If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

We are seeing the first wave of GDP reallocation now that most of the industrialized countries, and including countries outside that (China, India, Brazil and Indonesia) facing a declining number of actively working persons.

The above basic needs spending on luxury items from government tax revenue, consumers, and public/private/corporate debt-financed is slowing.

Getting other countries to pay to subsidize you country's social programs is more difficult and forcing countries to choose between social spending or defense.

The crisis headlines and crisis research being published from the many single issue groups, think tanks, government offices, and academics has shifted from competition for an increasing supply of funding for most all groups to those individual groups competing for a shrinking pool of funding.

It is why there is a competition in keeping one of the more recent topics, such as declining birth rate, from dominating the news as the single topic groups need their pet topic to be in the top ten most dire issues list year after year to remain relevant.

The issues near the bottom of the top 10, 20, 50, ... list of most know about and most focused on issues are likely to get less funding, less donations and less overall media mentions if a new issue, say birthrate decline, takes over more of the news headlines and political speeches.

With each data breach, the companies should be required to pay into a lifelong insurance policy for each individual person they let have the person's information stolen.

The 'free credit monitoring' is essentially a part of "cyber liability insurance" bought by companies https://www.allstate.com/resou...

Given what's covered and the cost of the insurance, there's a moderate incentive to improve security since paying for the insurance is now just a cost of business for companies.

Here is what is covered for the company in the First-party coverage direct costs section
        Legal expenses to determine notification and regulatory obligations
        Recovery and replacement of lost data
        Customer notification and call center services
        Lost income due to disruption
        Crisis management and PR
        Cyber extortion and fraud
        Digital forensic series to investigate the crime
        Fines, fees, and other penalties related to the incident

Third party coverage for claims by affected persons against the company
        Payments to affected customers
        Claims and settlement expenses
        Losses related to defamation, copyright or trademark infringement
        Costs for litigation or regulatory inquiries
        Accounting costs
        Any other settlements or damages up to the coverage limit

There is a long history of getting more detailed photos. The "did X and added AI" without comparing to the best or even middle-tier ways without AI needs to be in the research.

1. Take lots of photos of the same shot without moving the camera
2. Repeat step 1 for a lot of overlapping images
3. Average photos from step 1
4. Stitch together the overlapping photos from step 2 and 3

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-sys...
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Snaps Its Highest-Resolution Panorama Yet - Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Mar 04, 2020

This is a 1.6 megapixel camera (1648 × 1200 pixels) on the Mars Rover - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary....

 

Wikipedia is good for starter information on many topics, bad for political or social topics, bad for historical topics which are on liberal/conservative people, and bad for gender topics. A reader would need to do much more verification than just using an article at face or an AI summary of it.

Wikipedia should get better as the first crop of retirees who need to sit on and police their favorite political, social, and gender topics stop participating in Wikipedia.

"The researchers analysed data from the onboard fuel consumption meters of 800,000 cars registered in Europe between 2021 and 2023. They found real-world carbon dioxide emissions from PHEVs in 2023 were 4.9 times greater than those from standardised laboratory tests, having risen from being 3.5 times greater in 2021."

I expect that manufacturers are systemically underexposing pollution cost in the total lifespan of the vehicle from mining the metals, manufacturing parts, assembly and then expected pollution while the vehicle is in use.

The discussion to date is on pollution per mile driven while in use and not the full lifespan of the vehicle including manufacturing.

Simply requiring cars on the road to last another year or two would be a huge improvement.

A drastic reduction in the complexity of the vehicle would reduce pollution, including reducing the hundreds of parts and weight of all of the extra electronics needed to make the car a subscription platform..

The news headlines should point out that two men risked their lives to save others.

AI Generated lesson plans and sites like Teachers Pay Teachers https://www.teacherspayteacher... which let teachers buy lesson plans, modules, study guides, and more from other teachers means that you a) don't have to know the material you are teaching, b) don't have to from trial and error produce workable lesson plans and c) don't have to do more than the equivalent of reading someone else's slide deck in class.

Having seen the homework assignment of "create a study guide for a test on chapters 3 to 5", "write down 10 quiz questions and answers for topic X", and "write a summary for youtube video Y" and turn them in electronically all of which are the same as getting the students to do the teacher's work so that the teacher does not have to do it.

The legislation introducing tax breaks and similar subsidies for PHEVs was argued for by larger savings in gasoil use. They don't realize, so what's to do about the subsidies? Why should PHEVs in some places get the same subsidies as EVs, despite only saving 19% instead of 100% in local emissions?

The challenge is how to unwind decades of agenda based social science research, faulty studies (small sample size, self-reported data, surveys of only one gender, research data sets from advocacy based nonprofits) and the pyramid of research and news articles citing them. And vanity journals which serve to publish research from an approved set of topics.

Grievance studies affair - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

These should be legal ethics cases with a high likelihood of disbarment for the attorney and blocking of his law firm, and its partners from appearing before the NY supreme court and other NY state courts, working on, advising on, filing documents with the NY state courts for 5 years including disclosing the name of any of those attorneys on all documents.

The moral panic cry from the teachers, schools, experts, psychologists, and vocal mothers is another moral panic in the true sense.

Kids are just rebelling against 25 years of nanny state over-protection, policing of every word or action even to the extreme, and lack of tolerance in the classroom for unapproved viewpoints and discussion.

Taking away recess, taking away hands-on learning, enforcing lessons of approved history, omitting inconvenient history, pushing only approved and correctly politically aligned historical figures and turning everything into a lesson about approved behavior, approved social and political viewpoints hasn't worked well.

Kids are rebelling against that today just like they rebelled against the common pushed school work decades ago.

The rise of people who adopt political, social or other beliefs as dogma is the problem.

It prevents any discussion and only allows for parroting 'approved' viewpoints. It goes for the left, right, pro/anti social cause X, gender X/gender Y and lots of more groups.

When you are not allowed to present a scientific research paper, government statistic or other piece backing up your position, there is no debate... only dogma.

The only facts which seem to be allowed are are 30 year old data sets, scientific research on an absurdly small sample size (less than 50 people), self reported surveys, surveys of only one gender, and agenda based research.
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Add in the large group of people who 'discuss social or politics' via a flow chart of how to dismiss any statement which disagrees with their opinion.

Guessing it's one of the regular playbooks here

- Companies who are too big to fail seeking a bailout
- We can't let the domestic company which makes future army tank engines fall behind other countries
- We have an excuse for decades long lackluster sales and profits because of an external competitor
- We need to offload our pension obligations onto the US taxpayer again since it's been 17 years since the 2008 financial crisis

The main takeaway is that the US auto industry is depending on high cost vehicles to make their profits and has by feature creep increasing the costs yearly so that less and less people can afford a new car.

There is a large hole in the market where a competitor could produce a bare bones work truck with minimal or no computers and just enough extras to be street legal and sell enough to take the truck market profits away from the major auto companies.

https://www.caranddriver.com/f...
Electronics Account for 40 Percent of the Cost of a New Car
By Eric Tingwall - May 2, 2020