I don't know about "couldn't" do, but it's pretty obvious with the cutting of CDC and government agencies that they aren't willing to do it going forward. If I'm not mixing things up, part of WHO is surveillance. Member countries share information about outbreaks and coordinate response. It's one of the ways we know about some nasty ebola mutation in the ass end of Africa before it actually makes it into the U.S. Since it at least maintains some legitimacy on the world stage, it has access to hostile regions and governments where U.S. officials would not be allowed direct access otherwise.

Infectious diseases is one of the rare cases where nipping things in the bud in foreign countries is very much cost effective. If a U.S. lead WHO team stops some disease in a remote village by inoculating everyone before it spreads to the world (and hence, the U.S.), it would have paid for itself literally millions of times over, as well as earning prestige and 'soft power' for the U.S.

To replicate this would require the U.S. to have surveillance teams in every country. In addition to not having access to some countries, this would probably cost more than the WHO membership. Humans work better when they cooperate. One of the critiques for the Trump admin was that it dismantled one of the surveillance teams that would have given us a leg up on COVID if it were still there.

One of the reasons SARS-COV-19 was the "big pandemic" because the original SARS (2002?) wasn't. Aside from being less contagious, there was a coordinated response partially thanks to WHO that kept it from spreading.

Coordinated surveillance and response is one of the best weapons humanity has against infectious diseases. The U.S. with its resources is best equipped to contribute to and benefit from it. Pretending that it's now someone else's problem seems very short sighted. Infectious diseases don't care about borders.

And just because I've seen some MAGA morons blurt some garbage about illegals bringing in diseases, there is lot more travel than immigration. Unless U.S. goes full closed borders like the old USSR and restrict travel for its own residents, there's plenty of vectors for infections to come in.

I see this from a British perspective and I have always, always preferred our system of not having some hundreds year old document to worship. The weakness is having the paper at all, not in needing to rewrite it. The UK is based on precedent and as such is far more adaptable to modern situations.

In short you have a people problem, not a documentation problem.

One reason she lost was she and her party weren't willing to lie through the teeth nearly as much as the opposition, and gave too much credit to the electorate in their ability see through very transparent lies, and hold them accountable for those lies. To repeat an analogy I've used before, if nVidia wins on sales by cheating on the benchmarks and colluding with "influencers" to publish false performance metrics, it does not mean AMD was "terrible". You are drawing false inference from the election results.

"how terrible Kamala was" should more accurately be rendered as "how terrible the fictional caricature of Harris was that was painted by the billionaire-funded right wing propaganda machine, which was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the ignorant." If one actually looks at the track record of Democratic administrations through Clinton, Obama, Biden... the world didn't end. The US kept its prominent position in the world. You still have your guns; they weren't taken away. Statistically, there was market growth, job growth, and even deficit reduction in some cases. Perhaps the little guy still suffered during all this time, but the issue was not limited to Dems. The whole "trickle down" BS was Reagan, after all, and to think that the guy who is laughing with the billionaires about firing striking workers would actually be any better for the little guy is laughable. "This candidate may not do enough for my interests, so I'll vote for the guy who demonstrably will work against my interests." is very, very stupid.

One example: "bring prices down on day one." Anyone with any clue knows the president does not have the power to make this happen. If it were accompanied with any sort of plausible plans/policies, maybe it could be forgiven as political hyperbole, but no, all he had were tariffs, which would have the opposite effect.

Another one: "Trump is for the American worker" -- one of the first things the administration did was dismantle the labor relations board so that there is no place to take labor complaints and grievances. As people are finding out now, the "no tax on tips/overtime" was so narrowly defined that almost no one benefits from it, (Congratulations if you were able to slip through that crack) and it expires in a few years, whereas the huge tax cuts for the billionaires is permanent.

Demonization of immigrants, despite that any statistic that is collected indicates immigrants commit fewer crimes than native population. Undocumented workers also are net positive to the US treasury due to the fact that most of them pay taxes (have TINs) but can't collect any of the benefits (don't have SSNs). [ICE using tax records to track down immigrants to arrest should be a clue.] This will exacerbate the revenue shortfall caused by the tax cuts.

Admittedly, Harris didn't seem to bring anything spectacular to the table, but anyone with any sense would see that the status quo is much preferable to the active destruction of the position and prestige the US has built up since WW2. The bumpy ride that I had predicted over the years is finally here.

It wasn't. This isn't either. Neither was sampling, which was also called stealing at the time. Or drum machines instead of live drummers. Or synthesizers instead of a string section. Or...


Acting not really my field so I don't know. But for music creation...I get the point, but I don't really fully agree with it. It's another tool to learn.

Brexit, ignoring the politics and looking purely at the market, should be educational here. In the UK there is a spread betting firm, IG Index. All polls all the way through campaigning consistently showed that support was essentially neck and neck, and too close to call. However, for whatever reason, sentiment on the bets on IG Index went purely to Remain.

Banks actually took this as legitimate market data, over the actual polling, and set up their positions accordingly. Everything was in place for a Remain vote, hugely axed towards it. So when the result came through...financial chaos. All because they took spread betting data as a legitimate signal over the actual controlled polls, which never supported a huge axe in either direction.

Be very careful as to the weightings placed on data.

Inside the /. bubble, sure, that makes sense. But crypto badly wants to be mainstream and, demographically, it's a lot younger than this community is. You might be surprised at how few people under 30 maintain bookmarks or consume news from specific outlets intentionally.

I'm increasingly convinced that if you're running an AI interaction at all it needs to live in a container. Somehow the sci-fi wisdom of "no seriously, don't give an AI access to the internet" flew right out the window when AI could tell us when our boss' emails actually had something in them worth reading. I get that, but ESPECIALLY for software developers, if you're going to make use of agentic AI systems, you need to have a metaphorical (if not literal) moat around the agent before you just turn it loose.

That was true before we started talking about the security implications of an AI with privileged access coming under attack.

Maybe.
The classic case is Sickle Cell, which protects against Malaria.
Is eliminating Malaria a good thing? Not if it means giving everyone Sickle Cell Anemia.
Is Eliminating Sickle Cell Anemia a good thing? Not if it means wide spread Malaria epidemics.

As a pro-technologist I'm all for having the option to edit genes, but it's something that needs to be studied over generations to determine "goodness".

Yea, but those financial reasons were "dealing with the physical stresses is expensive" and "the shockwave causes damage and is annoying over populated areas so we can only really go M1+ over the ocean."

Also zero advantages of a blockchain, no? The whole point is when you don't trust the counterparty and need a record. But if this is fully controlled by a single entity and you know precisely who's settling and who you're trading with...what's the point? Any old database could do that.

What are the national security implications for the USA if Canadians regularly cross the border in to the US while driving their Sino-EV?

The US is paranoid enough to have banned DJI drones (in fact *all* foreign drones) on the grounds of "national security" because they could photograph sensitive locations -- but then again, couldn't a Sino-EV with its plethora of onboard cameras. Given that these Sino-EVs are going to be "chatting" back to their Chinese manufacturers, how are we to know that they won't be dumping screeds of sensitive image data right into the hands of the CCP?

Inquiring minds wish to know.

I'm in the UK so take this from that perspective - here, from what I see, no spaces have vanished and in fact they've increased.

Plenty of parks here, most places have a relatively easily reachable mall or shopping centre. Pubs still exist, coffee places are new (I'm speaking as someone who was a teen in the 80s, not so much of the coffee-type culture then). Bikes are back and with more infrastructure, gyms are bigger than ever and exist as a space to meet...it's all still around.

What's different is the alternatives to that. You can also talk to people online now, and to some extent that seems to be removing the drive to meet up in person. Not completely obviously, but it's there. Catching up with your friends over gaming groups in Discord, or just group message chat or whatever is completely common. Seems much less common to go round someone's house than it used to be when I was a kid and teen, but again - not exactly zero. It's more expansion of choice than reduction of opportunity.

Anyone wanting to build a gun really only needs some basic metal-working handtools and
set of plans.

I know I'd much rather have a Sten gun than a 3d-printed "one time use/explode" one.

So I'm aware that NVidia has the edge on AMD in terms of performance right now, so I'm not making that argument. It's more that nvidia are the unwitting drive-by victims of a Copilot shooting for me: one Windows co-pilot ad too far pushed me to move my gaming PC over to Linux, and AMD better supports Linux.

An OS migration on the consumer side also means a manufacturer migration to things that support the new target. Yep, only 3% of the market and I doubt NVidia's board would quake in their boots if they read my post...but it's true.

Since the introduction of ghost guns, homicides have been on the decline.
Does that mean ghost guns are responsible?
No. It's more likely that homicide rates are declining in spite of ghost guns, not because of them.

A larger percentage of gun crimes are being committed with ghost guns.
Does that mean ghost guns are responsible for gun crimes?
Again no. It's more likely that people who commit crimes decide to use ghost guns than people who have ghost guns decide to commit crimes.

If you don't like the second amendment, then campaign to change it. There's a procedure for doing that.

The bill of rights is a guideline for government actions, not an obstacle to get around.