I agree with the last part in parethenses. Do you have citations for the rest?

Not for lack of trying. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/judge-blocks-rfk-jr-from-scaling-back-childhood-vaccine-recommendations.

Bwah? The article I linked to is on Harvard's news site. It is not just about Harvard. As that article notes there's been about 500 million dollars of contracts canceled. Note that even if that were all Harvard (which it isn't) that would be a sizable chunk even in their endowment. And this has on top of that had a major chilling effect causing corporations to stop doing mRNA treatment research in general.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

The US does a lot less preventative medicine than peer European countries, so lower vaccination rates harm a lot more here. And aside from changing the vaccine schedules, they've done a lot else which I mentioned. Like cancelling all the mRNA research https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/slashing-of-funding-for-mrna-vaccine-development-raises-concern/ which is going to have massive long-term damaging consequences.

Minor note: Carter did not have solar cells in the sense of electrical production on the White House. Carter had solar water heating panels but they were not "solar cells" but just direct solar heating for water. See https://projectsolar.com/blogs/solar/white-house-solar-panels. Solar cells at the time were still very expensive and not very efficient.

A stopped clock is right twice a day is the old cliche. Concerns about microplastics are legitimate and are particularly linked to inflammation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969723075757 and cardiovascular issues https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11009876 among other concerns. We don't know how serious this is, but it is at least a problem and should be looked at furhter. This is a good thing, and should be recognized as such. That the same government is refusing to deal with CO2 and is actively trying to hinder the development of solar and wind power still holds. And I'm sure the damage to vaccines and sabotaging any new vaccine research or mRNA treatments will kill far more people than are helped by this. But it is a problem when science is politicized, and that's what's caused them to be so bad on other issues. It would be a mistake to start associating legitimate concerns about microplastics with the right-wing. Unfortunately, these same people are obviously trying to do that by connecting this to "MAHA" which is really more about really dumb ideas about masculinity and anti-vax attitudes masquerading as science. Don't let the justified contempt for these people cause one to start thinking that microplastics aren't a real problem.

I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.

I don't see why I care about government trying to protect people from themselves with this one? I would never invest in crypto and very likely not private equity funds as part of a retirement plan. But that doesn't mean other people wouldn't want to. If you've got enough money already saved up in retirement funds and you believe you've found a window where it makes sense to risk, say, 20% of what you've got on something like crypto? It might double that money for you practically overnight. It also might just cause you to lose it all. But maybe 80% of your total was all you really needed to save in the first place?

ClipChump is the worst.... Many corporations stick people with that as the only (free and included w/Win 11) tool they've got to work with the occasional need to edit video. It feels like it's cloud-enabled for no reason except to say it "uses the cloud"!

It feels like a poor attempt to imitate Apple's iMovie except crippled with less functionality and a huge performance hit because some of the features only work via the cloud, plus it insists of storing files/folders in a personal OneDrive that syncs to the cloud. It acts like the audio portion of a clip is an afterthought, too. You can mute the existing audio or remove it from a clip, but it has zero for EQ'ing it. It doesn't even allow grabbing a still frame and putting it in the video for X number of seconds!

1) They don't need to turn the core on Earth. 2) Core's don't get straight from slightly enriched uranium to plutonium to highly radioactive in a few seconds. They take time for radioactivity to build up as there are more fission products.

In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes. As for the idea that there's a lot of data centers being built in the Southwest, more are being built or planned to be built in California or on the East Coast. Northern Virgina is the fastest growing region for data centers. See map here https://usdatamap.com/ (This isn't a perfect map. The situation is in flux. And admittedly, this map doesn't show size of them. My impression is that at least some of the ones being built in Arizona are very large so the map here isn't showing everything.)

Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, one has historical water rights to contend with. In many jurisdictions for major water resources, historical users get priority over new users, so farmers and others would get priority before data centers if it came down to that. (Yes, this does mean that in parts of California, golf courses get priority over some other uses.)

This is not remotely why AI systems are being used. ChatGPT is being used daily by hundreds of millions of people https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users. Right now, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world by some independent metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites. These systems are not being used just because some rich people want to not have to pay people or bother with civility. The regular, common people are using them. Understanding where this is going, the impacts it will have, both positive and negative, requires understanding the actual usage, not what one imagines it to be.

The water use for AI seems to be greatly exaggerated. Estimating water use complicated. Different data centers use different amounts of water. Also, systems need more water use for cooling when the weather is hot, so centers may use more water in summer. A data center will use more water when the center is at close to maximum usage, so data centers will use less water if they are handling queries when few users are using the system. Complicating things even further, some people are counting not just data cooling water but also counting the indirect water use from the needed electricity production (fossil fuel and nuclear plants use a fair bit of water for their steam turbines). There's a good article here discussing the difficulties in making water estimates https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 However, all things considered. they estimate that all things considered it takes about 39 milliliters of water per a typical query. Now, for comparison, a high efficiency shower uses about 1.5 gallons of water a minute, which is about 95 ml of water a second. So making a query to an LLM AI system costs less than a second of water. If this estimate is off even by a factor of 3, this is equivalent to taking 1 second longer on a shower. The water use is just not hat high. The total water use is also not very high. If for example you use estimates for how much water is used by golf courses in the US https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf, the largest estimates of AI use put the water use as about a tenth of the water use by golf courses, and golf course water estimates put it at most about 1% of total US water use. So even if one is concerned, just getting rid of some of the gigantic water hungry golf courses in California and Arizona (seriously who the heck puts a golf course in Arizona) would largely offset this. Now, it is true that as data centers grow, more water will likely get used. But as we switch to more wind and solar power, the indirect water use will go down, and data center builders are working hard on reducing water use since it is such a hotbutton issue.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.

Going to have to agree to disagree. I still have a MacPro5,1 from 2012 that I regularly use. All four drive trays are in use, both optical drive bays, and I have two PCI addon cards for added functionality. The expansion capabilities of the MacPro5,1 were absolutely useful and justified.

Apple's Mac Pro, and before that the Power Mac, used to be a reasonably affordable machine for the capabilities it offered. The trash can was silly, but still affordable.

The 2019 return to tower form also came with an insane price increase. The base price was double that of previous generations. That killed the Mac Pro.

It's about time they finally had the funeral.

These issues are all very minor. Submarines are cramped and people can remain incommunicado for months. Messages to Earth is essentially just means one will be relying on email equivalent. And vacuum packed food can keep for years. Drinking water that is reclaimed from pee isn't fun, but isn't a big deal.

Mechanical problems are a big issue. That's why for example even today submarines carry some replacement parts, and why big surface ships historically had machine shops. Some things will need to be carried. But others may need to be ready to be made on site. That's why there's now a 3D printer on the ISS, to get used to doing exactly this. The gravity issue isn't a large one: on a 90 to 120 day mission to Mars, the level of bodily deteriorating isn't that big. We don't have a lot of data for the exact "how bad is it" but I'd strongly suspect that 3 days in microgravity and then 2 years on the Moon is going to be much worse than 90 days in microgravity and then 2 years on Mars.

A 90 or 120 day trip just isn't that big an issue. People have spent far longer on the ISS and managed fine.

People don't go insane and murder each other nearly as much as they do in movies. Again, look at submarines. The degree to which there are psychological issues is drastically exaggerated.

One of the lessons from the ISS and Mir is how incredibly difficult and expensive in-orbit construction is. Now, we've learned from it but its still a big issue. If you want to send 12 people then the most pessimistic estimates give you around 250 tons of stuff for a 2 year mission. That's only slightly higher than the Starship design, which is capable of being built on Earth, and masses about 5000 tons. Serious on Earth-designs for rockets have been bigger than that. For example Sea Dragon was going to mass 18,000 tons. And you can also do things to reduce the difficulty by launching multiple rockets, say one with the humans and the stuff they need for the first few months, and then another just full of cargo.