" could seep upward into the Alsace aquifer," implies that the aquifer is *above* the depth of the mine. So the question becomes, what is this magical mine where gravity works backwards?

GigaPoF - Gigabit Plastic Optical Fibers - are a thing.
They are much simpler to cut than glass fiber, you plug them into connector (OptoLock) which basically looks like a spring clip speaker terminal, and some of the more recent variants are transparent to infrared light too (not limited to red light only),can carry up to 10Gbit in some settings, and allow some degree of bending (better than glass fiber).

They work only on relatively short distance (between 25m and 100m depending on speed, etc.), but that is not limiting here: the point is to wire rooms to a central gateway, not transport signal over multiple kilometers.

(For the completeness, there are variants of thunderbolt which both: carry data over optical media, and carry power - though that one is done over different material for obvious reasons. And isn't widely used for Wifi)

But lucrative: You know those GigaPoF-to-USB-C dongles aren't going to sell themselves on their own, somebody gotta sell them.

Where on the planet is not near groundwater?

And yet, the discovery of an anti-gravity mine where contaminants flow UP to the aquifer, should be worth billions.

Capitalism has failure modes where "Private property" makes "Competition" and "Freedom of choice" irrelevant. Some of these failure modes are called monopoly and cartel.

If the CEOs believe it is true, it won't matter that it is true. Reducing headcount and ending hiring is going to be their priority.

I say any company over 50 employees needs to be charged an extra AI tax for eliminating positions, above and beyond the unemployment taxes they already pay on layoffs.

The problem I've had with Mastodon, assuming it's representative of fediverse microblogging, is that its search relies almost completely on hashtags. Full-text search is opt-in per post, and very few users have bothered to hunt for the switch to opt in and turn it on. Posts made before the introduction can't be found at all except through tags. And the users of Mastodon think that's a good thing because it protects vulnerable members of marginalized groups from abusive bigots searching for them.

This leaves users like me to play "guess the hashtag" all the time. I search for what I think is the right tag for a topic, and all the posts I find are my own. Or I write a post and nobody else engages with it because nobody else is searching for the tags I used. What am I supposed to do to get my posts seen?

I hope that you either find peace, or that otherwise that your inevitable suicide is painless.

Remember back in the early days when they were pretending that they weren't an illegal taxi service, but rather were just normal people "sharing a ride" to where they wanted to go anyway, and so called it "rideshare" to avoid prosecution?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

That and we need to accept that nothing will bring Kurt Cobain back. Cutting pollution now buys us time to cut pollution further later.

My level of pessimism about things like regrowing limbs has declined a lot in recent years. I mean, there's literally a treatment to regrow whole teeth in human clinical trials right now in Japan, after having past clinical trials with mice and ferrets.

In the past, "medicine" was primarily small molecules, or at best preexisting proteins. But we've entered an era where we can create arbitrary proteins to target other proteins, or to control gene expression, or all sorts of other things; the level of complexity open to us today is vastly higher than it used to be. And at the same time, our level of understanding about the machinery of bodily development has also been taking off. So it will no longer come across as such a huge shock to me if we get to the point where we can regrow body parts lost to accidents, to cancer, etc etc.

Whether someone is "curable" or not doesn't affect the GP's point. A friend of mine has ALS. He faced nonstop pressure from doctors to choose to kill himself. Believe it or not, just because you've been diagnosed with an incurable disease doesn't make you suddenly wish to not be alive. He kept pushing back (often withholding what he wanted to say, which is "If I was YOU, I'd want to die too."), and also fighting doctors on his treatment (for example, their resistance to cough machines, which have basically stopped him from drowning in his own mucus), implementing extreme backup systems for his life support equipment (he's a nuclear safety engineer), and the nonstop struggle to get his nurses to do their jobs right and to pay attention to the warning sirens (he has a life-threatening experience once every couple months thanks to them, sometimes to the point of him passing out from lack of air).

But he's gotten to see his daughter grow up, and she's grown up with a father. He's been alive for something like 12 years since his diagnosis, a decade fully paralyzed, and is hoping to outlive the doctor who told him he was going to die within a year and kept pushing him to die. He's basically online 24/7 thanks to an eye tracker, recently resumed work as an advisor to a nuclear startup, and is constantly designing (in CAD**) and "building" things (his father and paid labour function as his hands; he views the world outside his room through security cameras).

He misses food and getting to build things himself, and has drifted apart from old friends due to not being able to "meet up", but compared to not being alive, there was just no choice. Yet so many people pressured him over the years to kill himself. And he finds it maddening how many ALS patients give in to this pressure from their doctors, believing that it's impossible to live a decent life with ALS, and choose to die even though they don't really want to.

And - this must be stressed - medical institutions have an incentive to encourage ALS patients to die. Because long-term care for ALS patients is very expensive; there must be someone on-call 24/7. So while they present it as "just looking after your best interests", it's really their interest for patients to choose to die.

(1 in every 400 people will develop ALS during their lifetime, so this is not some sort of rare occurrence) (as a side note, for a disease this common, it's surprising how little funding goes into finding a cure)

** Precision mouse control is difficult for him, so he often designs shapes in text, sometimes with python scripts if I remember correctly

The alternative to diesel and petrol doesn't have to produce zero pollution. It can produce substantially less pollution. It's a lot easier to scrub a handful of power plants than to scrub millions of tailpipes. Not to mention that if the USA still had electric light rail in this century, a lot of it would run on wind and solar.

Think back to 1940, just before the United States got dragged into World War II. Chevron and Phillips Petroleum were among the investors in an joint venture to put the electric streetcars of California out of business in favor of fossil-powered buses. Others included Firestone Tire and Mack Trucks.

"I wanted to use public transportation to avoid the pollution of using a personal car, but public transportation was made unavailable to me in part because of the actions of defendants." Compare defendant Chevron's role in the present case to the role of Chevron (then called Standard Oil of California) and Phillips Petroleum in the demise of streetcars in transit systems in California.