinations', but in reality they are lies, with dire consequences.

Examples abound ...

- Professor accused of sexual harassment based on a non-existent article in the Washington Post.

- Another professor accused of being convicted and imprisoned for seditious conspiracy against the USA.

- Lawyer fined $5,000 for submitting an AI generated brief to court quoting non-existent precedence cases.

- Fake complaint against man for embezzlement.

You are right.

Most likely it is this FAO report, which puts it at 14.5%.

The exact percentage per other studies ranges from ~ 11% to ~ 19%.

On the other hand, the EPA says that all of agriculture, including livestock is only 10% as a whole.

No idea why livestock is only 5.8%, and all of agriculture is 18.4% in the Our World In Data visualization ...