Excellent point!

Imagine where the US would be today if politicians had been just a little less greedy and corrupt in the 1970s, and embraced Jimmy Carter's commitment to renewable energy. Probably not a wholesale conversion, but during times like these, all of us across the Free World could just sit back with zero f^cks given and a bag of popcorn, and watch a bunch of religious fanatics burn the whole Middle East to the ground.

Everybody wins.

The primary stated goal of NASA's Artemis program for several years was to land the first woman and person of color on the moon. It was emphasized repeatedly, trumpeted, and openly stated on NASA's website for years (before it was taken down in March 2025).

While I certainly understand your attempt to strawman the point, this doesn't logically mean the woman and person of color on the crew are necessarily unqualified.

What it does suggest to anyone who isn't crying racism/sexism on a daily basis, is that given equivalent qualifications, these individuals - to fill the stated goal of the program - would have been preferentially picked over other candidates afflicted with the regrettable conditions of whiteness and/or maleness.

IF NASA would have gone so far as to pick someone to fill those gendered- and ethnically-preferred roles over someone more qualified, I can't say. (Then again, we have KBJ as Supreme Court so anything's possible.)

https://medium.com/predict/thi...

"The real reason we will never be able to "fix" the drought is because the American West is not in a drought right now.
And you can't fix something that isn't broken. ...
The West's rapid aridification isn't being caused by a "once-in-a-century" weather event like the flooding in Kentucky or the nearly constant hurricanes that pummel the Southeast each year.
It's not even the direct result of climate change (although that's definitely accelerating the process and making the effects more intense). Western states are running out of water because they are located in a desert. ...
What we're dealing with in the West is not a drought because the current lack of rainfall isn't "abnormal" for a desert. Dry is the default setting. And you can't call it a "drought" because you wish deserts were wetter.
The problem isn't the so-called drought - - it's the city planners, developers, and suburbanites who built cities in a desert with no plan to provide water beyond wishful thinking and praying for rain.
The fact that we got weirdly lucky with unseasonably wet weather for a few decades has helped us ignore the reality that the American West simply doesn't have the water to support 65 million people - - and half of the country's agriculture - - at least not at anything near our current water usage levels.
And there's really nothing we can do about it." ...
According to researcher Lynn Ingram, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, "The 20th century was abnormally wet and rainy." Ingram goes on to claim, "The past 150 years have been wetter than the past 2,000 years." (cf "The California drought is helping return the weather pattern to normal" https://archive.ph/0m3BI)

In other words, what we're experiencing now isn't a drought. It's a reestablishment of the norm."

This isn't a crosswalk CAPTCHA.

AI has been better than humans for space images for over 2 decades. I'm sure they've beaten humans at cancer spotting for quite a while. You just need proper consistent imaging and plenty of it as training data. The unusual bits go to some humans and eventually it will do everything in the area better than humans. Start specific and over time add confirmations -- because they do a biopsy on a positive test result to confirm. That is better than a human verification; it confirms the human too.

All the difficult image recognition can be done by minimum wage people in a foreign country...something that used to be called "Augmented Intelligence" and hasn't been utilized much. It will be.

It's not a great job anyway...it pays well and involves schooling... but other than the pay, it's not enjoyable work; rewarding but not fun. we say crap assembly jobs suck and people don't like those etc. add industrialization to fix that! and we did and continue to. Those are low pay so we are ok with that... and/or they are "other" people far removed from us. But when they are like us, or get paid more... then we care more... guess why?

History Rhymes.

!) April Fools NEEDS promotion! Its now an educational holiday in an age of gullible people.
2) I hope they fund more science! we never have enough of that - tons of side benefits
3) The people who need to be watched and prevented self identify with this; probably more dangerous than pedophiles. Not that we'd stop voting for them; see #1.

"By the 1970s these 'bombed to shit' countries were outcompeting American manufacturers in their own domestic market."

LOL
"I'll just prove his exact point for him!"
Thanks man!

Why not contract out program development to some of those Iranian hackers who seem to have drones flying at will over US military bases? It might not be a perfect solution, but it would probably be cheaper and better than the clusterf^ck they've had going on for the best part of a decade.

Lol, cogent conservative responses here get modded to oblivion.
Frothing leftist flamer "Insightful"

Slashdot is so ideologically captured.

Did you think the benefit of being the 'only surviving industrial infrastructure' faded what, a week after ww2? /huh?

"We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations."

Did we?

Because what I see is a high marginal tax rate really only in the postwar years. ... And anyone who begins their economic model in the late 40s is a moron or a liar.

Remember anything important that happened, say, midcentury?
Something that may have left the US fabulously wealthy, particularly relative to all the other industrialized countries who were shattered & left in ruins by the same event?

Anyone who points to that time and stupidly says "durr, we should do it THAT way" conveniently disregards the (hopefully unique) economic environment resulting from multiple, cataclysmic, economy shattering wars and the luxuries available to those left standing thereafter.

I hope the webserver is still working.

This is a desperation attempt to solve a problem; or more like placate voters -- if it works or not is not as important as acting like you are solving a voter issue.

A common (fundamental?) theme in minor to pro-level politics is BLAME management:

The fact corps impose the whole trash problem on *everybody else* to save them money, is masked by making it OUR problem to solve; we are responsible for cleaning it up.
Protection of children (especially if you want to do harmful stuff) is then the responsibility of their guardians to use the laws and tools they promoted to "empower" them. They are the good guys lobbying etc. to give everybody the ability to V-CHIP the internet! So then like the V-CHIP it'll fail but its our failure instead of theirs (to be fair, they never put porn over the airwaves and blame people for not blocking it with the V-CHIP... because that was a BS placating political "solution" from the 90s)

It's funny to suggest that we need age verification to counter immature people who go around making empty death threats like a 12 year old... but is not age tagged so we treat it was serious. Making an argument using them as a reason precisely against their position!

But really, those can be ignored for just about everybody. Now a real person on a phone call can sound really bad and real if done by the right unhinged person; heard it. Now with AI a child can get a really good real sounding threat. While a child calling would sound comical and unfortunately they all know this so we don't get to enjoy their cute death threats. Outside the USA, it's entirely empty when you get those things. Sure you can find 1 example case out of millions of people with lower odds than lightning strikes (and not golfers either.)

Seriously, a user group is all we should standardize as a solution. software can use the flag or not and setting the flag (user group) becomes another issue to fight over.

Find a better source. The idea doesn't originate from that sick woman who is a high priest of the morons. I'm not being insulting, her work is juvenile; it's low maturity for her age and while it resonates with teenagers, a healthy person out grows that in a reasonable time... when they hit their 20s. If you are still stuck, then by definition, you are a moron. Just a fact. Without brain damage, it's theoretically possible you can still learn and grow out of what everybody else has. Not all morons are permanent; though, the old definition of it came at a time when they didn't know brains are extremely adaptable.