I remember the one thing that really made me rebel against the school system, growing up, was all the homework. I was a smart kid/teen but I also knew what areas I wanted to spend my mental energy on. I always leaned more towards writing, spelling, literature and creative things. I was never wired to be very good at math.

I struggled through the math courses (although oddly did reasonably well at geometry because I wasn't so adverse to doing all the "proofs").

But yeah - any teacher who flat out told me they expected us to do "about an hour a night" of homework just for their one class? I was ready to check out and ignore the work because that led to my whole evening being tied up with it, by the time I got through the homework assignments from all my classes.

There's got to be a reasonable middle ground, IMO. It's fine to send something home each night to make sure a kid is practicing what was learned. But it's also the job of the school to ensure they learn the stuff fully in class. Always thought it was a BS cop-out to suggest "tutoring" as soon as a kid gets a little behind. That just shunts the teacher's job off to a third party because they're trying to cover too much, too quickly, in class.

One big problem I see with wind turbines though? The maintenance has fairly steep requirements. You can't just hire some handyman or general electrician to climb one of those towers and repair a short circuit or whatnot. There's a whole new job created for trained specialists in working on wind turbines, and as one might imagine? They're not cheap to hire.

Solar panels are mundane by contrast. No specially made turbine blades (out of mostly non-recyclable materials) to need replacing. No need to have workers climb tall towers to do maintenance. And any electrician worth a darn can troubleshoot a solar panel array or diagnose a failing inverter. And certainly no helicopters required.

What's the point of having a war if someone can't profit from it?

As someone who daily drives an EV and has done so for years, I'm obviously not overly paranoid about the battery fire issues out there. But the faster you charge a battery pack, the more heat gets generated. And the higher the battery pack's capacity, the more potential energy is contained inside it to cause a problem if it has a sudden failure.

While the same could be said about the potential energy in tanks of gasoline or diesel fuel? The challenge for EVs is that extinguishing battery fires is FAR more difficult to do. A number of race tracks have established a burn area to tow an EV with a battery fire to, so it can sit there as long as it needs to burn itself out. They don't even try to extinguish the fire. Clearly, that's not such a viable plan for a crowded interstate during rush hour.

I know there are a few experimental technologies out there, like the device a fire department can attach to the end of a hose, so it rolls under an EV and sprays water directly upwards, to cool a battery pack right above it. That's good stuff, but I'm not sure it's being adopted in the mainstream as quickly as battery pack capacities are increasing.

Conspiracy theories are soo much more fun than boring old reality.

What? You're not going to advocate for it??? I thought you were invoking some kind of principle or something.

You're down with Russia killing far more Ukrainians, whom they claim are their own people?

You're down with what China's doing to the Uyghurs, whom they claim are their own people?

And while we're on the topic, how many Iranians should we be willing to kill to save them from their leaders? Nuclear extermination would surely do it... do you advocate that?

But maybe it won't take that much. Regime change in Afghanistan only cost 2000 American lives, 175,000 Afghan lives, and 2,000,000,000,000 dollars, but we sure got rid of those sorry... What? They're back in power?

Only the simplest minds think intervention automagically yields the intended result. In fact the current sorry situation in Iran is a direct result of us trying to "fix" things more to our liking in the middle of last century.

Last I heard, 3D printer and filament manufacturer AnyCubic was including some of these restrictions for printers like their Kobra 3 Max?
They were enabling it via their cloud printing functionality though. so setting the printer to LAN mode circumvented it for now. It may even be a feature they coded but left disabled while they wait to see how legislation pans out? But I recall some people in Facebook 3D printing groups being really angry about it when it was first discovered.

IMO, it amounts to more "feel good" legislation where some politicians want credit for making the nation safer. But in reality, it'll be ineffective because it can only work based on matching CRC hash values of known prints they want to restrict/ban. If people have such a print file in their possession and modify the dimensions a bit, it won't match any longer. And eventually, if they try to restrict too many items (say with AI trying to determine what is or is not a gun part?), they're going to start creating false positives that stop people from printing things they need to print.

So... Should we attack every country that slaughters its own people?

Wasn't there enough on this subject documented in BSG? Do Cylons have a soul, a god?

No, they want to "correct" it to harbor only mainstream hallucinations.

Vacuum energy has been known for quite a while and has been observed experimentally. In the Wikipedia article there's a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth, where he referenced actual papers. Smashing protons together in colliders is always done in vacuum, as otherwise they'd collide with the particles from gases and thus not achieve the high energies wanted, among other issues. This writer doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of physics.

On one hand? I think there's considerable evidence this AI bubble is going to pop; maybe in 1-2 years from now? If that's the case, the tech workers who manage to get paid training AI models still walk away with that money when it gets shuttered due to lack of funds.

On the other? I also get how distasteful it is to "train your replacement", especially when the replacement is just computer software.

I think much of this depends on how things *really* pan out. I'm not seeing big I.T. job losses due to AI implementations, so much as the regular economic pressures that drive companies to work with less staff. There's a lot of high-level/upper management talk about AI replacing workers. But it's more hypothetical than reality right now. People are still needed to put the right queries into the AI engines to get the desired results back out -- and that's often kind of an art or skill in and of itself.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.