I agree that Trump is once again guilty of treason.

They added AI to their Logi Tune software not long ago. After some backlash, they made it able to be disabled, and not run in the background all the time. But subscription mice are the second step in the wrong direction. I've used Logitech mice since 1991, but I think I'll be looking somewhere else next time.

Slashdot still maintains exclusive compatibility with 7-bit characters.

A old friend of mine is a climate scientist (Ph.D. in mathematics and weather modeling.) He spent many a year at some of the advanced arctic and antarctic research bases doing climate research.

He left the field some years ago over the politics in the scientific community: too much infighting and not enough science. That's a problem throughout the scientific community, really. The less your proposed research is perceived to fit in with the prevailing ideas the more other scientists will try to stymie your work, and the less your chances of gaining any funding.

His comment to me once was that climate science is an inexact science, that there is an incredible amount of noise in the system, and thus it's very difficult to achieve a theoretical basis that has any significant predictive ability.

That's not how it's portrayed in the media though, they tend to speak in absolutes. Not that American science reporters have ever done anything but an abysmal job informing the public. It's more sensationalism and the art of manipulation than actual reporting. I remember watching some Fox News program where a panel was discussing how untrustworthy scientists are because they're always changing things (thereby evincing a complete lack of understanding of the iterative nature of scientific research, that it is a process of continual refinement) and the token black guy says "I think it's important to just pick a study that supports what you believe" and everyone else just nodded and smiled.

Dafuq?

I think that was why Google's G+ social network had to go. It was connecting too many ordinary citizens with actual scientists and other highly-educated people, allowing them to completely bypass mainstream media on important issues such as climate change. What also impressed me was how many of those researchers and professional people of all stripes were more than willing to answer questions from lay people and answer them in understandable terms. I will never forgive Google for terminating that platform, and doing so with the lame excuse of "we had a security problem." They did us a disservice by doing so.

That presented a problem for those in power however. People began to perceive the difference between official narratives and what the people doing the actual research were saying. I often wonder how different the pandemic response would have been had G+ still been in full operation.

They correctly point out nothing in that context: the West wasn't "allowed" to industrialize and pollute (as if China or anyone else could have stopped that process) it just did what it wanted within its own territories, as did everyone else. The West just figured out how to do it over a century before anyone else, and China and India are simply playing off of the West's initial advantage. One could argue, however, that China, India and other regional powers are being "allowed" to pollute because both were enabled by Western corporatism and its willingness to sell out its own citizenry and shift its manufacturing base to the third-world.

The elephant in the room here is not actually that human civilization and concomitant industrialization cause pollution. No, in fact it is overpopulation, and that is the sole province of the third world. Not that I see many willing to talk about that: no, it's always the United States that is the source of all the world's ills, even when that's just not the case. Were it not for the flood of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, the U.S. would be in a population decline (as is much of Europe.)

That said, you are absolutely correct about poorer nations having little vision of the future, other than trying to achieve a high-energy, high-resource-utilization Western lifestyle for as many of their citizens as possible, even if the collapse of human civilization is brought that much closer.