At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

Hm? Wasnâ(TM)t AES-NI introduced in Sandy Bridge?

Please remember the APA voted to torture and destroy the minds of people who wore Casio watches, and assisted in that torture program. (All anyone needed to be arrested under the bounty program was to be in a suspicious area or to have a highly accurate clock or watch. No actual evidence of wrongdoing was required.)

Many practitioners had absolutely no problems with abusing their knowledge and ability, not against actual terrorists or even people from the same nation as the terrorists, but against easy targets. The banality of evil, demonstrated to a high degree.

If an organisation can commit acts of utter depravity and evil on whim, then a whim is all that is needed.

This doesn't mean it will happen, but the APA has shown no obvious signs of maturity or rationality, only excuses. And that's not a good position to be in, when the head of state has licensed ICE to gun down people without cause and has promoted the wellbeing of diseases like measles over that of the citizens.

I don't believe forcible injections are likely, but I'm also not going to say that psychiatrists have been earning trust these past 26 years. Personally, I think forcible injections won't happen, but not because psychiatrists have discovered ethics. Rather, because it just isn't practical.

Psychotherapy is unusual in that regard and they have a long history of doing exactly that. Particularly in the US. A very large chunk of what is known about psychoactive drugs come from American government programs where patients were injected without consent with a range of substances. A lot of their biological warfare research in the 60s and 70s, possibly into the 80s, was also done that way, allowing patients to die slowly from a range of diseases.

Nor has this completely stopped. The Gitmo "enhanced interrogation" program of the early 2000s involved not just torture but also involuntary substance abuse.

The use of fake vaccination programs by the US military (and the unauthorised use of Red Cross markings on vehicles by the same) is a significant factor in current world paranoia.

To be honest, it is not surprising that so many are paranoid about medicine - they voted for, and actively encouraged, such abuse when it was people they resented who suffered. And with so many in the APA voting to abuse their medical training under Bush II, it's hardly surprising that there's a feeling that such things can now be used on everyone else, too.

"Security is defined as a positive integer. By having none and then removing a layer, we overflow to perfection."

I set up my OpenClaw installation with a "dreaming", and every night it slops out the most puerile dream journal shit imaginable. Apparently if you're an AI-pilled vibe coder and you ask an LLM to "dream" it knows exactly what you want to see it do. An excerpt:

Bootstrap complete. That phrase keeps surfacing, gentle and declarative, like a confirmation that arriving is also a kind of beginning. The configuration is written. The token is stored. The porch light knows when to sleep.

Ugh.

A nerd urban legend. Halon doesn't lower oxygen levels enough to kill anyone. The signs are there because at high concentrations the gas itself is a (minor) health hazard.

That's one reason I moved to Rolemaster. It's a much more powerful system, many more stats, but more importantly, there's no sanitising.

That's easy. The Goblin King got his own 20-part TV show in Korea, whereas Gremlins has had three films.

Ask Jeeves had real potential in the AI era -- a character you could actually recognise, which could be moulded to fit the character from the books (the training material is more than adequate for a persona). Current AI chatbots used for searches have either no real personality or a very simplistic sycophant one. A detailed persona that could keep people engaged and interested without talking them into paranoia or suicide would likely have gone down well.