The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Do you think so? The Switch 2 is still available from Nintendo's own website, as well as Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Gamestop, and Microcenter.

I find it hard to imagine that anyone who wants a Switch 2 is going to give up when they don't find it on Amazon. Or that a lack-of-advertising on Amazon is going to be the thing that makes sales "fall off a cliff" for this product.

The IA that we have now, *such as it is* (good with the bad), took a whole lot of money to create. It's not the sort of thing that a few college grads with a kickstarter could have come up with. It is very much the production of the super-rich, and so it is natural that they are going to feel entitled to controlling it.

The notion that the rise in tech will create this utopian labor-free world where everyone is equal, is just naive. There will always be greedy people, and so long as there are always hierarchies of power, the greedy ones will claw their way to the top and ruin things for everyone else. Even if tech someday gives us our star trek utopia, it's not going to happen in a flash when the necessary tech arrives...it's going to emerge from a long slog of exploitation and suffering.

Some of the complaints I am hearing about AI are silly though. "Oh, AI addiction is harming our relationships!" Well, any addiction will harm your relationships. The answer is the same here as anywhere else: conquer your addiction. It's hard, but do-able, and done. This isn't an AI problem, it's a you problem.

"Oh, it's harming my kid's mental development!" ok well then take the phone away for a bit and make the kids play together out in the yard. Sure, they will scream and so-on but boredom will set in and their natural instinct for play will take over. You just have to put forth the effort. I am sorry that parenting is hard, I truly am, but the ask here is for "the world" to take the AI away from the kids, when that can much more easily be done by the parents. (Oh and also teach your kids how to use it responsibly).

"Oh, its harming the environment from energy use." The AI isn't doing that, the people running it on their servers are. Charge them more for the power! Use the extra money on environmental clean-up. Switch to nuclear power. The human demand for power is only going to rise over time, this is just pushing the issue as a side effect of the high level of interest in the technology. So, instead of ruining thing for everyone who gets good value out of AI, fix the energy production and pollution problems directly.

"Oh, it's putting creative people out of work". Actually, I sympathize a lot with that one. That sucks. The rampant disregard for copyright law during the production of AI sucks too. It would be nice if we could have some regulation in place that would cap AI use in creative works, give people clear options to choose human-created works, and so on. That's tricky though, because it is so easy to cheat and get away with it. The tech exists now, so the cat is out of the bag at this point. There's no making the tech go away. This one will be difficult to hash out and good people are going to get shafted in the process. I am sad about this, but don't see a clear and good solution that will actually work, at this point.

Rollover protection is part of why A pillars are so much thicker now. The first time I drove one of them, it amazed me how much I had to keep moving my head just to keep track of what was across the intersection.

We will never be ready for tech that disrupts the market. That's kinda the goal, and the reason why we call it "disruptive." We can't foresee the particulars, all we can do is have the rug pulled right out from under us and then scramble to adapt to the new world.

According to the singularity hypothesis, changes like this are going to start coming at us faster than they have in history. We will be even less ready than prior generations were, with even less time to adapt between major shifts. And the pace is going to keep accelerating.

If we can't adapt fast enough the chaos will destroy us. If we can, or at least if some of us can, then they will experience an entirely new concept of what it even means to be human.

2045. See you on the flip side!

As I said in a prior post, you are looking at the net profit margin. That number is reduced by the enormous salaries that these companies pay themselves. Gross profit margins (which are profits beyond the costs of goods sold) are above 20% for grocery store chains. Nice and fat, if you ask me.

Incidentally, the existence of unpleasant work is not in-and-of-itself justification for allowing illegal immigration. The whole "can't afford to eat" thing is supposed to motivate Americans to do those jobs. And, further, if Americans still refuse, there is also the option of raising salaries for those jobs. That's how the market is supposed to work, after all.

employers simply will not hire at those higher wages

Many of the jobs, in this context, are union jobs. Unions can ensure that employers must hire at higher wages. Further, they are waged positions, which means forcing people to work longer requires paying them more (time and a half). Also, market conditions can force the issue. Employers need the work done and a collective refusal to do it for too low a salary will force the issue. Again, it's how the market is supposed to work.

Also, your proposal to raise taxes for the rich falls flat in an environment where the rich have a large list of tax loopholes that allow them to escape paying them. I DO agree that there is a taxation problem here too, but it's not that taxes for the rich are too low. It's that the loopholes need to be taken away. That is also easier said than done...MUCH easier said than done...given the disproportionate amount of political influence that the wealthy hold.

You are looking at net profit margin. That is the profit they list AFTER they have paid their top execs huge salaries (and other book-cooking that goes into "operating costs.").

Gross profit margins tell a different story, and it varies by company. This is not gross income, it is still gross profit, which means its the money made beyond the cost of goods sold. This is what they are paying their amazing salaries with.

Kroger, for example, is reporting a huge 22% gross profit margin.

The discussion is a bit academic, however. It's a simple matter of economics. There are two and only two forces that prevent companies from fleecing the market: competition and government regulation. Where neither of these two forces are strong, there is and will always be anti competitive behavior and market fleecing. Book-cooking is just a way to make it appear like they are barely scraping by, when in fact they are riding the gravy train.

The logic here seems to be: exporting the illegal immigrants will reduce the supply of cheap labor, thus increasing the cost of labor, thus motivating businesses to pass those increased costs along in the form of higher prices, thus costing legal (non-illegal-immigrant) families more than they can afford.

On the flip side, the exportation of workers will increase the demand for labor, which will in turn create more jobs that regular citizens can have and also increase wage competition to drive wages up, thus increasing household income, thus making the higher prices affordable.

Most of our markets for common everyday items like groceries and such are cartel-controlled at this point. These cartels already have nice fat profit margins due to the lack of bona fide competition. That makes this problem worse, as they absolutely will punish the country with higher prices in retaliation for a policy like this. Their ability to do so would be reduced if we focused our trust-busting laws on them and allowed real competition to pull prices back down to realistic levels. This is, of course, easier said than done.

We deserved a 4 day workweek long, long ago. Since the 5 day workweek was established, other technological innovations have greatly enhanced worker productivity across the board. We should have a two-day workweek already, and that's still splitting the difference.

Legislation is the only way we will get a shorter workweek. And we don't need "AI" to justify it.

A major consequence, though, will be even more interest in offshoring and outsourcing. Employers will naturally prefer to utilize workforces that they can maximally exploit.

Further, the quality of computer science education has dropped enormously in the past decade or two. Colleges responded to high interest by watering-down the curriculum so they could cash in on it. I have seen evidence of this in the entry-level candidates I have interviewed throughout my career.

Other posters on this article have been modded troll for referring to colleges as an "old form of education" and suggesting that they may not be valuable anymore. So, at the risk of being modded troll myself, I will assert that this dim view of college makes sense for people who are interested in vocational training. By and large, colleges are cashing in on naive dreams, encouraging people to study whatever crazy thing makes them happy whether or not the degree brings any real job market cred. It's great business for the colleges because it maximizes the number of students (with the amount they can pay significantly increased by the ubiquitous availability of financial aid). Not so great for the graduates that wind up completely unable to work in their field.

This is bad news, so nobody wants to hear it. Much easier to mod the messenger troll than accept that the situation here isn't exactly as promised.

The world has changed. It's time to adapt.

The CEO of a dating app stating that they want to improve human relationships is like a mob boss saying they want to improve law and order.

Dating apps are then #1 enabler of social trends that are ruining human relationships. No amount of AI resistance is going to change that.

I also notice the irony of him saying that taking risks is an important part of friendship, despite his unwillingness to take risks with an AI relationship. He doesn't actually know that it is bad for mental health...none of us do. We don't have enough data yet and the tech is still evolving rapidly.

So anyway, I don't expect much to come of his statements or intentions. He won't be coming up with some revolutionary thing that significantly changes our current cultural trajectory. It may not be clear where this river is headed, but we are all riding along it at full speed.

They have the means, motive, and opportunity to use the data you submit for their profit. So, they will.

Any promises they make in policy statements are automatically untrustworthy. At literally any time the government can swoop in and demand this sort of thing, with gag orders to prevent you from ever finding out. Not to mention the possibility of hackers sneaking in and stealing the data, or disgruntled employees leaking it. Or incompetent employees mishandling it. And of course there is the corporation itself, which has every reason to break this very promise (at least in spirit but also in letter).

This principle applies to basically everything you do online, not just AI chats.

The answer seems to be here.

Baldoni hired a firm to discredit Blake on social media. Apparently, one of the things this firm does is bot-post on every single slashdot story.

After a thorough review of this thread, I have concluded that Tony Isaac actually knows what he is talking about, and lives in the real world.

fluffernutter, however, is stating naive talking points that are quickly refuted by a review of history and human nature.

In aggregate, humans will (very reliably) respond to their actual incentives. When their rewords are not a result of their efforts, their efforts wane. A few unusually enlightened people might devotedly serve the greater good, on an ongoing basis, without receiving any rewards. But the majority will not. And because of this, any system that depends on such service will ultimately crumble (or resort to totalitarianism and THEN crumble).

Greed is not an artifact of an economic system, it is an element of human behavior that cannot be eliminated. The presence of greed and corruption in an economic system is no argument against the tenability thereof, because these things are present in every system. Capitalism, though imperfect (as all human-implemented systems must be) works far better in both the long and the short run than communism ever can.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.