Windmills don't kill corn. Windmills don't kill clams. They might scare some fish initially due to low frequency vibrations but they will probably adapt. The bird-killing issue is a thing but they've found that they can minimize it somewhat with different paint on the blades.

Yes there are negative issues, just like any other infrastructure project, but you have to weigh them, and you can't let your own ideological alignment get in the way.

Trump hates windmills because he hates how they look near his properties. He has a particular issue and then builds an ideological theme to support it. People get roped into ideology and stop weighing the costs and risks in favor of being a *movement*.

Opposite side of the isle it's just as bad, they're terrible at seeing the benefits of nuclear on ideological growns. They hate burning fossil fuels so bury their head in the sand at plastic incineration being more efficient and overall less carbon intensive than recycling programs.

Offshore windfarms aren't any more harmful than offshore oil rigs, and in practice offshore oil rigs are beneficial for the local ecosystem by adding a habitat (excellent fishing btw).

It's not like we didn't have police, just not what we think of as a modern police force. We had organized law enforcement consisting of sheriffs and constables, with the power to deputize when needed.

This is much the same as we didn't have organized fire brigades, instead we had government officials with the power to organize a response to fires by recruiting more manpower from the populace to fight fires.

Asking if we need a police force because we didn't previously have one is like asking if we need a fire department because previously we only had an informal volunteer fire department. These things only worked in the past because the need was small enough that we didn't have the economy of scale to support a professional firefighting or police force, but with growth, the professionalization required necessitated the formation of these things.

Also the "cops are just slavecatchers" thing is a largely made up and exaggerated talking point by the far left that they repeat ad-nauseum. The first professional police forces in the US were formed in northern cities like Boston and were decidedly *NOT* slavecatchers, but rather organized out of groups normally deputized to enforce the law, turning them into professional employees -- in much the same way a volunteer fire department becomes a full time employer in cities that grow enough to need it.

Some early southern professional police and sheriff departments *were* constituted out of slave patrols, as these were people who were often deputized, but these were not the first police departments, nor did they constitute the majority of them, not even in the south.

Why not say "School starts when the sun has been up for one hour. During these months school starts at 16:00 TAI, and in these months it starts at 17:00 TAI.

Use the time measurement consistently. Imagine "daylight saving length" where "For these months, start measuring things as one inch longer" and having to change how everything is measured..

The vast, vast majority of Americans don't live in "remote areas". They live in towns with infrastructure, and don't drive long distances except for the occasional road trip (a rarer thing these days). While the typical American daily travel experience is a longer distance than in the rest of the world, this is by virtue of car-centric infrastructure, with more people in other developed countries walking or taking public transit, but among people who *do drive* in other countries, it's not a huge difference in terms of how far people drive in a typical journey.

In terms of cold temperatures, the performance differences are vastly overstated by ICE apologists. The country with the highest EV adoption in the world is Norway, a country not exactly known for its mild winters, particularly on the coastline facing the Atlantic. I've lived in a cold climate myself and know the experience well of spending much of the year with my gasoline-powered vehicle's auxiliary heater plugged into an electric socket just to keep the vehicle from freezing, but for some reason that constant energy use was never figured into the calculations. With batteries, you know your range will go down a bit, though that is being mitigated somewhat with newer battery chemistries, and you figure that into the range of the battery capacity when you buy the vehicle.

Resale value is the only point I'll concede, but that's really more a factor of how fast the tech has been developing vs the very mature ICE technology. The exact same thing happened with early gasoline automobiles. As the tech matures you'll see the market for used EVs stabilize, and this is already happening somewhat.

An EV from ten years ago is now very usable on its old battery pack. When you buy an ICE vehicle, you look at the odometer and if it has a lot of miles on it you figure the reduced reliability into the price you're willing to pay. EVs have far more mechanical reliability, so you're more figuring in the functional range on the battery pack in the price you're willing to pay rather than the remaining lifetime on the engine.

I'm sure that statement is correct in that the encryption algorithm itself is secure, but there is probably a backdoor that got put in when the French government arrested the CEO, then mysteriously released him.

He wasn't saying "ban the car". He was saying "end car dependency." which means constructing multiple modes of transport with the same amount of priority, so that people can choose from the modes that are available, as opposed to building a massive network for cars and only token transit, if at all. People use good transit when it's available, the problem is that the US tends to build either crappy transit or none at all.

This is true, people go to Australia all the time.

Most US city centers have rail going through them. Freight rail. To some degree the land is already available if you're willing to take it back from the freight companies.

VRChat is everything Metaverse was trying to be, and is wildly successful. It succeeds because it is directly created through user demand, rather than a top down approach that considers users as a necessary evil at best, or a product to be actively sold at worse.

The reason for the chicken pox/shingles issue is that if you contract the VZV it colonizes your nervous system and remains latent. It periodically reactivates and sort of gives you a free exposure over the years, basically a recurring booster shot.

People have been fine with this in the past but some researchers suspect that the latent infection has long term potential damage and there could be a benefit in preventing a latent infection in the first place. (Similar issues with latent herpes infection have been posited, but there's currently no herpes vaccine.)

You're confusing the task with the mechanism. Classic autoconplete uses statistical methods, often using some variant of a Bayesian algorithm. The task is to predict the next word, the method is statistics.

But if I asked *you* to predict the next word in a sentence, you would not be using a simple statistical method. Neither is the AI. It doesn't have the breadth of multi domain training data that your neutral network has, so it doesn't really think like a human does, but the way it functions is much closer to your brain than it is to a classical autoconplete.

It's hard to stress enough how profound that difference is.

Why not deploy more, cheaper, less efficient AI processors, but run it only during the daytime when the solar farms are pumping out excess energy? It won't be the highest performance and have more heat output but you don't have to worry about energy availability or build grid storage infrastructure to support it. You could then offer it at a discount for customers that are willing to wait a little longer for training tasks to complete.

This is obviously not good for on-demand inference tasks (e.g. talking to AI customer support agent), but inference is orders of magnitude less demanding on the hardware.

Why would you fly from LA to DC to see a shuttle when there is already a space shuttle (Endeavor) in LA? There were six built (counting Enterprise) and minus the destroyed Challenger and Columbia, there are four left at three corners of the country for you to see.

Dude there are *four* surviving space shuttles. One in DC, one in NY (those are close together, fair enough -- the one in NY was only for atmo testing and while mostly capable of flying in space, but never received the refit to be able to do it) but the other two flown shuttles are at KSC in Florida and in Los Angeles. If your argument was that people have to travel too far, then we'd move the NY one to Nebraska or something to minimize distance traveled from any point in the country. That would also be a lot cheaper to stay at a hotel there than in Houston.

But, conveniently, Florida, New York, DC and California are some of the most visited places in the US. 64% of Americans have visited Florida (far more than any other state), 56% have visited New York, 54% DC, and 50% California. Texas just barely beats California at 51%, so you could probably improve accessibility a tiny tiny tiny bit by moving the LA one to Houston, but that would leave the entire western US with worse access (distance from LA to Houston is 1500 miles, vs distance from Houston to KSC is 1000 miles, and that's not even taking into account places like the Pacific Northwest.)

If you want to see a shuttle for less money, you have a couple of options. Go to Florida and drive to KSC, or stay at a cheap place somewhere along the Northeast Corridor or Metro North train lines and take a day trip into NYC -- you can stay late as the last Northeast Corridor trains run late into the evening and the Metro North trains leave as late as 1AM. (And you can take an uber to Penn/Grand Central to get the short distance to the train stations if you want to avoid the subway at night -- it's not as dangerous as the news makes it seem but you do see some tweakers on the subway, but the regional trains out of the city are clean and comfy)

On average, I've actually been very happy with the use of AI chatbots for phone support.

The reason for this is that, for lower tier support (as well as a fair chunk of things I need done that can be handled by lower support), the support agents are largely working off of scripts that they are not allowed to deviate from, nor do they have the expertise to understand what they are doing.

While the AI is not necessarily as intelligent or capable as a human *CAN* be, in practice it is often more capable than the first-tier support agent that it has replaced, due to the breadth of its training data. If I need something that requires cognitive tasks that exceed the AI's context window, I can request escalation.

This is in stark contrast to the bad old days where I waste time talking to the bottom tier support where I usually need to spend a long time explaining what I want done, wind up requesting to be escalated anyway, or try to battle with a dumb non-AI menu-based agent bot to even get to speak to a human (and usually that human is still bottom-tier support who I have the same problems with).