No it is not scientific.

Science is about facts, not policies. Ideally, policies are decided based on these facts, but at that point, it stops becoming science and it becomes politics.

A scientist's job is not to support a politician over another, decide on budgets, or anything like that. What a scientist can do however is point out the possible consequences of a policy, backed with data and using proper methodology. He can make recommendations on what to do to achieve a certain goal, referencing relevant scientific results, but not decide what to do with these. Scientists don't oppose, they falsify, it means they can point out lies and other statements that don't align with facts, but by itself, a political decision is not something that can be falsified even if the context can be.

Now, scientists are also people, they can engage in politics, have opinions, and of course, they need to pay their bills. But here, we are talking about scientists as people, not science as an activity. Politics about science is not science.

Smoke is bad for the lungs, it can come from smoking or it can come from other sources. There is nothing particular about smoking, it is just a particularly bad case of self-inflicted air pollution.

It doesn't mean the study is worthless of course, we still need to quantify this, and the results may have been surprising, but as it turns out, they are not.

The reason people don't release music on CD is because it is inconvenient. It has value as a collector's item, but if you just want to listen to music, a digital file that you can put on a USB stick, your phone, computer, etc... is so much more convenient. Streaming is even more so if you have internet access.

At first, the music industry fought hard to keep CDs relevant, it was a time when downloading meant piracy. They then tried to offer their own (paid/legal) download platforms, with DRM, no one wanted that and many switched to DRM-free MP3s (the very thing they wanted to kill) for that reason. Now, it is all about streaming.

The music industry lost the battle on copy protection, they may even have lost the war. They are now doing the smart thing and offer a product (streaming) that is convenient enough and affordable enough that people don't even want to copy. There is still some DRM, but it is more of a suggestion, people who want to copy will.

Cars last about 10 years on average, 10 years ago, CD players were a standard feature in most cars, and many of these cars are still on the road.

My current car don't, but my previous car (2004 model) had a cassette player! It was already outdated in 2004, but it was the cheaper option, so that's what I got. By the end of its life (2018), it was completely obsolete but I could still use it if I wanted to.

SpaceX *is* doing pretty well, despite the spectacular failures.

The problem is all about Elon Musk communication. To put it bluntly, he is a manipulative bastard. But the rockets, yes, they are fine, very good actually. I don't know how much SpaceX got in state funding, but probably a lot more than meets the eye. Again, I don't consider it a bad thing, US rocketry had been an international joke between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. The people who put a man on the moon have their astronauts travel on a Russian rocket, come on... of course the state should put their money in a company that can actually build rockets! But it didn't stop Elon Musk from bad mouthing the government, and going back to the article, "pretending that space is easy".

Just don't listen to Elon Musk hype and you will save yourself a lot of trouble. He has some technical skills though, so on that ground, he has interesting things to say, unfortunately, most of what we hear about from him is not that, with exceptions, like Tim Dodd visit to SpaceX on YouTube.

As much as it is "bullshit" to be forced to accept black people if you don't want to. Anti-discrimination laws are a thing.

In my country (France), some businesses are forced to accept checks, banks in particular. Regular shops don't. In fact, for a long time, it was the only non-cash payment method that (by law) didn't come with bank fees, making it popular with small structures or between people when cash wouldn't do. Now, most banks offer free wire (SEPA) transfers so checks are becoming a rarity, but I think that having a way around arbitrary bank fees and doesn't require an app is a good thing.

Credit card transactions are not free either. But anyways, following the law doesn't have to be free.

Yes, but how? Who is going to make the infrastructure to support that? How is your new thing better than cash?

Fascist politicians love electronic transactions, much easier to track and control people with these.

Easy: delegate. You can delegate to AI (according to those who think it can be done), an employee, or an associate.

Now, if you can't delegate, or if you are a workaholic who can't imagine having any time off, you are free to do as you want, but the idea with the 4 day week is that you shouldn't expect more of others.

https://archive.is/L3W74

There is nothing simpler than *using* AI, just write a prompt and get your result. That's the whole point of AI, any dumbass can use it. "Prompt engineering" is overrated unless it is a system prompt of if you are doing stuff like jailbreaking or prompt injection, neither are particularly relevant to "normal" use, and not that hard anyways. The only thing you really need to know is that sometimes, LLMs hallucinate, so you need to verify. And sure enough fact checking is something all universities should teach, but it is not exclusive to AI by far.

Now *understanding* AI (i.e. machine learning) is another story. Algorithms, linear algebra, statistics, etc... These are hard to pass in many scientific fields nowadays, with so many papers involving machine learning. But it doesn't seem to be what it is about.

And BTW, I think one *should* ban chatbot use for classwork. Students will have more than enough occasions to use it outside of school. Instead, school should teach students how to think by themselves, so when they are inevitably going to use chatbots in other personal or professional situations, they can do it with a working brain. The "creative" ideas in the article are not, there is no creativity in having ideas being suggested by a LLM. "karma and the practice of returning shopping carts", come on, that's a meme.

UBI is what you get when you combine communist/socialist and capitalist ideals, if tried in full, it would be terrible.

UBI just gives a bunch of money to everyone, that, if spent wisely, will allow everyone to live decently. Except that not everyone spends money wisely, and I believe it contributes more to poverty than the lack of a job. Giving these people a bunch of money will not solve the problem. You can instead give them a house, food, health care, etc... but that's not a UBI, that's just regular socialism.

The whole point of UBI is to *replace* welfare systems, simplifying administration, making fraud irrelevant, etc...otherwise, that's just welfare, not a UBI.

None of the UBI experiments are true UBI, they are just increased welfare, because UBI simply won't work. How much welfare is right is the hottest question, I don't know if there is a right answer, but one thing is clear: UBI is not it.

There is a good chance that enshittification bothers him more than most, as he is the one to implement the technical solutions for all this shit, which is a lot of work that goes against making good quality software. And of course, if people start complaining about things like crashes, lag, etc... he will get the blame.

I guess he likes making money, so he is not completely innocent, but I am sure he'd rather make the money-making part somebody else's job.

BO went to space, the (arbitrary) limit for space is 100 km and they went over it. Going to space is about how high you go.

BO didn't get to orbit, but getting to orbit is not the same thing, it means going fast enough horizontally to avoid falling back on Earth, but not so fast as to escape Earth gravitational pull. Getting to orbit is about how fast you go. Some suborbital flights actually go higher than some orbital flights, for example, ICBMs. And we could imagine orbiting below 100km (so, officially not in space), but because of atmospheric drag, it probably wouldn't stay up there for long.

So BO went to space, but it didn't go to orbit. And yeah, orbit is much harder.

The article says "the edge of space" because usually, when people think about space, they think about at least orbital flights. Here it is like saying you went to Canada when you just crossed the border, took a picture and went back home. You did go to Canada, it is just not what people usually mean when they say, "I went to Canada" so you may want to use an euphemism instead.

The problem is that it is not really about pollution but about how new your car is.

Have an old, small car that is well maintained and doesn't pollute much, you are still banned, you can't go to a lab and show that your results are acceptable, go buy a new car. Have a new monster SUV that cheated its emission testing when it came to market, that's fine. No one is going to stick a probe down the tailpipe and test the actual emissions, at least not for the purpose of getting access to "low-emission" zones.

That's why the ruling is so unpopular, it hits the poor who can't afford new cars the hardest. It is even worse than the also unpopular "contrôle technique" which is a mandatory certificate for road-worthiness, to renew every 2 years. At least, the latter is based on actual testing, not just the age of the vehicle.

In education, it is a feature, not a bug. Research tends to consider that handwriting helps with retention *because* it is a slower and more involved process.

The problem is obvious: we want large screens, we want portable phones, tablets have large screen but are not very portable, non-foldable phones are portable but they have a small screen, foldable phones have both.

I especially like the Huawei tri-fold phone as it gives you a proper tablet-sized screen when unfolded, not an awkward square. At least in principle. In practice it is absurdly expensive and fragile.

If anything, tablets were more of a solution in search of a problem when they came out (if it doesn't fit in your pocket, you might as well buy a proper laptop) than foldable phones. In fact foldable phones were the most common form factor before smartphones, the reason it is not the case anymore is technical: foldable screens are expensive and fragile, solve the problem and I expect foldable phones to become the standard once again.