The definition isn't particularly coherent. Cane and beet sugar are Group II, but "sugar, oils, and fats for domestic use" are Group IV? Which is it? Ice cream is Group IV despite being milk (Group), cream, sugar, and salt (all Group II)... are they complaining about the often-present emulsifier ,which as a vegetable extract should also be Group II? Certainly it should be Group III at worst. Sausage is Group IV despite the processing in sausage being pretty much purely physical; perhaps they don't know how the sausage is made.

(And of course that pre-Columbian Mexican staple, the tortilla, is clearly Group IV)

This is why pretty much every major 20th century technology was invented in the US (telephony, movies, semiconductors, aerospace, the internet etc.).

Telephony was invented in the 19th century by a Canadian born in Scotland who ultimately became a US citizen. The work was apparently split between the US and Canada. Scotland is also one of those places that had a disproportionate number of inventors -- if you look a little earlier to the Industrial Revolution, especially, you'll note a lot of Scots.

I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.

Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.

It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.

This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.

Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.

But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.

As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.

It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.

And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.

It does not annoy the rich and powerful. It annoys the (human) executive assistants of the rich and powerful, but that's what they get paid for.

Makes sense. According to leading environmentalists, coal use produces less CO2-equivalent than natural gas.

Though probably the best way to react to that isn't to replace natural gas with coal, but just to ignore the environmentalists.

My guess of why Ding uploaded to the Google Cloud: this was the only way to get the information out. That is, it couldn't be physically transported out of Google's office(s) otherwise.

If he could display it on his screen, he could exfiltrate it.

Thinking they will surely never go extinct, despite that having happened to the, what, 6 other alternatives?

Homo sapiens subsp. sapiens is probably the REASON those other alternatives didn't make it.

No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

Tax software is one of the last places I'd expect AI to take over. Tax software is implementing a whole lot of very detailed rules and regulations to produce forms. Any sort of AI approximation, hallucination, or other slop is entirely unacceptable if you don't want to have the IRS auditing you and threatening to send you to pound-me-in-the-ass Federal prison. So no one in their right mind is going to say "ChatGPT, here's my W2s, 1099s, etc, produce a 1040 for me".

Thanks for making our standard of living the highest in human history. Thanks for keeping my house warm and lit. Thank you for helping cook my food. Thank you for helping me to get from point A to point B. Thank you for natural gas derived fertilizer, which helps provide the food I eat. Thank you for lubricating oils (the whales thank you for this one too). Thank you for plastics, in all their various and sundry uses. And thank you for combating the hair-shirting environmentalists who would have me freeze in the dark in the name of the climate.

Perhaps the lack of students will cause the universities to cut their tuition charges

They'd rather die. And they will.