It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

More explicitly, they are names given to a proposed solution to the problem of discrepancies between models and measurements. Measurements show that objects in the universe move in a way that isn't fully accounted for by the gravity of all the things that we can see (that is, the stuff emitting or reflecting light), so the proposed explanation is that the discrepancy in motion is due to the gravity of things that isn't emitting or reflecting light.

This is a hypothesis. It fits the facts we have so far. We still have to find evidence that the hypothesis is correct, or that the hypothesis is wrong. That's how science is done. You come up with a hypothesis that fits the measurements you have, then you look for ways to see if the hypothesis is correct.

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

The geothermal plant already exists: https://www.globalelectricity....

Apparently, Microsoft was proposing to build the data center there and tap into the existing geothermal power, not build new geothermal power (the summary was a little confusing about that).

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.

The difference is that electric cars and trucks primarily charge overnight, when the demand for electricity is low.

You don't need to improve the grid capacity to serve people charging when you have excess capacity available.

Oops. I thought I was responding to the story about the grossly insecure White House app.

Still, it's incompetence all the way down.

Although I'm not as big a fan of Hanlon's Razor as I used to be, I'd be willing to chalk this up to typical government incompetence, farming this work out to the cheapest bidder in a way where no one involved in any decision-making has any technical expertise whatsoever.

Nothing is going to get better as long as the U.S. education system is captured by ideologues whose priorities are _not_ an educated, literate and thinking populace.

That was a quote pasted directly from the Psychology Today article linked, but a quick google shows you're right, no support for that statement. Possibly the phrase "usage rules" (PT's phrase, not mine) meant recommended practice (at the time the article was written) and is not legally binding.

Wave power is generating electrical power from energy that's already present in the ocean. If you don't use it to generate electrical power, it will eventually turn into heat from damping anyway.

Ketamine is a Schedule III controlled substance: having accepted medical benefits but abuse potential. Usage rules mandate that the drug cannot be taken at home. Patients are observed at least two hours after receiving the agent and typically receive psychotherapy and other treatments for depression.

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Quoting Gerard Sanacora, M.D., Ph.D. Director of the Yale Depression Research Program and Co-Director of Yale’s interventional psychiatry program: “Large amounts of data suggest that your ability to make rational, correct decisions is completely disrupted when you take ketamine, as long as it’s in your system... People can hear things, see things, feel things differently. The physiological and psychological reasons are the main reasons the FDA declared Spravato [Ketamine] safe only in a health care facility under supervision.”

Yes, it's the albedo, and also yes, too small to have a significant effect compared to the main driver, the greenhouse effect..
The summary actually states this:

If the latest estimates are right, Shindell said, microplastics might not be an enormous source of atmospheric warming, compared with massive contributors such as cars and trucks, belching industrial plants or even burping cows.

But then undercuts that with

"But not a trivial one, either," he said.

Spoiler: yes, it's trivial.