Compare this to the response of good police officers to "defund the police" after a bad cop killed a guy on camera. Yes, almost all public health people have good intentions, but a few bad apples can make their life hell. The scientists at the Wuhan lab acted like the cops in Minneapolis, saying there was nothing to see, until the video surfaced. Even though there is no evidence they did it, much less did it on purpose, when you launch a coverup you look guilty. The rest of the public health community piled on: lockdowns, masks, vaccines will prevent Covid, ... . When all these things turned out to be less than fully truthful, people turned on youall. You should have seen it coming. I know how hard it is to tell politicians you don't know, and make a "best guess" recommendation. It's sad when people don't do what you suggest, and it's human to exaggerate a little to try and get them to do the right thing. But you now see the effect of getting caught. Perhaps you will learn for the next time. This should color all your monkey pox messages, is it?

I had gotten so bored of Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. The whole thing was a news echo chamber that amplified stories retweeted by the same mass media journalists that pick what we see on the news every evening. Far-left + Far-right = not interesting. Nobody was doing anything but reinforcing their friends and ignoring everybody else. With Musk shaking the snow globe and refusing to put it down the results are amazing. President Biden talks about investigating Saudi stakes in Twitter, shares they bought on the open market before Musk made his offer. It's made the whole world of "Nobody knows what's going on at Twitter" visible and it's spectacularly entertaining.

Absolutely correct. This is the reason we won't need artificial super intelligence to destroy ourselves. Our "make the robot do it" mindset will lead to Sol III as the next Altair IV.

Really, I'm not at all sure these "hypersonic" missiles exist. The US, China, and a team of Russia and India are working on them. There have been some tests, including a Chinese test in January that caused all the news coverage. Many of these tests, including 2003-4 US tests in the X-43 program, have led to hypersonic scramjet meltdowns and explosions. This seems like something the propeller-heads need another decade to work on. If nobody can get a test vehicle to work, and even the super-well-funded US can't get a practical missile out of the technology, it seems premature to consider this particular bit of Buck Rodgers fantasy a game changer.

I have an electric car, and solar panels. The answer is still no. My electric car is so efficient that it's not the largest component of my electric bill. I have gas cooking, heating, and hot water; and the electric bill is three times the car bill, in December. In the hot summers, the AC can kick the daylights out of the Tesla in terms of power consumption. By the way, electric car travel is NOT FREE. There is significant capital expense, just another way of financing energy usage. My solar panels spread this capital cost over their usage period (I pay an "electric bill" for the solar power I use). It's all just a financing shell game. You can make one number $0, but you can't make them all $0. As folks have said, they want to charge my electric car a "gas tax" to pay for the roads. They even want it to make noise, so kids and folks don't walk in front of it. None of this transportation power shuffling does anything about industrial power consumption. You're not going to like the price of aluminum foil made with solar electricity. High power industries need the high power density low cost power that renewables can't provide.

Actually the best feature is "nobody ever really knew who would be around on any given Friday". It means that meetings on Fridays are impossible. It gives you one day every other week to sit at your desk and WORK. Sure, sometimes you get calls when you are off, but if you take an hour and do something gratis at least it didn't get screwed-up by someone who didn't have all your facts. It does work better in a big firm, or at least a project-organized firm. It's hard to get it to work with a service business. With a project, somebody might be on vacation any random day. Clients don't expect everybody to be at work every day, so it all averages out. In a transaction-based service business, the client only needs you for a couple of weeks and so they expect you to work their job every day. Losing one day is too big a percentage.

Exactly true. The IT installed startup script takes 10 minutes to run. Anti-virus scans of memory and installation of proxies and filters maxes out hard disk throughput so that users see no responsiveness to their inputs. Happens once or twice, and the user never turns the machine off again. Sleep loses network connections, and re-establishing them causes all these vampire robots to fire up again. Once one user figures this out, and shows their friends, nobody puts computers to sleep again. Now if IT didn't want to monopolize the user's computer ... . Never mind, that's not going to happen.