Look up "Jagged capabilities". That's where we are so far. And if you go back a couple of decades, a calculator could do math a lot faster and more accurately than you could.

A claim of "AGI" is a claim that the weakest of it's jagged capabilities is still stronger than that of the average human, and I don't believe we'll see that this year.

Expect a time delay. Some have hypothesized that it will happen overnight, but to me this has always seemed unreasonable. I expect a transition period of years. Being an AGI doesn't automatically generate the CPU cycles.

We have NOT had AGI, and I'll be really surprised if the OpenAI offering is one. What we've had is tools that are very good for certain specialized tasks. One characteristic that all of the tasks it's be exceptionally good at is that it's easy to validate the answer after you get it. (P == NP?)

When you get to tasks that aren't easy to validate, then it gets a LOT weaker. And you've to to be certain that it isn't just fabulating...i.e. giving you an answer because you asked it to do so, even though it doesn't have a good guess at what the answer should be.

Note that, e.g., AIs that generate protein folding predictions aren't necessarily accurate, they're giving you a best guess, or a series of probable guesses. I'm not counting those as "easy to validate", because currently the AI, itself, can't do the validation. But they're quite useful, as the good models do about as well as a human expert, but a lot faster and cheaper...however you must NOT skip the validation step. (People can't make accurate predictions in this domain either.)

There are so many unknowns in "dark matter" that they can't really claim it doesn't interact with itself. Some of the theories have it not interacting with itself, but that's not a good argument. There are too many possibilities. ...From here on I'm just spinning ideas...
FWIW, I came up with a theory that there are nine basic flavors of dark matter, each about 1/10th the mass of the universe, and the various flavors don't interact with each other, but they do interact with themselves, and are as varied within themselves as ordinary matter is. So you'd have nine types of dark galaxies.

This is a really BAD theory, but it's fun. The problem is that dark matter tends to be associated with galaxies, and local dark suns should be quite noticeable in that circumstance. We don't see that kind of result, so there aren't any local dark suns. I'm not sure we could detect them in another galaxy, but they should affect stellar motions within our own in a noticeable way. Unless you want to special case our own galaxy, dark matter needs to be rather diffuse for some reason...nothing much larger than a G class sun, possibly a M class. The reason you can get away with something that large is that lack of friction with ordinary matter means that you wouldn't get anything captured into a binary orbit with a normal star.

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

I don't think it's been ignored, but it might have been siloed. I was aware of it, and I'm not even close to an expert in that field. (OTOH, that bit about Teflon was surprising. I'd have expected Teflon to be totally inert.)

That's probably a underestimate. But, yes.
The real problem, though, is that many of them intensely support him. I think many of his supporters tend to be more firmly committed than were Nixon's.

Calling him a loser is incorrect. That he has occasionally lost is correct, but find someone who hasn't. Sometimes it seems he's playing a different game than the one we expect him to play.

But I rather agree with the rest of your characterization. And think it leaves out quite a few correct pejoratives.

I think the problem is that there's a conflict between good security and ease of remote use. They've been pushing ease of remote use with "adequate" security. Now that security is no longer adequate, but they don't want all the customers to be angry with them.

Sorry, but who, officially, has the right to name the lake? I'm pretty sure it isn't the president.

My preference is Eustatia.
I think I first proposed this around 1990, perhaps a little bit later.

How long before the labels start going after new artists that sound like existing ones?

You know, where someone is "inspired" by a singer, a band or a songwriter that they've idolized for years and thus their own creations are heavily influenced by those artists?

If there's a chance for a new Lambo or Porsche in the corporate car park at EMI or WMG you *know* they'll be working on such law suits right now!

I've also wondered why there's no restriction on voice-actors who impersonate famous people -- but if you do it with AI then you are right in the firing line.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

And the ROI is really, really impressive. Each dollar in the NIH budget gets returned as about 5 (depending on the study) in increased GDP. To my knowledge, there is no other billion-dollar scale investment that has consistent, long-term returns like that.

Congress knows this fact. They commissioned many of the studies showing it. It is difficult to believe the Executive Branch is not aware of it. If we really wanted to be America First, rather than reducing the NIH budget, we'd be promoting another run of annual increases with the intent of doubling that allocation in real dollars over the coming decade. Contact your congressional representatives today to advocate for the idea.

To me it appears you've go an extreme definition of "meaningful". It you want to claim the effect will be small, I'll go along with you. If you want to claim it won't be present...why do you believe that? It appears to me to be an unreasonable claim.