Oh man, there’s a great pun opportunity here using the “can’t see the forest for the trees” but it’s not coming to me.

Yes, I was outraged by the first words in the headline of the slash dot post, and immediately ready to cancel Bill Gates (and most of my life I’ve been a Bill Gates/M$ hater, though I was happy when he retired and seemed reasonably serious about philanthropy - as billionaires go he’s better than average). But I did RTFA, his long blog post. It makes for a terrible headline, but if you actually read it, he is still clear that climate change is a big problem and he still wants us all to help solve it and cut emissions. And although I’m not sure I agree with him on a shift in priorities to improving health and agriculture and reducing poverty with a partial de-emphasis on emission as #1 priority, I think he makes a pretty good case, and I felt like I learned something. His new stance is unfortunately subtle, which doesn’t work in today’s media (including /., but at least they provided the link so I could read for myself). So go ahead and insta-pillory me if it feels good, but I suggest you RTFA first, and then make specific cases to bolster your argument. I would say I found about 10 assertions I wanted to yell at him about, but about 30 assertions that were pretty solid and made me think a bit. I think he might even be right, but I would argue all he will do is damage b/c of how the right/anti-climate folks will distort and simplify his message to ‘Don’t worry about global warming, even Bill Gates says we will be fine and the doomsayers are wacko’, which if you cherry-pick you can do. His intended audience is I think the COP30 in Brazil, and those are thoughtful folks who can handle nuance, buuuuut then there are Americans.

Yes I had the calc watch in like 8th grade, and then I upgraded to the even better scientific calculator verison in 10th grade. I believe it was the CFX-40, where the entry pad was angled down (b/c it was so big it had to follow the curve of your wrist. It would do trig functions, and even x^y. I felt sooo cool. https://i.etsystatic.com/14120... I just started tutoring a high school student in AP physics this year, and it’s filling me with high school nostalgia for when I first learned math and physics.