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Comment Re: Universities teaching the 'truth' (Score 3, Insightful) 11

Papers get ridiculed when the data is not reproducible or does not support the claims. Not because the medical industry can't make huge profits sell baking soda. Papers are written and published because that's how you get ahead in academics. If there is a simple miracle cure for cancer, there are a thousand hungry PhDs and students willing to write papers on it.

Comment Re:kids these days ... (Score 0) 93

Fun reminder that with an AI agentic framework, pretty much any software can be readily disassembled and this sort of malicious behavior "fixed". Tasks that previously would have taken far too many man-hours to do, well, you can have a bot do it now.

Comment Re:LEDs for thee, not for me (Score 1) 110

, I'm talking about the massive, entirety of the electronics industry, all of which is required to make an LED bulb:

Yes, that's what life cycle assessment (LCA) figures include. It doesn't take 8-20 kWh merely to assemble a LED bulb, that's the energy for everything included.

And that's actually a lot of energy for such a small item. Even incandescents are relatively energy intensive to make for such a small item (glassmaking is energy intensive), and LEDs are 8-13 times as energy intensive to make. Just (A) not 25x as many, and (B) orders of magnitude off of being relevant compared to usage consumption.

Remember that this "every person driving every car" also applies to the usage electricity, which is by far the vast majority of the impact. Generating an extra 1,23 megawatt hours to power 25000 hours of incandescent instead of LED lighting involves massive numbers of people "driving their cars and mining". 1,23 megawatt hours of generation just is not even remotely comparable to the resources that go into manufacturing a small electronic device. Which should be obvious from the price alone.

And pretending that incandescents are made of rainbows while LEDs are made by Satan is just not fair. Incandescent bulbs rely on tungsten. Tungsten is only 50% more common than silver. Extracting tungsten from wolframite or scheelite requires open-pit and/or underground mining, then pressure digestion in hot sodium hydroxide, liquid-liquid extraction with organic solvents, & acid precipitation. Since you're throwing away 20-25 incandescent bulbs for every LED, you're demanding 25 glass envelopes (glass smelting), 25 brass threaded bases (copper mining), and 25 tungsten filaments. The number of components is less but the volume of them is far more. As is the energy required to make them.

As for "waste": a large portion of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuels. 1,23 megawatt hours of electricity leads to a ton of pollution, including things like lead arsenic and mercury, being emitted directly into the environment. Far more than anything you might be concerned about within a LED bulb if you were to outright incinerate the thing in open air and dump all its waste straight into the water. Which is, of course, not what actually happens. And it should be mentioned that that RoHS marking on the bulbs? That requires strict requirements on the maximum amounts of toxic elements that can even exist in the product. We're talking milligram quantities of gallium, indium, phosphorus, etc. It is simply incomparable to the emissions from power generation.

Re, health claims, I can only guess you're talking about blue light impacts on circadian rhythms, and that early LED bulbs tended to be "cold" / "daylight" color spectra, wherein most incandescents are "warm" spectra? But today you can buy fluorescent to literally any spectrum you want, so it's not particularly relevant. Or maybe you're talking about flicker? Again, it was often bad with old bulbs, but completely irrelevant to modern bulbs. If you mean something else, you're going to have to state what you mean.

Comment Re:again, don't blame the computer (Score 1) 61

The command structure checked and double-checked and determined their information was flawed.

According to the story, there were already aircraft en route to board the ship. Do you think this is how the US military actually operates? Launches aircraft to board a Chinese ship, and only while they're en route midair do they bother to double check?

Comment Re:wow another WW3 (Score 2) 61

Just to elaborate on the "actual details" flags:

1) What ship? This isn't exactly sensitive information - both the US and China know it - and there were supposedly already aircraft en route to board it. Leaving that out means that nobody can check ship traffic or flight records to see if these claims are actually plausible.

2) What AI? Is this some private military tool like Maven, or is it, like, say, ChatGPT?

3) They're saying that the analyst fed intelligence related to the ship’s cargo manifest and the AI "hallucinated" that it was carrying nuclear weapons. If you're feeding it intelligence, asking for a conclusion, and it reaches a conclusion, but that conclusion is wrong, that's not a "hallucination", that's just a wrong conclusion. And exactly how difficult was this analysis? Are we talking "there's a no-smoking sign on the deck" -> "Oh, that's surely because of nukes!", or are we talking "It's setting off all our geiger counters and there's audio of the captain repeatedly talking about "Héwqì"" -> "Sounds like good evidence for nukes!"

4) Is this actually how the US military operates? They get one report, they launch an airborne boarding operation, but *then* decide to redo the analysis while the birds are en route to their target? Really?

This whole anonymously-sourced story is just throwing off red flags for me left and right. I'm sure something happened, but I really doubt it's fully matching the portrayal.

Comment You mean Democrats (Score 1) 39

In 2026 you can just say democrats. We don't have to pretend the Republican party or anything else but batshit crazy religious lunatics and fascist psychopaths anymore. The Democratic party isn't perfect but we are so far past both sides bad at this point that you can just say Democrats and we aren't going to get upset. This isn't 1993 we don't have to pretend partisanship matters anymore.

As for the Democrats fixing shit not a chance. Not because they aren't going to try but because holy living mother of Christ where the hell do you begin? They are going to have their hands full, assuming Trump ever leaves office, just trying to keep everything from collapsing. And in 2 years the dipshit voters who put a pedophile rapist in the white house twice are going to vote Republican because the Democrats won't have fixed every single fucking problem in their lives that they caused by voting Republican.

70% of baby boomers voted for Trump and 65% of the older Gen x voted for him. There are days when I'm not at my kindest and I really wish the Boomer remover had done its job. I also wish the American left Wing would stop blowing off young men and calling them small dick mediocre rapists... It would be really nice if the left wing would stop bitching about patriarchy long enough to remember that not every single dude on the planet is a fucking rapist pedophile and that maybe they ought to do something about the fucking economy and jobs or at least mention it in passing in between blurting out dumb shit like defund the police and then having to spend 30 minutes explaining what the fuck that means to nobody in particular

Basically the center is too busy trying to fix the messes caused by the right wing and the left are too busy playing around with their dumb hobby bullshit. We don't have a chance of breaking up any of the trusts.

Although private equity is made the healthcare system bad enough that the doctors who have real money and real time for lobbying or starting to step in because it's affecting them directly.

Comment Quality goes down and prices go up (Score 3, Insightful) 39

Because there's less choice every year. They don't have to care about what you want or what you think. Because it's so much easier to just be the only game in town and if you don't like it well you can't even go fuck off to the mountains because they own that land too.

I remember reading a post from a guy who moved from super liberal Oregon to the land of the free that is Texas expecting it to be a lot cooler because there would be less government regulation and he'd be able to do all the cool stuff he wanted to do like drive his ATVs and go hunting and shit. Only to find out that any of the land worth doing any of that on was already owned by other people with a lot more money than him and there was fuck all for him to do in Texas. You didn't have to worry about following the rules when you were out in a public park because there weren't any. At least not the kind he was used to it from Oregon.

I guess what I'm trying to get out here is you don't realize what you lost until it's gone. We lost antitrust law enforcement and we still haven't realized what we lost...

Comment Re:holy runon sentence batman (Score 2) 61

The bi-partisan Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (of 1968) explicitly prohibit Iran from ever developing or possessing nuclear weapons. And 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reaffirmed that Iran was not to develop a path to nuclear weapons. And included dismantling of many centrifuges, and divestment of nearly all of their enriched uranium stockpile, and submit to 24/7 indepedent monitoring and reasserts the authority of the IAEA to resume inspections. The sunset provision allowed some enrichment to continue for peaceful energy purposes, with the caveat that inspections and monitoring remains in place.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush green lit selling third-party weapons to Sadam. And David Perdue ( American Ambassador to China ) confirms that President Trump asked President Xi Jinping if China would like to buy weapons from the US. In 2003, while G.W. Bush was in office, the IAEA documented that Iran was found in non-compliance with its NPT safeguards obligations. So, I suspect the track record for the GOP is far worse than Dems when it comes to arming our adversaries, just on these facts.

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