I can provide anecdotal support for these findings.

Most of the career-successful people I worked with/under were bull-shitters who were good at social networking but frequently marginally competent at best. Supervisor level and upwards, this was disappointingly common. Some long term people felt safe and entrenched by the end of their careers and dropped the social networking for open rivalries.

There was an additional population of people whose sole goal was the public sector salary, job stability, and eventual pension. They tended to be lazy and/or incompetent. Occasionally they couldn't hold on and would burn out badly enough to lose their employment.

Finally, there was a third category of those who believed in public service (but were quite pleased with the salary, stability, and pension).

I'm not in China, but I would expect this to be a typical outcome anywhere the public service pay is attractive.

Physicists are just exploring a mix of applied and theoretical mathematics. Get closer to the source and just ask mathematicians to define life. They're just as likely to understand chemistry and biology, and in a much better position to create and explore novel system models.

Biology is an emergent phenomena of chemistry. Chemistry is an emergent phenomena of physics. The study of where biology emerges from chemistry is best pursued by biologists and chemists, not physicists. Their area of expertise is simply too abstracted from the problem to be useful.

1) Produce an excess of energy using methods that do not release CO2

2) Use the excess energy to sequester atmospheric CO2

3) Repeat until atmospheric CO2 levels are at pre-industrial levels

There are no shortcuts. If you skip step one and attempt step two, you have a net increase in CO2 release. If you avoid this whole plan by adjusting insolation, you get a break on the temperature while we inevitably ignore the continually increasing CO2 and all the other issues it brings, and you make us dependent on maintaining the new artificial insolation management system - and when it one day fails, there will be that much more CO2 to deal with.

You may also want to consider that with rising CO2 levels comes cognitive impairment. It won't be much of an issue outside with the numbers we're talking about, but indoor air (which we spend an awful lot of time breathing) only reduces CO2 levels by mixing with outdoor air. The indoor CO2 levels are always higher, and that will get worse as outdoor levels rise.

I haven't yet looked into why our beef and chicken prices have gone up anyway. At least during COVID they had issues with workers and transport... what's the excuse now? Hell, milk in my area has gone up maybe 20% in the last year or two. That's ridiculous. It's not like all the dairy cows are gone, and we've always had a slight excess of supply.

Doctors who prescribe antibiotics to complaining patients who don't have symptoms consistent with a bacterial infection should be investigated, and if it's a consistent behaviour they should lose their licenses.

Vets and wholesalers who supply farmers should be shut right down.

It really ought to be a criminal offense. Overuse of antibiotics is an unnecessary risk to all our lives.

That, however is a temporary issue. Obviously a far longer term issue than the government cares to consider, but it is one that can be overcome.

The economic issue cannot.

The reason parts aren't made in the US is cost. Maybe you think "OK, tariffs and outright bans will mean they have to be made in the US".

The problem is, those foreign parts cost fewer American dollars to produce. The cost of the parts goes up and cost of living goes up, or American wages go down, and the relative cost of living goes up.

There is no solution to this where your cost of living relative to your wages remains similar. Standard of living goes down. No political slogan can overcome this.

We never shut down anti-vax talk, that's why it failed. We should have. So many people have died who didn't need to because we're afraid of offending bros and Karens.

As long as the government isn't in full control of the degrees in question... it's a bad solution to a worse problem.

We're living in a world where old diseases are coming back because we couldn't shut down anti-vax talk as quickly as the asshole who started it all to discredit vaccines in production so he could sell his own and get rich. He took a big hit because he had something to take away... the greedy fools who followed did not.

You shouldn't be able to give medical advice - even if you slap "for entertainment purposes only" on your message - unless you have a medical degree that is relevant to the kind of advice you're giving. Because the alternative is, apparently, the return of polio.

Sure... go work yourself to death so the guy at the top can try to become the next member of the billionaire club. Forget about anything other than the potential of getting a little bit more of that money for yourself.

WTF is the point of living if all you do is work?

Who in their right mind would give their personal health information to a corporation that also has their billing information and can associate the two?

It's a matter of time before the database is cracked or sold (or, more likely, access is discretely rented). Then you try to get insurance, or it becomes part of employment background checks, or it's used to target you with yet more advertising.

If it could run locally and had a single upfront price, it might be an interesting health tool. As it likely really is, it's nothing but a privacy nightmare.

It depends on your local laws.

Where I live, it's the sharing and not the downloading that's illegal. Rip streams all you want, the issue of legality is on the host... but use a torrent app and you are sharing, which is illegal.

Sony infected consumers with malware, deliberately, as corporate policy.

I give Sony just as much respect as they give me. None at all.

I know who Gritty is. I've seen every episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I know nothing significant about the city, any regional accent, or its culture. I don't know anyone who does beyond some sports fans who know the teams... and it's hardly the only city they know in that way. I don't recall the city even being mentioned on any of the other shows I watch, I don't see it in the news more often that other cities.

If you're from there, good for you, I'm not putting you down... it's just a big world that has a lot more than Philadelphia in it.

I recognize the issue, but short of walking into the woods and living in a canvas tent while foraging for berries until I die of some random illness or animal encounter... or survive long enough to freeze to death in the coming winter... there's not much I can do.

I recycle, and that's mostly bullshit. I try to reduce my use of things that are difficult to recycle, but even as we're told plastic is bad, more and more products come in plastic bags or blister packs. Sometimes there are multiple layers of plastic packaging - and none of it is accepted by my municipal recycling program.

My home is fairly well insulated, but my furnace burns natural gas. It has to, because there's no way in this climate I could afford a heat pump that could keep my home warm in February.

I drive a car with an internal combustion engine, because an electric costs $40k and won't make the trip to my parents' house. I drive to work because 99% of this country is built around the assumption you are driving... even as we build housing with insufficient parking and tell people they should take public transit options that don't exist.

I'm middle aged and approaching 'senior' status. I'm done beyond voting for the best option I can at the polls. It's the kids' turn. Fight you buggers, fight. You need the planet for longer than I will.