Hopefully total world IQ will drop more slowly than total world population.
Meanwhile, all those ecosystems we've been pillaging to provide food, clean water, energy, waste disposal, etc. for a growing population can start recovering, if we manage to avoid hitting a tipping point in the meantime.
Came here to say exactly this, but out of mod points.
Seems like every wildfire now, aircraft with humans in them get grounded because some idiot flies their drone into the wildfire area in search of viral video. Either because there's an actual collision, or because a drone was spotted and it's not worth risking a human pilot in that area.
Like this: https://www.cbsnews.com/losang...
If the firefighting aircraft are also drones, we can keep them fighting the fire while we go after the human idiots in the loop illegally flying their drones.
You mean, like this?
https://www.reuters.com/sustai...
"Google has signed agreements with two U.S. electric utilities to reduce its AI data center power consumption during times of surging demand on the grid, the company said on Monday, as energy-intensive AI use outpaces power supplies."
I run my own script in a cron job. It parses feeds, adds tags, filters out a lot of the sponsored posts and stuff I don't care about, then sends the rest to me in email.
Thanks to the tags, it's easy to move the resulting emails to sub-folders as they arrive.
Because email syncs across my devices, so do my feeds.
And it also serves as a canary for whether my server is up and connected. No new articles arriving? I'd better check on the server...
Sounds about right...
It's not the wasps, it's whatever irradiated them. Clearly it is accumulating.
The article didn't say what kind of wasps, but I'm guessing it's ones that build mud nests. A small water leak could leach through contaminated soil and make nice radioactive mud. In an otherwise dry area, that's what the wasps would use for their nests.
No it isn't. A banana poses little risk. You can choose to eat it, and your body will make sure the potassium doesn't harm you. Some unknown element in the environment, however... A lot of the stuff that gets emitted from nuclear plants can be quite nasty if it gets inside you, or even on you.
Maybe don't eat the radioactive wasps, then.
But as has been pointed out numerous times here, the banana scale is flawed because your body regulates the amount of potassium it absorbs, and keeps it away from areas where it could do damage. That's very, very different from something in the environment causing a random wasps nest to experience this amount of exposure.
Ok, so think of it as one banana tree with a normal, non-radioactive wasp nest up in the bananas. That's the same threat, from both radiation and stings.
Yes, they should figure out where the exposure is coming from.
No, it does not even make my top 100 list of "things to panic about in the US in 2025".
a wasp nest with a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations
Disappontingly, that is not a specific federal regulation for radioactive wasps.
Digging into the actual measurement a bit more... The linked report claims 100,000 dpm/100 cm2 beta/gamma. If the wasp nest is about 10x10cm, that would be 100,000 disintegrations/minute = 45 nanocuries, or about the same as 100 bananas (~0.5 nanocuries/banana). Which is about what was on the shelf at my grocery store when I bought bananas yesterday.
If there were four radioactive wasp nests in my grocery store, the problem isn't the radiation. It's the wasps.
If we're going to need to scorch the sky, we'd better start planning now.
Are calculators making you less able to do basic math in your head?
Do anti-lock brakes and lane assist make you less able to pay attention to the road?
Does religion or any other similar belief system (for example, those of the far-left or far-right) make it harder for people to think critically?
Well, yes. Or more precisely, they allow people who can't do those things well anyway to get by. The average American adult functions at a middle school level academically. (And I'm pretty sure socially, too.)
Take away all of that assistance, and we're not going to make everyone smarter. The wetware in our skulls evolved to solve the problems we had 10,000 years ago. We've done amazingly well with better education methods and better nutrition and better healthcare. But the average person today is simply not capable of handling the average problems of today.
The bigger question is whether we will use GPT as helpful assistance, to enable people to do more than they otherwise would be capable of? Or will we simply use it as this century's opiate of the masses.
Shouldn't a bit of additional aging be a good thing?
(Of course, not for our elected leaders. The average age of Congress is airline-pilots-would-be-forced-to-retire high...)
From Nature:
The study’s authors had wondered whether a condensed working week would add to employees’ stress. “When workers want to deliver the same productivity, they might work very rapidly to get the job done, and their well-being might actually worsen,” says lead author Wen Fan, a sociologist at Boston College in Massachusetts. “But that’s not what we found.”
I assume that means they didn't find workers want to deliver the same productivity.
The cyclone blew THROUGH the area.
Yes. That is trew.
This is a good time to punt work.
