I can find no reference to CNN claiming that there was no Hunter Biden laptop. Even the article the AC linked to shows that CNN did indeed report on the laptop.

Funny ChatGPT anecdote about the custom instructions. got tired of it starting every reply with "Absolutely!" or "That's a great question!" on everything, and to eliminate the fluffy language. So I gave it custom instructions not to do that. After that, every response was "Let me answer that for you with no fluff, no delay, just straight to the point!" It would end with things like "No introductions, nothing else, just what you asked for!" :-/

When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

The problem was that you were part of that chain of obligations to, and the guy above you could grab your wife, or in the case of James II of England (James VI of Scotland), he could grab you.

China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.

Which will not prevent automation. Look at the history of technological advancement, from the Paleolithic to today. Each major innovation has disrupted labor in some form or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in a proximal sense, but in the long run societies adapt. You cannot block innovation, and if you do, you simply surrender the field to the nation that is willing to throw out the status quo.

All North America can think about is building more pipelines. The oil obsession, in the face of climate change and economics, means we're just going to fall further and further behind. Sure, for a while tariffs will serve to keep EVs and economy cars out, but not even the United States can defy gravity forever, and when it all comes crashing back to Earth, North American automanufacturers, the heart of North America's industrial capacity, will be shattered.

Or the automakers could just ignore the dictates of the White House. But at this point, we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons, with strong encouragement from political leaders in the US and Canada, who lack either the wit or the courage to make the final break.

If anyone had been listening to what he was saying, they would have had no idea what he was saying? The grandiosity masked the complete deficit not merely of ideas, but even of reason and coherence? They elected a mean-spirited moron.

Is it April 1? Or is this another manufactured moral panic?

Xi is a lot of things, but a tinpot dictator he isn't. I despise everything the regime running China stands for, but if we're going to look at the PRC's ability to maintain itself and even expand itself economically and scientifically. Xi may die tomorrow, but the PRC isn't going anywhere. If progress is measured in research, have you paid attention to how much basic research is coming out of China these days, as compared to the West, which seems bound and determined to decimate academic capacity, or hand it over to a bunch monomaniac billionaires.