I had heard that the Grim Reaper was afraid of Chuck Norris; and that when he finally did, the Grim Reaper was the one who died.

Why does that matter, as long as all that bot activity is producing things we want?

Isn't that kind of like observing that far more of my computer's processing power goes into building my search index (most of which I will never use) than running my actual search requests?

Your number is not accurate. Black-body radiative power in a vacuum is dissipated according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law: P/A = T^4, where P/A is power per unit area, is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (5.67 x 10^-8 W/(m^2 x K^4)), and T is the temperature in Kelvins. Assume a heat sink at a temperature of 100 C = 373 K. Therefore, P/A = (5.67 x 10^-8) x (373^4) = 1098 W/m^2, which is over 5 times the rate you claim.

Check out Ubiquiti Unifi cameras and their recorders.

It's more likely that it died down because Musk effectively poisoned the brand in the eyes of the company's target audience - few people care about Tesla anymore.

Actually, it's not Musk who "poisoned the brand"—it's those with insane and irrational responses (and a heavily funded negative-PR campaign) to what formerly would have been mildly controversial views even 10 years before. Even reasonable views are now portrayed as "toxic", "racist", "fascist", etc. For example, there are innumerable videos out there of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Obama and other prominent Democratic politicians stating positions on immigration that are now that today's Democrats rabidly label as "racist", "fascist", etc., because those same positions are now held by Republicans today.

Thanks for that pointer to Sabine Hossenfelder. I found this video of hers to be a great summary and introduction to where we stand in physics.

I am a physicist speaking here. This article conflates two completely separate phenomena into one, in order distract attention and say, "Don't look behind the curtain." These two phenomena are: 1) Lack of progress in physics; 2) Behavior on the Internet. The second has been and will continue to be discussed ad nauseum. It is the first that I wish to address here.

There has been a nearly total lack of progress in physics for at least 50 years now. Eric Weinstein has spoken numerous times about this curious situation.

The whole point of a theory is to be able to make valid predictions for what will happen under specified conditions in order to help us to act effectively in the world—to avoid bad things and to effect desired outcomes. Physics has not produced a useful theory of anything for over 50 years. Virtually all funding in physics over that period has gone into string theory, despite it having produced nothing of any value to our actual life or conditions—nothing that allows us to control our world or make desired things happen at will. The only thing is has predicted is the existence of a particle—the Higgs boson—whose existence was subsequently observed. All other predictions are, at least presently, untestable, and useless even if true. It is as if someone intended to send physics on a snipe hunt in order to prevent it from coming up with anything else as dangerous as (or more so than) nuclear weapons.

I recommend watching the above discussions on the current state of physics.

Well, everywhere I have seen this $0.42 number cited it was qualified as "per department", not "per query" or "per token". It sounds like you have seen more detail than I have. If you have a better source, I would like to see it.

So...you regard 42 cents as a grift that taxpayers will be "footing the bill" for? I hope that was satire.

This is quite typical of purely logical, rational thinking that appeals to a certain kind of mind (I know because I used to look at the world this way and argue the same way when I was young). Unfortunately, it fails to take in so many relevant details. One can easily come to all kinds of conclusions when one argues from a rarified simplification or idealization of reality—the spherical cow.

Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves:

For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.

He may have believed that, but he misunderstood the purpose of the test. The test was not a test to see if an atomic explosion was possible. It is a test to see if the much more complicated implosion detonation device would work. The physicists were already so certain that the simple uranium gun mechanism used in the Hiroshima bomb would work that they didn't believe it necessary to test. However, the bomb used in Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb that used a very different mechanism that relied upon an extremely precise implosion mechanism that the scientists were not entirely certain would work. That is what was tested in Alamagordo. If that mechanism failed, the Hiroshima bomb would still have worked.

For those wanting to know why a different mechanism was used for the bomb used on Nagasaki, see here.

You have successfully killed "toxic masculinity", formerly known as initiative, drive, and motivation. Now you complain that you can't find men that you consider engaging.

Another side effect of this is the Social Security web site, which millions of people depend on, has crashed five times in the last month. That couldn't have anything to do with the vast majority of its IT staff being fired, could it?

According to The Washington Post , "The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts."

I suspect that the greatly exaggerated press reports of the demise of Social Security has dramatically increased the number of people logging (and calling) in to check their accounts that the decrepit systems running their software are handling more traffic than has ever been seen before. Then the press can use these crashes (and long times on hold) as proof of their exaggerated reports.

The hosting site is a Chinese propaganda site.

This is the more abstract problem: We have a vaguely defined concept that we wish to estimate the extent of, but which we do not know how to directly measure. Therefore, we substitute a proxy metric that we can directly measure which we believe to be correlated with what we cannot directly measure. We then use that metric as a measure for what we do not know how to measure directly. Then, over time, people who are being measured find out how to game the proxy metric and it starts to lose its value. This is a frequent problem across many fields of human endeavor (e.g. "lines of code")