For our first kid, we used resuable. Reusable diapers mean you must do laundry every day. Even if you have enough diapers that you can skip a day, longer than that, and the odor becomes intolerable. So, for the most part, it's laundry every frelling day, and you cannot do something like forget to move it to the dryer.

That relentlessness, on top of sleeplessness, on top of full-time job, meant hubby put his foot down for kid number 2, and we switched to disposables. It wasn't about convenience, it was about sanity.

Now, if you are fortunate enough to have someone helping you with your kids for an extended period, perhaps a professional housekeeper, then washables are a viable option.

A book / web site will give you likely better training on new algorithms than an overpriced, needlessly complex gadget (should they ever release a 3x3), and will be more cost-effective. In all, this is a product that won't have much of a market. ... but you'd think about spending hundreds of dollars to get a little better at cube solving? Why not take that money and do something really good with it, like give it to some charitable organization? Even if you just give it to your local elementary school science / tech teacher for supplies, you'll be improving the lives of dozens of kids. You'd be surprised what they can do with a few hundred dollars.

You've got the elements of the answer right in your comment. Workers in Asia mold plastic with machines at the rates of thousands of pieces an hour. Your hypothetical American putz is making widgets by hand.

Manufacturing costs are no longer primarily driven by labor. They're driven by level of automation, where America has fallen far behind.

We can argue until the cows come home as to the effectiveness of an isolationist stance for bringing manufacturing back to the US. The only thing that will drive on-shoring for certain is a sea change in the way US corporations are managed, by de-incentivising short-term gains. There may be some good ideas in that realm, but I haven't heard them yet.

Those are great hypotheses. Now prove them likely true with preliminary evidence that is rigorously collected so that it might be duplicated by others, and then you get a shot at research money. With that research money, you then need to perform additional data collection and hypothesis testing in a way that, again, is rigorous, using tools and techniques that are widely available, so that others can duplicate and extend your findings. And if the additional data you collect shows that you were wrong, then go back to square one.

Why? Because we need to be certain that the answers are correct before spending massive resources on addressing them. Otherwise we're just pissing in the wind.

Additional hypotheses that have been tossed around here include the massive increase in sedentary behaviors that are well-documented, the reduced vitamin D that comes with lack of sunlight exposure, the lower immunological development that comes from reduced social contact, etc. There are lots and lots of hypotheses. Let's see some data.

Me? My money is on low-grade vitamin D deficiency, weakening the immune system.

It's hard to imagine that their stance will survive legal challenge, but with essentially infinite money, they must have good lawyers who have done the relevant risk analyses.

One aspect of which I can imaging being that once they have trained on copyrighted work, it's effectively impossible to *untrain* the network, so they might be required to pay some modest royalty, but will be able to argue that it is technically / financially infeasible to remove said material.

Well, that sounds very much like, "I can't think of a way it could be otherwise, so it must be true." Here are some counter-examples:

Smoked and dried meat keeps indefinitely.
Salted meat keeps indefinitely.
Water in a slightly porous jug is cooled from evaporation, making it more refreshing.
Snow and ice in a clay pot melts into water when near a fire.
Clay pots are excellent for carrying things from point A to point B, no matter what they are.

And that's with 30 seconds of thinking. Thus, I assert that your assumptions are incorrect.

Thta stood out to me too. The only mitigation I can see is that most of their participants seem to have been university undergrads, who may be a little inexperienced with such things.

Ah, my favorite among such is the warning from a hair drier I bought some years ago. It said: "do not use while sleeping."

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or not, so I'll err on the side of naivete. The construction and operational validation has been paid for, which is the largest part of the cost. The ongoing costs are things like salaries, materials and supplies for subsequent operation, maintenance, and improvements, which are far smaller.

There is no scientist I have ever met who thought LIGO was, in the end, a poor choice of investment of national research funds. There were plenty prior to its stunning first detection (myself included) who thought they were chasing ghosts, but all of those doubters have been converted. The important thing to understand is that LIGO's contributions weren't just detection of a black hole merger (in itself, a hugely important event because it demonstrated the hypothesized existence of gravitational waves), but the establishment of a new field of astronomy based on gravitation, an entirely new means to observe the universe that provides information previously completely unobtainable. Our eyes have been opened where we were previously blind, and the ongoing results are, and continue to be, astounding.

There's a nice fact sheet summary at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/s...

I've been using it to write grant applications, and I share your opinion. It frequently makes mistakes (and 5 is worse in many ways than 4o). While it can certainly be used to create a rough draft of a document, the result is similar to what you would expect from a junior associate, with the same kinds of mistakes that create an, "OMG, no," response in the reader when it starts to make things up.

There was a lot of talk about how rapidly it would accelerate in performance. That progress seems to have stalled this year. I have a hard time thinking that we've started to see the ultimate asymptote of performance, but it seems like we've hit a region where the easy, early gains have all been made.

EBay is your friend. Plenty of them available there!

I talked to somone who studied tire particulates once. He reckoned it was the same magnitude of problem as tailpipe emissions. This means you only really solve half the problem (or thereabouts) with the switch to EVs, but I suppose that beats not solving any of it. And of course vehicle emissions are far from the only source of air pollution. People working in this area are looking at all sorts of little trade-offs that could reduce tire abrasion by modifying everything from the tire composition to the ride characteristics, to adding some kind of collection mechanism to the car (which seems a very long shot to me). You're right though, some mouth breathers will whinge about tires like it's reason to continue driving an comically oversized ICE truck as one-person transportation.

It isn't just that new factories are fully automated, it's that they must be so in order to be competitive. The only way manufacturing in America can be competitive to manufacturing in low-wage / already-automated countries is through automation. The era of factories being built with lots of human employees is gone, and even in the industries we thought would never fall to automation, robotics is making significant inroads. Why? People are just too expensive.

There is a lot of backlash against p-values. I won't enter that argument here.

But, accepted standards are that p-values need to be below 0.05 in order to be taken seriously in a biological study, and, even then, they aren't that strong until they get substantially smaller. (Note that in physics, they've been burned so many times by crappy significance values that the standard there is 5 sigma, or about p = 0.0000003.)

This paper, according to the summary, reported an effect at p = 0.079. That's substantially above p = 0.05. Me, I probably wouldn't publish anything at that p-value, but take my licks and move on to the next study, having learned how to design better experiments.

In the US, bus rides take far more time than driving because of the very frequent stops. Where I live, many urban bus lines stop every two blocks, suggesting that there's some underlying requirement that a passenger need not walk more than a block to the bus, which I find to be an absurdly low bar. Frequent stops not only make the bus ride take longer, they shatter any hope of the vehicle being efficient, importantly including the metric of particulate emissions from brakes and tires.

The subway, where I live, when underground, stops every half mile or so. When above-ground, it starts to act like a bus, again, which, again, is absurd, and deleteriously impacts both service quality and efficiency.

Until the number of stops for buses and trams is reduced, there's no possible way to make above-ground public transportation time-efficient for passengers, even with dedicated lanes on the road.