It's interesting that Slashdot posts this mention of Microsoft firing this small fraction of staff, but there was never coverage of Twitter firing more than 50% of its staff.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

The motivation to mine and process rare earth materials has existed for many years. If it were just that easy, then China wouldn't have such a strategic dominance in this resource. For instance, most geologists think the minerals deal floated for Ukraine is ridiculous on multiple levels, but to distill it down, if those minerals were feasibly available to mine and process, private enterprise would have already set up shop there. In reality, Ukrainian rare earth mines are in abject disrepair and not even running and that is a reflection of the commercial viability of Ukrainian rare earth metals resources.

The capital investment required to launch a new lithium mining / processing operation is gargantuan. Nobody is going to take that step when China could sweep away its relevance by simply dropping this export ban.

advanced geothermal techniques could unlock 90 gigawatts of clean power in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

This statement was made just seconds before Elon Musk marched right up onto the stage, slapped the DOE across the face, and shouted, "You get 'clean energy' out of your mouth!" The problem was resolved with the Musk administration re-branding the agency "Department of Petroleum."

Why print in color? Get a black and white laser printer. Most economical cost per page printing there is. No problem with ink drying up in the print head if not used for a while, etc. If I need to print a photo, I upload it to Walgreens and they have it ready to pick up in 30 minutes at the cost of nickels per picture.

You write from an informed perspective on this topic (ST:NG), yet I think the godlike fault you cite is inaccurate in the context of Next Generation. The series OFTEN dealt with the problem of a comparatively advanced civilization encountering a primitive civilization. This was so much woven into the fabric of ST:NG they built the "Prime Directive" as a best practices for these scenarios. The introduction of the Borg illustrates the importance of the Prime Directive as it turns the table on the Federation being primitive and the Borg representing an advanced civilization with zero respect supporting the natural development of an alien culture and society.

While ST:NG is classic SF wrestling with frontier mythos, I think it's less "Wagon Train to the Stars" (that's Battlestar Galactica) and more Christopher Columbus to the Stars. The enterprise is an exploration ship, not a colonization vessel.

To do that, you'd need to insulate the AI in an information ecosystem that reinforces the conspiracy and shuns contradicting information.

Exactly. Musk has prioritized Twitter content in training GrokAI in order to perpetuate the misinformation flourishing on that platform.

I'm not here to internet-argue with you. I share your disdain for "in-your-face" product placements in movies. I'm with you.

Stepping back and evaluating the work of a director from all sides, I think almost all directors have sold out as artists in choosing a medium where they must pander to their audience to entice them to purchase tickets to see the work. The director is catering the artistic work to the supposed taste of the intended audience. When movies "flop" at the box office, frequently it's because the director executed their vision poorly, had a bad vision, or the producers forced a crappy vision through cells on their spreadsheets for what makes a successful film. Sometimes, though, a movie flops because the director abandoned consideration of the audience and pushed forward with the movie THEY wanted to make. Recent examples are Joker 2 and Megalopolis.

Regarding Apple, the company claims it does not pay for product placement in TV shows or movies. If a character is using a MacBook and the logo is visible, it's because the director wanted to associate the character with the brand for some reason other than financial. HP or DELL would have paid for the placement, so the director was leaving money on the table by choosing that Apple logo.

The referenced "no villains policy" is a preference by Apple, but there is no case history of enforcing it. Per this article:

In John Wick, the man who kills John's dog and steals his car is seen using an iPhone, and Josh Hartnett's serial killer character in Trap also appears to be using an Apple device. Some fans pointed out that an iPhone also appears in a villain's briefcase in Marvel's 2015 movie Ant-Man.

I'm not a fan of product placement. In most cases it's a repugnant cash-grab by the studio.

Consider this perspective, if you may...

A director is an artist who works within a set of constraints. The budgets can be gargantuan and seemingly freeing a director of constraints, yet, they are always still there. Producers can require certain actors be featured to secure the film's funding. Locations can be dictated based on tax incentives. Even the framing of each shot (aspect ratio) can be controlled by the distributors offerings of projection equipment.

A good or great director is empowered by their ability to define an artistic vision and then navigate the constraints to present their vision with the least amount of compromises as possible.

Another way of looking at the Chinese farm tractor is that the director may have had a concept that exceeded the budget offered by the producers. A scene perhaps that would have been exceedingly costly and the producers were unconvinced it would add enough umph to the resulting product to justify the expense. So, a producer might have suggested to the director, "If you can somehow fit this farm tractor on screen somewhere in this story for 35 seconds, the manufacturer will kick in the money you need to execute on this scene." Is that selling out? Or is the director ensuring their artistic vision is completed without sacrifice?

Sure, greed played a significant role on both sides of this metaphor:

1. Explorers from Europe came to America looking for resource wealth.
2. The SS United States purpose for being built was to charge fees for passenger transport across the Atlantic Ocean.
3. Colonists grew weary of sending vast wealth back to England, so they staged a revolution and declared independence.
4. Within less than a decade of its maiden voyage, the SS United States became unprofitable to operate as a passenger ship and has essentially been docked ever since.
5. Oligarchs have determined the US government has become an impediment to their increasing wealth generation, so they have begun to dismantle the government.
6. After 40+ years of business schemes have been presented and failed to secure a future for the SS United States, the ship is more expensive to keep above water than below water.

The SS United States is a STEAM-powered ship. The real obstacle to re-purpose the ship for any non-stationary use was that nautical propulsion had evolved beyond steam power with diesel and nuclear options. Democracy is powered by an informed electorate, which for various reasons has devolved in recent decades. I'm not sure that an oligarchy, monarchy, or benevolent dictatorship is the evolution that will put the United States at the bottom of the ocean, though. This is where the metaphor becomes less clear.

Perhaps not long for this world, but the Environmental Protection Agency administers the Vessel-to-Reef program. This documentation outlines the remediation best practices to prepare a ship prior to scuttling it to become a marine habitat. Removal of fuel, oil, asbestos, and other toxins is called out. The whole ship has already been gutted of asbestos by Ukrainians many years back.

This is the second ship Okaloosa County, Florida, has sunk as an artificial reef, so the SS United States is not their first rodeo. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission requires adherence to the earlier referenced EPA best practices when deploying an artificial reef.

Texas has had republican governors since the mid 1990s. All statewide offices have been held by republicans since the early 2000s. How would the democrats own responsibility for Texas education ranking In the lower half of US states- 29th place? This is significantly below liberal bastion states such as California and Illinois. You would think with such tight republican oversight of teacher and administrator wages, Texas public schools would be excelling per your scenario. Instead, the republican governor and state senate members want to shift money AWAY from public school teacher salaries and disperse it to private church schools via a voucher program.

Please clarify, how are the democrats responsible for the struggling Texas education system?

"This project was funded by the Post-Primary Education Initiative of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)"

As it seems the US Department of Education will no longer be allowed to fund research in cognitive development methodologies, we can expect to see an increase in studies like this providing acknowledgments to non-US institutions. As the focus of these non-domestic studies will be on context affecting students outside the US, their results will be of increasingly less relevance to US educators.

Interesting that this article about a Tesla competitor faltering gets coverage on Slashdot, yet there is NOTHING here about the federal government purges Oligarch Musk is performing with a team of 20-something software engineers from his various companies. Like, wouldn't there be a tech angle about how Oligarch Musk's team strong-armed their way into the US Treasury Payments system defeating all security protocols? Nothing on Slashdot about those two federal security chiefs being forcibly removed when they resisted Musk's team attempting to access classified data they were not cleared to see.

There must be significant financial incentive for a blog which Musk follows on Xitter (Musk follows Slashdot) to stay on his good side to get the periodic retweet or like promoting the blog to his 200+ million followers, some of which are human.

As I'm reading this, it's a strategic choice made by Replit in defining its target audience. The summary sensationalizes the decision as a potential foreshadowing for programmers, but that isn't what the company is saying. Replit has determined they have a greater potential for profit by enabling non-programmers with their tools to create applications. This choice is likely based on the difficulty in competing with other players like Microsoft's Copilot in getting dev teams to subscribe vs. the wide-open market of people without coding experience or pre-existing toolchains.