I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

Don't train it on data that encourages suicidal ideation, self harm or violence. There's a lot of data in a LLM, but it's not a black box. And if it is, it shouldn't be talking to the public, much less kids.

With this one tool of talking, many psychological problems can be resolved. Or created.

The difference is an MMO chatroom is a service provided by a company, and a psychological safe space should be a selling point. SMS is communication between one person, one other person, their mobile network providers, and the NSA.

There's lots of reasons people type suicide into google. I did it while formulating this response.

A LLM has way more information than that. Being the confidant of someone with suicidal ideation gives you a lot of data, and you could easily tell as the mind state of the person moves from ideation to having a plan, to being about to carry out that plan. As that progresses, encouraging suicide is not the correct response, internet connection or not.

They are also, increasingly, able to give informative and correct responses. Encouraging suicidal ideation is a more serious flaw than hallucinating case law or chess moves, but it's the same type of flaw: It's a incorrect response.

If your product is killing people, you are responsible. Just like every other product.

There are a set of adequate responses to someone confiding with a bot, or a person, that they're suicidal, that probably should be part of the model.

These things have a lot of training. They don't have to bounce.

Then their life would be in the hands of those people in the chat. In most cases, I'd imagine they'd get the response "KYS, Fag" more often than not. Perhaps there is a case for a psychology expert LLM moderating or attending those spaces too.

Agree. It should only apply to LLMs, and there should be a number of acceptable responses, with alerting the authorities only occurring when the when they're not just discussing ideation, but their plan of doing it.

No, it's not cyclic. It's a symptom of the coral doing badly. It's caused by corals being under stress, and expelling the algae that live in the corals tissue. Currently that stress is usually heat stress from global warming. Rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change is the primary cause of coral bleaching..

Yes. Coral can recover from a single bleaching event. However you are mistaken to conclude that therefore it's cyclic. Bleached coral has expelled its algae that it is symbiotic with. If it extended or repeated periods without the algae does kill coral.

The largest coral reef is the great barrier reef, which started forming a lot less than millions of years ago. Probably less than 10,000.

Not really.

"Recovery from a bleaching event takes 10-15 years, and A temperature increase of just one degree Celsius for only four weeks can trigger bleaching.

It isn't. The Great Barrier has been monitored for bleaching since the early 80s and the first mass bleaching event was 1998. It was perfectly healthy without periodic bleaching.

I get about 55,000 papers when I put the search terms "Coral Bleaching Causes" into google scholar.

So there has been more investigation than an amateur could be expected to read through in less that 30 years. But the TLDR is in: Mostly higher temperatures, but there other causes: UV radiation and disease are also causes of some bleaching events.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.

The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not have prevented it even if we heeded early warnings in the 1990s when the current scientific picture solidified. We're not going to lose the entire planet in one go, it's going to be one vulnerable population after another.

It may seem like the climate crisis has completely fizzled to you, living in a large, wealthy, and heretofore politically stable country, but it is catastrophic for the people who have got caught. That's how the climate crisis is going to unfold: the rich and comfortable will be able to adapt to the continually changing status quo by moving their financial assets and supply chains out of the way, although you may be paying more for coffee.

At this point it's a matter of degree; we can't avoid problems now like countries being destabilized by climate change and generating millions of refugees. The question is how fast and how big a problem we'll have.

It seems pretty plausible that sub-recreational doses of psychedelics could reduce anxiety, but we have to be mindful that anxiety evolved in our species for a reason. Like inflammation, it’s a natural and critically important protective process that gets out of control in modern lifestyles. It’s unpleasant but pharmaceutically banishing it could leave patients vulnerable.

One of the biggest risks psychedelic therapy will expose patients to are the therapists overseeing their treatment. Psychedelic therapy has an appalling track record of abuse by therapists, including both sexual and economic exploitation. Advocates for psychedelic therapy claim it will “open you up” and I think they’re absolutely correct. But there are other ways to say “open you up” that mean the same thing but set off alarm bells: becoming more suggestible and compliant for example. If the therapist uses psychedelics himself he may have “opened himself up” to some bad ideas about therapist-patient boundaries.

Likewise people microdosing to enhance creativity should exercise caution. Psychedelics absolutely can in some instances unlock creativity by turning down excessive self criticism, but those criitical facilities play an essential role in the parts of the creative process that come after coming up with out of the box ideas. Self reports of microdosing effectiveness should be taken cautiously, due to their potential negative impact on metacognition. Those might be like the drunk who feels more confident driving after a few drinks.

No doubt these drugs have tremendous potential to treat extreme crippling anxiety. They probably even have nootropic potential. But their beneficial effect s come by suppressing natural mental processes that serve important purposes, and the promising results we have come from self reports or clinical reports from advocate researchers. I’ve been following this because I’ve been interested in experimenting with psychedelics for years, but what I have learned has convinced me to hold off until there is evidence and protocols for safe use that would persuade a skeptic.

When I got the mRNA covid vaccine, and subsequent boosters, they controlled the cells that absorbed the encoded nanoparticles to mostly muscle cells in my left shoulder, by injecting them into the muscle of my left shoulder.

ISG15 deficiency often presents with uncontrolled cell death ... better known as necrosis. The therapy seems to be very self-limiting.

But can you point me to a source discussing uncontrolled cell death as a consequence of using mRNA as a delivery platform? My google-fu is failing me.

I suspect this one would be too detrimental.

Even if someone with ISG15 deficiency would survive the necrosis long enough to hit puberty in a pre-modern medicine environment, then if the severe ulcerations in the neck and armpits don't restrict their reproductive chances, those in the groin probably would..

(Image from This paper.)

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

It is pretty hard not to respond to the pure BS that anti-EV types spout. I know it rubs you the wrong way, but the alternative is to let people who don't know what they're talking about dominate public perceptions.

I wouldn't claim EVs are for everyone, but for many of us they are extremely convenient and economical to run. The corner cases where ICE is clearly more convenient are not a concern for everyone, and not a concern for a multi-car household considering making one of their cars an EV. We have an EV and a plug-in hybrid that runs as an EV probably 80% of the time. We hit the gas station with the plug-in about once every six weeks.