This is a clear cut situation where workers should unionize to push back on this bullshit.

European employees can complain about violation of their privacy from this tracking. I expect lawyers could also make a strong case that training an AI amounts to constructive dismissal and take Facebook to their country's labour relations tribunals over it.

In this case, the prime manager, the mayor, had just been replaced inthe election.

Actually, management was blamed left and right, the audit helped force the contracting companies to eat far more of the cost, etc...
Trick i failed to mention, it was the NEW incoming mayor that ordered the audit, and less than 1% of project cost to date.

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

Then it got mutated by authors, pundits, managers and others who turned it into a rigid process with many problems

They created the problem by pumping out the ground water. It started out as a lake, they drained the lake and built a city on the dried out lake bed. Then they pumped water out from the ground to satisfy the thirst of the people that moved into the lake. Worse, they are STILL pumping out the water - and will do so until it is gone.

People have been doing this kind of sillyness for a very long time, and probably will do so long into the future. Miami is the opposite problem - they built it on a flood zone that keeps getting more and more water.

Not that hard to do a little bit of thinking before you screw over your grand children.

I looked at a waterfall project where the mayor ended up spending $3M to have an audit done on the current state of a project that was way behind on time and way over budget, only for them to come back and say that it'd be cheaper to burn all the effort to date and start fresh.

This is one of the ways some news stories fail: saying "above average" without saying by how much, which matters. Like actual news stories saying that a state is 39th in education. By how much? What's the distance between first and 39th? Is it enough to matter?

Has Dawkins ever claimed to be an expert in AI or LLMs? As far as I can tell from the Guardian article, he chatted with Claude (or "Claudia") over a period of three days and then wrote an essay (somewhere) which included his subjective impression that his friend Claudia was conscious. (By some definition.)

For some reason, presumably because he's famous, people seem to care about what he said. Seems to me that's a problem with them, not him.

Watson and Dawkins have publicly disagreed previously on an entirely different topic.

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