I went to school in VA. There was rarely a day that the heat would get turned on. They're big monolithic heat islands full of children, calorie powered.
We also didn't have A/C back then, either. Windows would be open all day. I doubt they do that now.
I know this comes off trollish, but: why can't these power companies (which are usually public utilities) just build more power production instead of jacking prices? What's the deal? Why is this a "hate on AI that runs in datacenters" problem, and not a "just produce more power" problem?
20 years ago, which was a few years after conservatives supported the Patriot Act which greatly increased govt surveillance of US citizens? Yeah, no real changes. The folks who want the police state now are the folks who have always wanted the police state (mostly through some idiotic idea that THE OTHER will be persecuted, but never themselves).
The Democrats also voted overwhelmingly in favor of the PATRIOT ACT.
And then you go to bring up an incident where some politician said some racist things to absolve the Democrat party of its history of founding the KKK, shooting Lincoln in support of slavery and writing the Jim Crow laws.
I take it you're in favor of reparations, then.
If not, you have an inconsistency in your worldview. You apparently believe that guilt is carried by groups across generations, even when none of the current group was alive -- and many didn't even have ancestors involved -- when the bad things were done. Thus, the modern Democrats are stained by the racism and pro-slavery views of the 19th and early 20th-century Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are therefore permanently stained by slavery.
They overshot the perceived demand...and have to retool to go back to ICE to keep selling cars/trucks in the US.
Something has to give with losses like that.
microwave labotomy
Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.
Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.
Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.
LOL...I doubt I'd survive there long...my tube amps alone likely would have me thrown out of such an abode...
Honestly, the code that Claude writes is better stylistically and better commented (sometimes to a fault) than 90% of the code I have seen from colleagues and direct reports over the past 30 years.
Indeed. And, yes, Claude massively over-comments. I have more Claude coding rules about commenting than any other single topic. Though I do wonder if my rules make as much sense in the AI era as when code was all maintained by humans. Most of my rules are about minimizing comments because comments are fragile and tend to get out of date... but Claude actually does do a pretty good job of maintaining the comments. I still try to minimize them, though.
It also is a better sounding board for spitballing ideas than 90% of my colleagues.
Heh. That's definitely true for me as well, now, not so much in the past. When I was at Google I had a higher caliber of colleagues. My colleagues at the new company are bright, but they're young and inexperienced. But, yeah, if I didn't have Claude to kick ideas around with me in my current position, my code would be much worse than it is.
And it's also worth remembering that we wage far less war than ever before, and engage in far less of the rest as well.
Wars are much more costly now that they were in the past.
Nope. Wars used to regularly cause widespread famines, as well as being far more directly bloody. Murdering all the children was for millennia an accepted practice. You should read the book.
It's NOT an advance to PRETEND that you're not cruel.
Yes, it is
When the norms and the expectations move from considering something cruelty to be funny or enjoyable to merely accepted and then to shameful or hidden -- and even illegal -- those steps are progress.
Related: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." While the individual hypocrite may not be better than the person who engages in open vice, and might be worse, the fact that people feel the need to keep their vices secret is a positive indication about society as a whole. Assuming, of course, that the "vice" is actually bad.
That's another area where our society has been improved... we're more tolerant, having realized that many things we considered bad are merely different. We still have progress to make on that front, too, but don't let perfect be the enemy of progress.
Or it's simply financial motivation. Any steps taken will cost them money, and the problem is likely not going to really become a problem until after they are dead and gone. They'll be spending the money, but will personally get no ROI from it. Therefore, they choose to do nothing.
That's probably true of many, and it couples well with motivated-disbelief. Confidence that if it happens it won't really be a problem for you makes it easier to just shrug the whole thing off and refuse to think too much about whether your disbelief makes sense.
It's worth mentioning that there's one more position that actually does make sense, even if it's a bit Pollyanna-ish: The belief that science will find a less impactful way to address the problem in the future. The argument is that we shouldn't trouble ourselves now, we should just wait for the new tech that will fix it.
I actually subscribe to a weak form of this view. I think we should be acting now to address climate change, but that we shouldn't do anything too drastic, because technology is going to improve and find better solutions. The world is actually making significant strides toward emissions reduction, mostly in the form of low-emissions electricity production, and not because of a moral obligation but because renewables are cheap! That's the sort of thing that generates real progress, without much pain.
I suspect that atmospheric carbon recapture will always be extremely energy-intensive, but we are on a path to extreme but intermittent energy abundance, and carbon recapture sounds like a great way to spend the extra terawatts when they're available. I think one of the things we're not doing enough of now is research into carbon recapture and sequestration. Reducing emissions can never get us to net-negative CO2, and we need that if we want to actually fix this problem in anything less than a millennium, so cutting emissions is insufficient. The corollary to that is that cutting emissions will likely become unnecessary before we get very close to zero.
So, the conclusion of the weak-form of this techno-optimisim is that we should be working to curb emissions, and we should be directing tax dollars to recapture and sequestration research (and geoengineering, too), but we shouldn't go so far that we reduce economic output.
What I'd really like to see us do is to take a very market-driven approach, facilitated by carbon taxes. Pick a reasonable per-ton price and apply it at the point of extraction, where it's easy to identify and track, so that every downstream use has the carbon tax built in. Fossil fuel consumption that doesn't burn it and release the CO2 can apply for a rebate to recover the carbon taxes on the carbon they didn't emit. Couple that with carbon tariffs which attempt to impute to foreign-made goods the CO2 emitted in their production. Anyone who can prove they're capturing and permanently sequestering tons of carbon should be able to capture that as a refundable tax credit. Planting trees should count, as long as there's a plan to keep that carbon sequestered for several hundred years -- and if the trees burn, the tax liability comes back. Oh, and a small percentage of the tax revenue should be earmarked for climate mitigation research. The rest can just go into the general fund, ideally displacing other taxes, and maybe funding progressive offsets since a carbon tax would be mildly regressive.
There'd be a fair amount of bureaucracy in defining and administering such a tax, especially the tariff part. But it's manageable, I think, in particular because it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough that everyone is incentivized to avoid 1-2% of their emissions this year, another 1-2% next year, and so on, and good enough that there's actual money to be made in recapture and sequestration for anyone who can figure it out. With that, we can sit back and let the market solve the sort of problem it's good at solving. We might need to tune the carbon tax rates a bit from time to time, and we'll want to scrutinize the system regularly to identify loopholes to close, but mostly we could just consider it a solution in progress.
That's easy, does't require any apt. Modifications....
We do not want "mob rule" here in the US...and if we didn't use the EC to more proportionally allocate vote weighting....then basically NYC and California for the most part would dictate who was president....and ignore the vast middle of the US.
Here in the US, you are a citizen of your state first and then of the United States....the state is what affects your life the most directly...and each state is diverse in its population climate, land types and laws....so they need to be more represented on a state level by the president...the Congress has a house with proportionate representations as a part of this too.
If it can misused, it WILL be misused and we all know that...at least to date we do.
The US has a single centralised government with a single currency, Europe is not.
You've partially right....we have a single currency, but we do NOT have just a single centralized government.
The Federal govt. is and is supposed to be somewhat weak...and its few enumerated powers are in the US constitution....
The real power that actually governs the people for the most part, resides in the individual states. That's how we have VERY varying laws in many respects.....there are some cases the SCOTUS has had to take over the years, mostly on equal rights, etc....to establish that are constitutionally the same across states, but for the most part, everything that affects a citizens' life daily is governed by the laws of the state they reside in....so, financial laws, tax laws (state and local)...etc can all vary by state.
Most states have sales taxes..some do not. Some do not have income tax and others do...some states require car inspections annually, some to not and even those that do, vary in what they check..most do not check emissions if I recall correctly....
So, the US has. Federal govt that manages the currency....and is a singular face to the world....but internallly it's largely a mishmash of state laws that change as you cross state borders...
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. -- Errol Flynn Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure. -- Errol Flynn
