Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

Or some other Weekly World News cast member?

Only the customers with fancy GPUs have anything worth farming, and they probably want to run games on them instead.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

What more is there to say?

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

True, but I don't see how that's a problem for anyone.

For something that's too far away to be of much use, it sure is getting a lot of use.

I think you're confusing fusion with fission. A Mullah (or any irresponsible person, for those who prefer not to sound like a bigot) who has access to grossly abuse a fusion reactor might at worse damage the reactor and sprinkle a trace amount of radiation around. They certainly wouldn't be able to make any kind of weapon out of it.

One nice thing about cobalt and lithium is that they don't get consumed when you use them. When you drive your gas-powered car, the gas you put into it goes away forever, and you have to buy another tank next week, every week, for the life of the car. The rare earths in your EV's motors and batteries, OTOH, remain present and usable for the lifetime of the car, and can and will be reclaimed for other purposes after their service life ends.

So sure, there might potentially be wars fought over those elements; but it's much less likely to come to that, partially because manufacturers are learning to get by with less or none of those elements, but mainly because every nation-state that depends on them already has a de-facto internal stockpile that it can rely on instead of having to go to war for more.

Dunno when American automakers will figure it out; I suspect Chinese manufacturers already have, but we're unlikely to see any of those here. In the meantime, the Slate might be something like what you're looking for.

That's true -- people tend not to properly consider the costs of problems that they can't directly see. Such as the housing/infrastructure costs incurred by having too much CO2 in the atmosphere, or the security/stability costs incurred by having to fight wars in the Middle East every 15 years.

At least the environmental messes in China remain China's problem; one that they will likely sort out on their own, because unlike some superpowers I could name, China is very much into solving technical problems. The global-scale environmental messes, OTOH, are everyone's problem, and only get worse the longer we ignore them.

That would only reduce costs if it allowed them to ship a single standardized keyboard silkscreen worldwide. As soon as they need to support both QWERTY and AZERTY designs, for example, they're back to having to create separate variants again and any potential cost savings are lost.

I think this more just Apple being Apple -- too many graphic designers chasing not enough remaining graphic design problems, to the point where they start "solving" things that didn't actually need to be solved. Now every new buyer has to learn what the new glyphs are supposed to represent, or guess what they mean based on their location on the keyboard.