...if you drink (espresso) coffee, it's roasted in iron drums, ground by steel or ceramic mills, & brewed in stainless steel which drips into ceramic cups. Very little contact with plastic!

Upper-class literally means having some kind of royal title, either by birth or awarded by a reigning monarch. In modern times, we also have the owning classes, i.e. multi-millionaires & billionaires, which were once the mercantile classes, & we've always had the ruling & enforcing classes, i.e. where wood, rope, leather, & metal meets peasant* flesh. It may seem like a distant memory but step too far out of line & our ruling & enforcing classes can & will "go medieval" on us. They still train in "counter-insurgency" which is the modern term for intimidation, kidnapping, torture, & murder, e.g. See the Homan Square "black site" in Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

*Yep, you guess it; we're the peasants in this scenario.

That's a bit naive. What do you think the purpose of war is? It's all about maximising control of countries' natural resources & labour. Political analysts criticise the Gulf wars, not because of the expenditure of lives & funds but because of the further loss of control over the Gulf's natural resources & labour. The net cost of extracting wealth from Iraq, for example, has increased substantially & the contracts have gone to countries that didn't participate in the destabilisation, invasion, & occupation. Of course, the MSM can't frame it in those terms because citizens tend not to want to lay down lives & send their nearest & dearest off to war in the name increasing corporate profits.

To put it more simply, war is all about longer-term profits. Currently, Russia wants to maintain its control over the natural resources & labour in eastern Ukraine. The USA & EU want that region to come under their control & that's why they're pulling western Ukraine into $10's of billions in debt with military weapons supplies (the primary means of achieving control); it'll give western countries & corporations substantial leverage to negotiate future trade deals.

The same goes for Gaza. Palestine owns large gas fields under the Mediterranean that Israel wants to control. They've already negotiated deals with gas extraction companies. Once Israel has ethnically cleansed enough of Gaza, with the USA's, UK's, & Germany's support, they'll stake a claim on the gas fields & extraction at scale can begin. It'll also reduce the EU's dependency on Russian gas & the premiums they have to pay for the liquefied gas shipped over from the USA. Note that the major political parties in the USA, UK, & Germany (& arguably across the EU) aren't arguing against the occupation & taking over of Palestinian territories, only the extreme & public manner in which the current Israeli administration are doing it. But even after all the protests & condemnations & statements & actions by the ICJ & ICC, they're still knowingly sending the bombs that the Israelis are dropping on refugee camps, schools, & hospitals.

Interesting Wikipedia page on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So it seems the USA tested smashing up satellites first, then Russia, & now China. It's been a known problem from the start & it's a highly irresponsible thing to do but they went ahead & did it anyway.

TFA doesn't mention sexually assaulting children. Why did you immediately leap to that & why have you made some spurious correlation between that & the apparent colour of some states? From the lack of context & polemic nature of your comments I think I can safely assume that your from the USA or at least very strongly influenced by its culture & ways of perceiving the world?

If you want to make some kind of connection between Waymo cars, sexual assault in San Francisco, child sexual assault, & the colour of states, you'll have to clarify your reasoning & give sufficient explanation so that others in this thread may follow you.

That's the thing about human communication; we don't know what's going on in your head. You have to put it into words in a way that makes coherent & cohesive sense. Unless you're "too stupid" to do that. Surely, you aren't are you?

Yeah but most people have never heard of the "Plato's cave" thought experiment... & the journalist might not even understand it very well & have a deadline to meet, so like pretty much everything else that wasn't in a Hollywood movie, we have to make do with crappy scifi substitutes. The same with AI "thinking" & "reasoning" & "hallucinating", although that's more deliberate to make people believe that these computational statistics algorithms are more capable than they really are.

I don't get your argument. What are red & blue states? Are there other colour states too?

TFA didn't mention any children getting sexually assaulted either. I assumed they meant adult passengers like the one they interviewed. Have I missed something?

I know, & the mineral extraction industry in general is responsible for all kinds of civil unrest, destabilising govts, organised crime, & armed conflicts. The idea is to do less of this stuff, not excuse it because someone else is doing it too.

There are all kinds of ways to manipulate the outputs but it's always treading a line between everything coming out the same vs. coming out nonsensical. GPT LLMs can't tell if a sentence is meaningful or not so it can't check for coherence. They still need humans for that.

Sounds more like San Francisco has a sexual assault problem.

Oh shit, I just checked that website & it looks like they've turned it into some kind of corporate training course! OK, that's when scientists lose whatever objectivity they may have had. Sorry, bad advice!

You might like this: British psychologist, Bruce Hood, reviewed the research to see what things people can do for themselves, AKA "self-help," can actually have a reasonable chance of making people happier, as opposed to the usual though-up-on-the-spot pseudo-mysticism we usually get from self-help pundits & gurus. He wrote a book about what he found: https://science-happiness.com/

It doesn't work like that. While strength & fitness training later in life will help, the trick is to train up, get into healthy habits, & get into the best possible form long before ageing starts to take its toll on your body. When you're starting from higher levels of strength & overall fitness, your body takes a lot longer to decline to a point where health & mobility become an issue.

In fact, there's research that shows that health related habits (diet & exercise & sleeping well) acquired/cultivated during childhood are the ones that tend to stick with people throughout adulthood. We should be doing our kids a favour & bringing them up right, then they'll reap the benefits of their healthy lifestyles. For the those of us who didn't get this good start, we'll have to put in the extra effort & discipline to maintain our health for longer.

Who the f**k's Bill Burr?