because i note - you aren't hearing this from Bezos, Ellison, nor Alphabet.

another - "we have enough AI, we shouldn't have more" - a way for the big 3 to try to get Congress or local governments to act...against the other vendors still building out more data centers and developing their own tech (Oracle, Amazon, Google).

"let us keep the monopoly on it all and leave those others behind, and /maybe/ we can control it...but if you let too much competition in, then our fears will happen."

It'll be Turtles All the Way Down. :-)

I wonder what Great A'Tuin thinks about that.

Back in the '90s I was chatting with a skript-kliddie who actually had an AOL logon like that. He figured that none of the CS drones could type it in right to nuke his account. You should have seen his face when I said the magic words: "copy and paste."

Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.

You think that's bad? That's nothing compared to Zone rouge in northern France and Belgium. It's been uninhabitable since about 1919, and is expected to stay that way for at least 300 years, possibly as much as 700 and not because of radioactivity. No, it's because of heavy metal contamination, unexploded ordinance and poison gas shells that didn't (yet) go off.

If the long press isn't working, pull the plug. HTH, HAND.

Also, people who aren't good at negotiating also deserve fair wages.

I'm not saying that they don't. And that's why sports figures have agents so that they don't have to be good negotiators themselves. My point is that being in a union doesn't stop you from negotiating if you think you can do better.

Why, then, does Major League Baseball have a union? These are very high skilled jobs, very well paid. The highest performers make FAR more money than the middling ones - having a union doesn't prevent that.

My father spent most of his working life in union supermarkets in Los Angles, most of the time in management. Except when he was just starting out, he never worked for union scale, but negotiated a higher rate because he was known to be good enough to deserve it. No matter what the unions say, you can always get more if you can make the boss believe that you deserve it.

I mean, ultimately, they're going to need to take a real fly brain, and hook it up to the Doom simulation, to see how accurate the fly brain simulation is.

How about avoiding those impacts in the first place? Or would that be un-American?

In other news, scientists are looking into geoengineering to cool our planet, so we can continue to drill-baby-drill until kingdom come.

The directional explanation reminds me of the backreaction conjecture. The basic idea is due to the inhomogeneity of the real universe: as the gravity within each concentration of matter (such as a group of galaxies) pulls it into a tighter clump, the distance between such clumps appears to increase.

I've only come across this idea because of Syksy Räsänen, who is famous in Finland for his goth looks and pro-Palestine activities. So the theory doesn't seem to be widely known.

I haven't seen any serious attempts at reducing emissions, quite the contrary. Sure, renewable electricity generation is a growing industry, but it's only a small part of the total energy budget that's growing fast. With a nation whose official motto is "drill baby drill" and an AI slop industry powered by gas turbines, it's hard to believe the story of renewables saving the world.

Instead of asking how we can power our cars with more climate-friendly sources, we should be questioning the need to drive around so much at all. If it weren't for the petrol industry, we'd probably spend our time more creatively than sitting around in traffic jams. In the early days, the automobile was a more efficient alternative to horse power, but then we ran into Jevons paradox. We're now seeing the same paradox in action with AI data centers; the computers that were supposed to save time and energy are now wasting it.

I'm OK with some form of climate engineering to cool the planet, but only if we're also serious about reducing emissions. Climate engineering shouldn't be an excuse that lets us continue drilling and burning our planet into ashes.

That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

There is one objective fact that supports that axiom: no matter who makes the observations, what direction they look and when, they get the same results. This strongly suggests that what we are observing is objective reality, not some subjective vision that can vary from one observer to another.

...you have functional illiterates like Trump.

Functional Illiteracy means that somebody is barely able to read, not that they can read fairly well but don't like to or don't bother. Do you have any citable evidence that Mr. Trump is functionally illiterate, or is it just your TDS getting the better of you again?

In that case, you'll be pleased to know that that site is now 404 compliant.