Did conservative politicians decide that almost all young males needed to be put on Ritalin? Or that teh solution to self esteem issues was teaching children they needed to be rewarded for getting their shoes on the right feet? or that Or that male teachers needed phased out because all men are sexual predators? Or that schools can assist in transitioning children to a different "gender," and that the child's parents have no right to be told? Yeah, that was all conservatives causing all problems.

Your hatred of anything other than the far left wing is showing.

And before you take the standard accusing me of being in support of all things conservative, I do believe that conservatives played a part in school problems. There is blame to go around. Funding problems, Issues with banning books. You on the other hand, are not capable of seeing anything beyond a narrative fed to you by people who are on a faction of the left that cannot take accountability. And in fine fettle, you don't either.

Yes, but not just parents. Schools, media, pop culture. All had a part. And the public schools had an outsized effect.

I managed to keep my son away from the worst of it. Kept him off the drugs the schools wanted him on, taught him that self esteem comes from accomplishment, not because the teacher told him he was the center of the universe, and he had great potential. He's doing okay. His Ritalin drugged up friends? Not quite as well.

And the worst thing we taught the kids is in your answer. It's always someone else's fault.

The flaw in the assumption that suddenly people won't know anything is that entry level changes, technology develops. People will be hired who will develop as the technology changes. This is a process that has gone on for a long, long time.

This, the slashdot resident doomers appear to believe that somehow, someway, the ultra wealthy will somehow remain ultra wealthy after they are the only people left with any money. And where does their money come from? Mebbee they didn't pay attention in economics and math classes?

Things change. Technology changes. At each stage there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth, "Our Jerbs!" we hear, soon no one will be working because AI took their jerbs. Yet if people don't give Bezos money, Bezos doesn't have money.

I came into the work world during the latter part of the transistor revolution, and the start of Integrated circuitry ascendency. I programmed on IBM 360s with punch cards. I went from tape VTR editing, and Frame Buffer 3d animation frame by frame to non-linear editing, then computer only video. Went from chemical based photography to implementing a digital photography process.

Each bit of progress was vehemently opposed, one woman even lost her job, after trying to sabotage digital work.

And the strange thing, while people demanded stasis, I looked at the new technology as an improvement. Then again, I altered and kept my job while some people lost theirs.

AI is in it's infancy, some things aren't sustainable, like the concept of energy gobbling dat centers, but my money is on a process similar to computers going from things like colossus and Eniac to things like the 360's to personal computers to that little smartphone so many people are addicted to.

If what you were suggesting were true we'd all be wearing sackcloth and bemoaning the complete lack of sanitation. If the big tech companies stop innovating they'll be replaced by something else that does, just like human civilizations largely managed to advance even though Rome declined and eventually fell.

I have no loyalty to the current tech companies beyond their ability to produce products or services I want. The industry is already full of corpses from past decades that failed to innovate. Given long enough any of the current leaders will only be a footnote in the larger history themselves.

Don't forget that legally prescribed drugs kill a lot of people.

I've been conducting a bit of a study myself. Of course, it's not a big study. But in my peer group, of the men in their early 70's, most are on statins and other maintenance drugs like ACE inhibitors, ARBs, and beta-blockers All of them look. pretty old and wrinkled, all are impotent. Note, this has been learned in conversations where they express "those days are long gone" referring to romantic interludes.

Wife has been damaged by maintenance drugs. But she still takes them religiously.

On the other hand, I take no maintenance drugs at all. I only doctor for acute things, like when I managed to get Lyme a few years back.

I'm surely not perfect. I have a lot of old Ice Hockey injuries that are presenting with arthritis. Aconite patches knock that down. But I'm still quite capable, if you catch my drift. People are drugging the bejeezus out of themselves, and just creating new problems. And don't get me started on how actual antipsychotics are being mainstreamed for women. (things like Rexulti, Abilify, Vraylar, Latuda) These numb her mind no doubt, but they also present with side effects like Tardive diskenesia, which can be permanent and sometimes quite disturbing, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, "unusual urges" and remarkably - suicide.

Don't worry though, there are dugs for the jerky movements. Oddly enough, they can also cause tardive dyskinesia. Am I a one-off? Could be. Could be my peer group somehow preselects for old unhealthy dudes. But I learned long ago to trust doctors and Pharma like I trust any other drug pushers.

And somewhere between nuts like Robert Kennedy, and the people on a gazillion maintenance drugs, there needs to be a middle ground.

What is goal - make it take 20 years to do its dirty work? lengthen each stage? If you think "the long goodbye" lengthend is reduced patient suffering - it isn't.

Ever been in one of these human storage units? a lot of dementia patients lay around screaming when not drugged out of what is left of their minds. Eventually, the mind rot gets to the point where their organs start failing. Fortunately at that point, things start happening faster.

What I wonder about is let's say we eliminate dementia. What is next? Something is going to kill us. In the end, let's say we tack on another 50 years. Where people live to an average of around 140 years. The problem is all of that comes on the old end of the scale. If life extension tacked those years onto my 40's, I'd sign right up. We have a few people making it to the century mark largely intact mentally and physically. They are the anomaly.

Outbuildings might actually be the ideal application for this kind of thing, and there's some off-the-shelf stuff that can solve some parts of the problem. We built a greenhouse a while back that I set up to do as much passive temperature regulation as possible... south-facing lean-to design, with transparent polycarb walls but a metal insulated roof. Idea being that you maximize solar gain in winter when the sun is low, minimize it in summer, and the insulated roof helps retain some of that heat in winter. I also added a couple 50 gallon barrels filled with water and concrete pavers on the floor for thermal mass. Last piece is that you can pick up automatic window openers that use an expanding fluid to open the windows when it gets hot enough.

It's surprising how comfortable it stays in there pretty much year-round.

So many of us have been brainwashed into believing that we are at fault for anything that happens to us.

Reminds me of the test for Huntingdon's Chorea. When it came out, it was hailed as something great. We don't hear about it so much now.

So same for Alzheimers. The only benefit I can see, and it's a nasty one - is that the person, when they know how they are going to die, can elect to delete themselves when the symptoms start.

My MIL was also diagnosed, and while she took "anti-Alzheimer's" drugs to mitigate, if it did anything, all it did was delay the inevitable. If it did anything, all it did was lengthen each stage, although when hitting the organ deterioration stage where teh brain stops controlling the body at all - that proceeded at normal speed once it started.

Exactly as my experience suggests as well!

And my dear, there always has been. What is your plan to ensure that no person in any country is starving?

I agree. The postmodern deconstructionism was to the point where it was denying biology. A few of my more left wing female relatives cannot define what a woman or even male or female is, and they are firmly convinced that men playing women's sports is a natural thing, because men and women are physically identical.

They still believe that it is important to transition as early as possible, with drugs and surgery, and that we must cherish children's right to change their sex, even though DNA testing defines male and female, and does so post surgery.

And before the apologists claim otherwise, in GB they were pumping drugs into children as young as 9, and in the US they were performing great amputation surgery and drug intervention on children.

So. unless they want more trumpian rule, yeah, time to drop the insanity.

Because where does this end? I can declare that I am a wooly caterpillar and that must be accepted.

I hope so. Whatever we are experiencing at present is not competence, and the right wing party are embarrassing cowards. They are just as bad as the woke. Woke are objectively nuts, the far right are an insult to adulthood, fearful and almost beneath contempt.

--thanks for the correction, by the way.

Yes, I think you're right -- when I do the calculation with your numbers, I get the same result.

I'm too lazy to go through my calculation and see what I did wrong, but probably somewhere in the conversion from units of BTU-hours and tons of ice to kilojoules and seconds.