A problem with the Kansas type argument is that people in counties which would be inclined to opt out are probably more likely to not take other precautions. And county governments themselves which opt out are also more likely to not take other covid precautions. There is similar data from Germany where different parts put in mask mandates at different times but the same basic problem is an issue (although in that case it really looks like that that wasn't what happened and masks really worked). See https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015954117. There's also some related data from the Boston area schools, which has the advantage that since they are demographically very similar, this sort of complicating factor is less likely to be an issue. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029. If one combines this with the one decent randomized trial in Bangladesh https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9036942/ it seems that the bottom line is that masks very likely work, but the Kansas data is not the slam dunk that the OP summary makes it sound like it is.

Average age of death is not a good metric for severity of a pandemic, and there is good reason it is not used by epidemiologists. Here's an example to see why. Imagine we have two diseases A and B. Disease A kills 30,000 people all of age 50. Disease B kills 30,000 people of age 50, another 20,000 of age 25, and another million of age 80. Notice that the average age of death of Disease B is higher than that of Disease A. But B is pretty clearly a much more serious problem.

One of the lessons about the last 60 years of space has been that the longer term you set an ambitious goal, the less likely it is to happen as priorities change, and people aren't that motivated. The US managed to land people on the moon in 1969 largely due to a combination of four things: access to incredible talent and resources post World War II, Kennedy setting a before-the-decade-goal, a competition with the USSR, and Kennedy then getting martyred which made changing any of his major goals really difficult. 17 years is a lot longer than Kennedy 9.5 years, and I doubt that Modi is particularly interested in becoming a martyr symbol so his country sticks to the same space goals.

Giving people a rough idea of size, 100 meters being about a football field is a reasonable approximation to give people a rough size they can wrap their heads around.

The pandemic is very much not over. About 500 people are dying in the US weekly due to covid. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html. That's not as high as it was, but not nearly over. More concerningly, hospitalization numbers are up, and wastewater numbers are very high right now https://biobot.io/data/). Unfortunately, getting more granular detail now is tough because the CDC decided to stop doing regular updates to their public facing date set, in part it seems to give the public the exact feel you are repeating, that this is over, and they can go and relax about everything.

All of that said, permanent virtual schooling is not a good idea. I'm a school teacher, and it really did not go well. The most motivated students handled virtual schooling well, and the others mostly did not. Keeping students engaged and working with each other virtually is tough, and getting them to interact in contexts where they have to actually work with each other is really hard. And having hybrid setups, with some students in person and others virtual was incredibly draining on teachers, and made a lot of lesson plans and other things much harder to implement. That said, having this an option which a small fraction of students use (which is what New York seems to be trying to do), may if implemented well still end up working ok. Since this appears to be opt-in, rather than a default, one is going to be seeing it for students who have other issues and who are themselves often coming with more driven family members who are engaged with their kids education. This might not be awful.

And closely connected cultural biases. For example, Jews are as a cultural group fond of medicine and do a lot of science. There's been a massive amount of work especially on Ashkenazic Jewish genetics, to the point where there are now standard Askhenazi specific genetic tests many do before they get married to make sure that both members of a couple don't share the same deleterious recessive alleles. Between this and the sort of relative bias you bring up, this might explain a large fraction, if not a majority of the matter in question.

1 and 2 are very different than 3,4,5 because they require us to be fundamentally wrong about basic physics. It is likely that no room temperature, ambient pressure superconductors can exist, but they don't require us revamping anything to the extent that FTL and antigrav would. This is an important distinction for evaluating how plausible a given claim is.

He didn't write much in the way of textbooks. Every single one of his books is a popularization, not a textbook. And his books, especially the most recent ones, often have serious issues. His most recent book on quantum computing was deeply flawed, and got basic points wrong as detailed in Scott Aaronson's review here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=... .

It is painfully clear from his latest attempt at a book that Michio Kaku does not understand anything about quantum computers, has made zero effort to understand them, and in general has said a lot to sell and get attention. This book review by Scott Aaronson is pretty damning: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321.. So it should not be too surprising that Kaku is saying things like this. There is no good reason to think that any of the things we want AI to be good at are things which quantum computers substantially improve. And since general evidence is that human intelligence does not take advantage of quantum computing, there's no strong reason to think that any of this is either necessary nor sufficient for anything with AI.

This isn't an application that does that though. This is an application which does so *after* being told to try to come up with something to use those ingredients with. One has to already have identified that one wants to use ammonia or whatnot as a food ingredient before it says anything at all.

Does your car need to have a warning sign not to put saltwater in the gas tank, or your stove to have a warning that says "Do not leave the gas on an extended period and then light a match?" Does someone saying that we don't need to be worried about those make someone a shill for Big Car and Big Oven?

Testing system limits is not a bad thing. Using a system which can take any output and acting like it is *newsworthy* when the system does something like this is the problem. I filed a bug report not too long ago because a certain program was crashing whenever it tried to open a file with a certain character string. That isn't newsworthy.

The system did this when people were giving it non-food items and asking it what to do with them. So what? All that means is that the AI tried to do something with them. If anyone is seriously asking what foods they can make by putting cleaning fluids into their food, and they are going to take the results seriously, I doubt they were long for this world anyways. More broadly, this is part of a pretty annoying thing where every time there is a new AI system, some people try to deliberately see what most outrageous things they can get it to say, and then try to turn that into news, when it really isn't. Congratulations, you got a large-language model to output something ridiculous. Yay you.

And it is not even like the company is trying to do anything more. They had a separate plan to do satellite launches off an airplane. That got spun off as a separate company, Virgin Orbit. They even got to space a few times. But then they had some issues and apparently Branson only cares about his fancy tourism business, so they VO went bankrupt. So there really was a chance to have something actually productive here and they didn't really bother with it.

Hmm? Nutrition density of nonmeat diets can be as high as with meat diets. And no, a typical cow is not just wandering around eating grass, but is getting a large amount of grain https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/grass-fed-vs-grain-fed-beef. In fact, in terms of per a calorie, the amount of tilling and land use a cow uses is far higher than a human eating the same amount of grain based products. We have actual data on what this sort of thing looks like. See e.g. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/environment/the-carbon-footprint-of-food-diets/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/climate/diet-vegan-meat-emissions.html. And sheer amount of landuse, aside from climate change is much larger for the cow. A plant based diet uses about a quarter as much land as a meat based diet. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets. But the point here is not even to reduce to a zero meat diet, which understandably many people find unpleasant. Meat is really tasty. But reducing meat consumption is still something one can do. And of course, of the many things listed, diet was only one of them. If you don't want to do that, I understand. So by all means pick some other things listed and try them instead. Every little bit helps!