Blocks email? You need email and that has nothing to do with doomscrolling. Spam is pretty under control at this point. Scammers will directly call and text you so just having a phone is an issue. I also need mapping apps and I need my browser for things like banking and such.

I could see giving this phone to someone who can't control themselves online like romance scam victims.

According to a talk I attended by one of the GPS system designers you can jam GPS with a 9v battery.

I guarantee the US can also so big whoop.

That's not really the point.

The point is the upcoming revolution in autonomous labor, which will turn our current financial system upside down.

For reference, you might want to check out Manna, by Marshall Brain (his actual name). It's an easy read, it's short, and it outlines the impact that robot labor will have on our current model of capitalism.

It's no secret that ChatGPT is useful, and a force multiplier for productive output. If that type of breakthrough can be achieved with physical processing, then much of the labor force can be replaced by robots.

The current economic structure assumes infinite consumption, that there will always be more people (rising population), and that they will always want more things. We've found out that the first part isn't true, and it seems that the second part isn't true either: once you have "enough" stuff to have a comfortable life, many people stop consuming and turn their efforts to other things. People aged 45 to 55 spend the most money (per household), but once they have accrued a level of comfort they stop and enjoy life.

If robots can do manual labor, then that will put most people out of a job. A robot factory 20 miles on a side out in the southwest US (a thought problem for discussion) could supply the material wealth of the entire nation, but only require 100,000 human workers for management, direction, and maintenance. That figure, 100,000, is negligible compared to our current population.

How do we support the remaining 300 million population?

One way is to create an AI soverign wealth fund. Some portion of the factory output is given to the population in the form of factory currency. Each month every person would get, say, $1000 of factory currency to spend, with online ordering, and the items would be delivered.

To the article's point, we know with certainty that our current economic system will transition into the factory robot model. The problem facing economists is how to transition us into that model without going through a catastrophic financial failure.

An AI soverign wealth fund could be the first step towards making that transition.

I guess you didn't read very carefully. They found a marker that appears 5 years before a diagnosis and also part of the mechanism of smoking and other things causing lung cancer AND potentially how to interrupt it. That's a good bit more than simply finding a well known correlation.

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Older EVs don't "die" like the cells in your flashlight, they lose charge capacity over time.

Specifically, once the battery goes down to below 80% of initial capacity, it's better for the company to swap them out for newer batteries.

However, 80% capacity is still a lot of energy storage, it's just that the energy density per weight (or volume) isn't as good for EVs. If your energy storage doesn't care so much about weight or size (concrete floor in an industrial building), then these things still store a *lot* of energy.

Also note: capacity degrades with "cycles", and grid storage does not cycle the batteries very much or very low. Taking the Australian Hornsdale grid storage installation for reference, they found that the grid battery would step in and smooth over what we would consider very short and very slight voltage drops, which meant that their peaker plants didn't have to spin up and down as frequently, which ultimately saved them $150 million (*) over the first two years, against an installation cost of $66 million (USD).

Since then there have been a number of other installations, so we have good data on what the expected outcome will be.

The term "schmucks" in your post is perhaps unwarranted...

* Can't tell whether this is CAD or USD from their website.

The big critique about capitalism is wealth inequality - it invariably leads to some people getting most of the money, and everyone else getting very little money.

The problem with that critique is that wealth inequality is mathematically more fundamental than any economic system. In other words, any time there is trade in value, you will get wealth inequality regardless of the system.

You can see this in numerous simulations online, such as this one.

Wealth inequality follows a Boltzman distribution or a Pareto distribution, depending on the type of investments allowed, and this can be proven mathematically.

About 2.5 million books are published in the US each year, about the square root of that number (1500) break even in sales, and about the square root of *that* number (35) are best sellers. Lebron James scores 43,000 points in his career, Kobe Bryant scores 34,000 points, and there are a zillion players that score lesser values.

Wealth inequality happens any time you have trade in value, this can be proven mathematically, and it applies to any value in any system.

And as a side note, once you realize wealth inequality is inevitable, the main selling point of Communism disappears. Wealth inequality happens under Communism as well, and we have numerous examples of this in recent history.

To be fair, this wasn't known when Marx was writing his thesis. At that time (1850's), economics hadn't progressed as far as it has today. Marx himself had a degree in law and philosophy, and not economics or psychology.

Capitalism has a bunch of bad characteristics, but we try to modify it to reduce the damage. For example, you can't sell patent medicines any more, you can't sell fake stock shares, and so on.

We use a modified version of capitalism that tries to avoid the bad characteristics.

Since Microsoft doesn't honor their license agreements, why should anyone else?

It's not THAT unlikely that if you have Porsche money, you can afford to get 3 phase service in your home.

The Culex quinquefasciatus (from Google's EPA request) is not native to N. America, it likely originated in Africa and came across due to human activity.

There are over 200 species of mosquito in N. America (worldwide about 3500). Taking one out will have negligible effect on the food chain.

Bats, specifically, will eat mosquitos but prefer larger insects. Mosquitos are small relative to the effort the bat takes to catch therm.

The specific mosquito mentioned is available in lots of places around the world (not native - see first point above), so we could repopulate if we notice a problem.

Google is breeding these mosquitos, so we have breeding populations and we could repopulate if needed.

It's the primary vector for West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Avian malaria, and Wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic worm).

I've been following the progress of these sorts of activities for many years. With proper care and monitoring, it's possible we could fix a lot of invasive species problem such as Cane Toads in Australia, Mongooses (mongeese?) in Hawaii, and Aedes aegypti. A. aegypti strongly prefers to bite humans and is carrier to disease, and is also not native to N. America.

The US used to have screw worms. The screw worm would lay eggs in an open wound on mammals (usually domestic animals such as livestock, but sometimes humans) and the larvae would develop under the skin by eating healthy tissue.

The US government began a program of releasing irradiated screw worm males, which are sterile, into the environment to compete with healthy males. This reduced the population, eventually down to zero, and now the US is largely screw worm free. This only took about 10 years.

Good riddance.

Now do ticks.

The full explanation is Sterile Insect Technique.

I get that there was probably a panicy passenger, but given 4.5 hours to land if they turn around or 4 hours to land if they continue to their destination and nothing but water under them either way, they may have actually prolonged the situation slightly by turning back.

They were half way there. It made no sense to turn around at that point.

Maybe he thought it was off.

Not only did they panic over a poorly chosen Bluetooth device name, they turned around AT or just past the halfway point, apparently to maximize the damage and inconvenience. They could just as well have continued as normal and sorted it out at the destination.