The idea of baseload power is that it produces power all the time. Then other power sources are used to supplement it. I think that idea of how to build a reliable grid is what people are now questioning. You still need alternatives for when the baseload power source is down for any reason. So a mixture of smaller sources, even some that are intermittent, can be more resilient.

I think that implies more calculation than was really there. Hitler was in power and backed by the German industrialists.The brownshirts were not happy about it and posed a real threat. It was more an internal power struggle for control of the Nazi movement than ideological.

Perhaps but the Soviet Union certainly wasn't, its war production exceeded Germany's.

An idea invented by political junkies to explain why voters don't choose their favored candidates.

They are taking a select group of posts that people shared and pretending they can extrapolate the overall use of AI from that. That is stupid beyond belief. Its classic lamp-posting, looking where the light is. You draw a conclusion from the information you have because you can't see the information you actually need to know.

In this case its just classic journalism, trying to make a good story by drawing an interesting conclusion whether it has any real basis or not.

Thank you helicopter parent. Your kids are perfect. But your kid is really irrelevant here. The question is what happens if you tell a whole class of thirty students that if they finish early they can do something more exciting. My point was that some kids are smart enough to figure out how to finish early so than can do what they want. The real question is why didn't the teacher give him additional work.

It doesn't matter how else the utilities make money. They are guaranteed a return on their investment in power plants. I am sure there are power plants all over the country that are no longer producing power but customers are still paying for along with a return on the original investment.

How do you know he finished his work?

I have some personal experience with this. We took the Iowa Basic tests in grade school. When we finished the test our teacher let us read a book. I was in the middle of a really good book. I filled in all the dots on the math section randomly and spent the rest of the test time reading my book. My teacher was shocked by my low score and asked what had happened. She was quite annoyed by my honest explanation. But I would not be surprised if she changed the rules to avoid it happening again.

One of the important things schools do teach kids is that they are not the center of the universe, even if their parent thinks they should be.

Home schoolers are not conservatives, they are just fringe. There are plenty of left-wing home schoolers. The only thing they share in common is wanting to control their kids 24/7. They are just extreme versions of helicopter parents. But most parents lack the interest, skills, time and financial support to be able to home school. If they have those, then a kid is going to benefit from the 100% attention from one teacher who has only their interests at heart. Assuming that teacher has the skills required.

My guess is marketing. The market of first adopters has a lot of people who like gadgets. The more gadgets, the more they like it. So an electric tractor is pretty boring. A diesel tractor that is self-driving is also pretty boring. They have been around for years. Or at least as "self-driving" as a Tesla.

Its just gotten far, far worse. And that has nothing to do with "educational standards". The standards didn't change, just the performance.

That was not only predictable, it was predicted as inevitable.You essentially took a year off every kids education and there was no realistic way to repair the damage done once you made that decision. As one teacher told me "Some kids are going to learn no matter what you do, some kids won't learn no matter what you do. The kids in the middle who can learn with proper instruction are the ones losing out by closing down classrooms."

So now you have kids hitting college without the skills to learn. And a few years hence they will be going into the work force. The ones who don't go to college will just go into the work force. And both groups will include a bunch of people who lack some of the basic skills and knowledge we currently take for granted.

That is in addition to any other weaknesses in the education system.

Liberals? Whose talking about liberals? I was talking about you.

No, it can't.

Not really. They likely are going to turn windows into an app that doesn't work without an internet connection and charge a subscription fee for its use. Existing control of the desktop givens them a way to capture customers and make it very difficult for them to switch to a competitor. You don't want a desktop that can compete with your main business of selling support agents

Which may be the biggest problem. There is an assumption that if you have a clever gadget you will make a lot of money. But its not clear there is any real value from "having a conversation" with a computer simulation. When its all done, they are going to be back to fighting over the same advertising dollars.