Yup, another nasty bug. I wish the countries most affected by these plaguey insects would pay some money to get some scientists on the task of extincting the botfly. Same with the original ones, the mosquitos that spread malaria....

On average, every hour humans make a species extinct, for no better reason than to extract some more wealth.

How about we extinct some species for a good reason for a change? Malaria alone inflicts about 500,000 deaths per year, and a total economic burden of maybe a trillion dollars or more per year, and really messes up the development of much of the world.

And to eliminate malaria and all other mosquito-borne diseases, we only need to extinct about 34 species out of 3000+ species of mosquito.

Yes, let's do it. And let's also extinct ticks, coddling moth, and cherry fruit fly. None of these are species that feed a lot of other species, and they're all nasty in their own ways.

Is it really necessary to divert PVC from thermal depolymerization? From my understanding of it the halogens will just get reacted with other stuff and get turned into pretty inert slag in the end.

A good fraction of the people who are addicted are beyond helping with rehab. They'd literally rather die than quit their drugs.

Maybe better than mandatory rehab is a clean supply of drugs and a place they can die in better conditions than the street. If they have access to their drugs without doing crimes, it's safer for the rest of us.

If they can be addicts and still contribute to society in a positive way, then so much the better--help them manage it.

I just can't see a way to get people to do mandatory rehab if they really don't want to comply with it. They'll just dodge the system and live outside it like they are doing now.

They're already starting mass spraying of pesticide in response to this threat of EEE. That pesticide pollutes the whole environment and raises the risk of autism in people as well as killing all kinds of non-target species. (Yes, autism is much more highly correlated with spraying of pesticides than it is to vaccinations--who'd have thought that spraying neurotoxins everywhere might cause brain damage?)

  Insect biomass has shrunk 20-75% over the last two decades, probably thanks to the massive use of insecticides.

I'd much rather have targeted extinction of a few mosquito species than thousands of tons of insecticide sprayed everywhere.

I'm not sure why blends are so poorly regarded. I've had some awfully good bottles of wine that were blends.

The thing with blends is that a really good winemaker can shore up the weaknesses of a particular grape with flavors from other grapes--producing a better result. Blending really opens up the door for more artistry with the wine making.

Which you would know if you had bothered to look. Then mosquitoes can spread EEE from birds to humans. So blaming "illegal immigrants" bringing EEE to the US is both wrong and probably bigoted.

Also, South and Central America has better vaccination rates than US people do when it comes to measles, so they're less likely to be "vectors" than native US people--at least for measles. I'm not sure how well this generalizes for other diseases, but it's kind of suggestive that maybe the US and it's people are not perfect in all regards, and maybe we should look in the mirror to understand our problems instead of blaming them on other people.

I tell mine where I want to see the weather at.
I keep location off almost all the time because I don't like the battery drain.

Most of the time I'm in my home city, so I don't need to update the location often at all.

At best, it's mildly convenient for a weather app to have your location.

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for solar and wind has been dropping for years and will continue to drop. Fusion using high tech devices and then thermal conversion of heat to electricity is never going to compete unless you can't use wind or solar.

About the only way fusion is going to compete economically against increasingly cheap solar and wind is if they use a fusion reaction that allows direct conversion of fusion to electricity.

Those same fields are sprayed with neurotoxins, namely, insecticides. And lots of them. On the face of it, heavy exposure to neurotoxins could cause autism too, it seems. Has the same correlation as exposure to glyphosate.

Seems more plausible than immunizations: neurtoxins that we spray around by the ton cause autism, not the occasional jab that prevents diseases.

Conspiracy theory: Russians try to persuade USA that immunization causes autism, concealing the true cause, leading to double harm:
1) People avoid immunizations and get sicker, weakening USA
2) People don't reduce insecticide exposure, weakening USA

--PeterM

If we can get ChatGPT to spot security problems, couldn't we run it against all our code bases and eliminate a lot of the issues?

Seems like a very powerful tool for discovering/fixing that kind of thing. If it can be done.

--PM

Consumer reports on electric vehicles: "79% more problems".

https://www.consumerreports.or...

I also have the accounts of my friends who have bought EVs and something breaks within a month.

It's really put a chilling effect on my desire to have an EV. And I do want one--when they're a good value.

It's not just kneejerk anti-environmentalists who aren't thrilled about EVs--they have problems.

One is cost-effectiveness,
Two is charge time,
Three is unavailability of charging infrastructure.
Four is lack of good enough EV options, just in terms of being good enough as cars.

I'd be willing to get an EV just for driving to/from work, and living with some issues, but I don't find the cost compelling enough to make the switch, and also I'm not willing to pay top dollar for a 2nd or 3rd rate car.

New technologies like cheaper, more easily swappable, solid state batteries, and better quality will tip me over the edge into getting an EV--I genuinely want one, I just want it to be better than what's currently available, and I want it to be a good value.

--PM

Wasn't my claim, it was the guy I was responding to.

That said, if I claim there's a thing there that you can't see, can't touch, and can't detect in any other way, you've got no way to falsify this "theory".

The hypothesis that there's some kind of gravitionally active, but otherwise undetectable substance that is affecting galactic rotation, is also hard to falsify. I point out that we have falsified hypotheses that some particular particles are dark matter, but they can just move the goalposts and say it's some other type of particle that we don't yet know how to detect.

--PeterM

Interesting idea that you can't falsify a theory of dark matter. Never thought of that.

And I think you're right, no matter what, you could come up with some distribution of dark matter that would fit any observation.

That said, I think such distributions would come to resemble the epicycles which were once used to explain the motion of the solar system, and would be come increasingly unlikely and implausible.

I did a bit of searching, and some theories of dark matter are falsifiable and have already been falsified--such as "dark matter is X or Y" and we've shown that those cannot be.

What really racks my brain is this: some galaxies rotate like they have no dark matter. This would not be possible under MOND, unless, of course, MOND is a nonuniform-in-space theory too, which would also possibly not be falsifiable. But it's easy to hypothesize that somehow the dark matter and detectable matter got separated in this particular galaxy, explaining the rotation curve.

Really deep stuff. I have no firm belief in any particular theory at the moment, would like to see evidence.....