Normally I'd be skeptical of such a use of social media, but luckily Reddit has a famously-effective "no bots allowed" policy, so surely this cannot possibly go wrong.

Actually, Trump is not a singular cause. He was not the first. Back under reagan, he killed a great deal of our civilian oriented R&D saying that private business can do it , while moving some to DARPA. Thankfully, DARPA still funded basic science.
Then W did more cuts, but pushed a lot of DARPA spending in UNI over to companies and forced cuts in basic science.
Biden also did major changes and pushed funding to go from merit based to DEI.
Trump is just a continuation of this and not even the worst ( reagan or W were the worst ).

Good points, but to be fair, ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones because it is safe to use it to do so.

Plenty of trucks and other vehicles have little or any effective view directly out the back. To be blunt: If you need to look through your rear-view mirror to not kill someone, you either need better side mirrors or you need to learn to drive.

It hasn't been "autocomplete" in a long time. Sure, there's a training step based on a corpus of Human language, and the autoregressive process outputs a single token at a time, but reinforcement learning trains specific behaviors beyond merely completing a sentence.

Besides, the best way to write something indistinguishable from what a Human might write is to, well, "think" like a Human.

Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?

Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".

What do you say, and why is it also "no"?

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

The telephone. And at grocery stores. And obtained car and home loans. All freely.

Please donâ(TM)t have children. You will sux as a parent.

Government is after these companies for encryption, which the companies claim it is about privacy. But this really should be about security. By using these services, you are nearly guaranteed that end user is who they say. What is needed is for governments to hand out a packet of vetted digital certificates and then use these in various services/applications.

China is pushing massive amounts of effort on AI for industry and military. Doing this should not be an issue. However, these ppl are likely to be a detriment to this. So best thing would be to do a NASA/USAF kind of thing. Split the group into 2 with those that fighting military involvement and put them in a group devoted to industry, pure development while other group continues to do pure development but in all areas including military. For this 2nd group, put in ppl with security clearance.

This has been claimed multiple times over the last 15 years, but their goal is 1.75 TW of coal plants. It will return to adding 40-50 GW new coal plants / year next year, if not this year.

NASA should be creating standards for private space. Not just space suits but even docking, sat capture, etc is a mess.

It used to be that we had intelligent ppl and postings on /.
Nuclear power plants do NOT have hires in their cooling towers, ESP. BLACK ONES. Only idiots bought off on this.
They burned a bunch of tires in the cooling towers to play to the anti-nuclear idiots that run around in the west, so that do not pay attention to things like Ukraine taking a chunk of Russia.

reagan and W focused on spending large amounts of $ on DoD fast and wastefully. These are NOT the ones to emulate.
We should be looking at IKE and JFK. Both of these men spent money with a dual use to them. It is insane that we waste money on buying shells (both ammo and missiles) when instead, we should spend the $ on automating the lines and getting the costs of shells very low and fast to make.
Likewise, when doing that, it should be required that the automation equipment work on regular ammo and other manufacturing goods.