You are so wrong. Our entire system is purpose built to be robust, damage tolerant, and function even when humans behave like humans ie imperfect, egotistical, capricious, self centered and self serving. Separation of powers. Checks and balances. The federalist system. The multiple levels of democracy. The separation between federal and state militaries. The free press. And thats just the start of the list. Our system is probably the MOST resistant to would-be dictators and the people who want to have a one-man rule government.

Where the heck do you live? Where I am, even the greeter at the supermarket makes a solid 15 per hour. And I live in a spot that is most definitely not a high cost area.

I think youre outlook is too doomy. Youre forgetting about engineers, teachers, first responders, maintenance workers, therapists, social workers, most retail workers, and probably dozens of other worker groups if I wanted to think about it a bit longer. None of these jobs can easily be done by AI, in the short term, in any plausible scenario. Once we get true AGI and our robotics tech advances by several technological generations, it might be a different story. Thats the narrative the AI companies want us all to buy into since it justifies their in-the-stratosphere company valuations. My suspicion is that this will be a concernâ¦. In 2200. Although even then I suspect that our species will adapt.

I agree that Europe is anomalously peaceful, as long as you’re nowhere near Russia. Japan is also super peaceful. Regarding Liberia, I straight-up don’t believe the numbers. Collecting accurate statistics like that requires a government that is a) fully functioning, b) effective, c) honest and d) actually controls all the territory in the country. Between all those requirements, it rules out most of Africa, most of South America, and large chunks of Asia and the middle east.

Crime in the US is down quite a bit. It’s also down in a lot of other places. However, there’s a larger point here. If you choose your place to live based on a murder rate of 0.0005 vs 0.0003, and ignore things like freedoms, history, laws, economics, culture, diversity, larger societal trends and war, you definitely deserve the suboptimal outcome you will almost certainly get.

Free speech will result in that sort of stuff. The US is a weird, freewheeling place. Its definitely not for everyone. For what its worth, people TALk a lot of sh$t here but our murder and crime rates are actuallly pretty low. I can see why Trump would make foreign-born scientists think twice about being here. However, China is NOT friendly to outsiders that arent ethnic Han Chinese. And, historically, China has a history of treating their scientists and engineers really well, right up to the moment that the emperor has the whole lot of them beaten to death by the revolutionary guards or straight up buried alive. Check your history. As a Nobel prize winner, I would have expected this guy to do his geography research a bit better. I hope he keeps a go-bag packed, although movement is so controlled over there that it probably wont do him any good.

an academic can put forward an utterly unoriginal, obvious, no-brainer idea like this, and get a fu&*in paper in NATURE out of it. It probably helps to be at MIT, but thanks for absolutely nothing captain obvious.

nuclear bombs in space. detectors. Basic radiation theory. small satellites. I see nothing new here that wasn't thought about at least 50 years ago, perhaps with the exception of using a cubesat. Detecting possible nukes from a satelite? No possible chance that any modern governments quietly thought about or implemented THAT idea. hashtag eyeroll . I mean, designing such a thing would require a team of at least 2 physicists and a few engineers with undergraduate degrees. So, so utterly cutting edge.

I looked at the actual article. Modeling the satellite as a homogeneous cube, and modeling the detector as two homogeneous rectangular planes. This is a f*&ing NATURE paper? My eyes rolled so far back into my head that I convulsed a little.

If I sound a bit annoyed, yes, I am. Those scientific journals are supposed to be the best of the best, and they only publish a limited number of articles per month. Every article like this displaces a hundred other strong scientific studies that better deserve the credit.

that sitting for 30 minutes shortens your life by, wait for it, 30 minutes.

Someone with mod points and a hatred of AC attacked this thread. This poster is spot-on. The world is getting hotter. Above a certain temp/humidity threshold, heat is deadly.

And Europe is way behind on this metric, for a variety of reasons.

Consider this. I just looked the numbers up. Heat deaths in Europe are around 50,000 per year. Gun deaths in the US are around, wait for it, 50,000 per year. Europeans that shake their heads at America’s fetish with gun violence are killing just as many people through their resistance to AC. Reality is weird.

Window units or more likely split-unit ACs. If you ask the question, your knowledge of AC is decades out of date. Split-duct ACs are perfect for the job and France has the money.

An effort to promote vaccines.

I’m just glad that there’s no way any conspiracy theories could possibly form around this one (eyeroll).

With Apple, he’s got delusions of grandeur. One of these companies is hands-down the strongest consumer electronics powerhouse in the world, with a major manufacturing footprint.

The other one makes cute cartoons and fantasy entertainment.

The use and business case for SMRs is still pretty flimsy. Nuclear is expensive. No amount of internet-bro-9.0 jargon is gonna change that. AI and crypto technology won't change the costs. If you're dealing with a nuclear reactor and you fu*k something up, you render a chunk of the planet uninhabitable for basically forever and slightly increase the chances of getting cancer for, oh, just the entire human population. That means that everything requires overdesign, redundancy and careful planning. And it's hard, real, physical engineering, not an algorithm that runs on a few GPUs. If you have a problem, you can't just slam out a code update over the weekend and fix the issue.

And, the engineering behind SMRs is HARDER than large reactors. Not easier. Harder. Nuclear doesn't scale down easily. I can't stress this enough. CS and IT people tend to think that they can apply the same Moore's law scaling to literally everything. SMRs make sense where small dense power sources are needed and someone is willing to throw near-infinite money and manpower at the problem, aka nuclear reactors in military subs and ships. Civilian or corporate power generation? Nah. Go big or go home. And only in a use case where the power is gonna be needed for decades.

Youre equating those two things? Ugh. Crypto can’t die fast enough. It was an interesting idea, for sure, but it simply didn’t work out and its gotten wwwaayyy out of hand. Cash isnt going away, not in the western countries. Electronic is fine for 99% of transactions but the other 1% use cases are important enough to keep cash alive.

If youre a privacy purist worrying about your ability to keep your transactions totally private, well, I respect your right to hold your own opinions but you’ve chosen an impossible hill to die on. You’ve already lost. That horse left the barn decades ago.

Um. What country are you talking about? It certainly isnt China. At least, not in this timeline. Basically, every line of your post is grossly distorted or straight up wrong. Home ownership means something totally different than in the west, and the hokou system means that huge numbers of peoples official âoehomesâ are plots of land a thousand kilometers out in some rural area. Their inflation numbers are grossly distorted by their trade policy and monetary control. Medical bankruptcy most DEFINITELY exists. Most would never admit it openly because they dont want to spend 6 months in a âoere-educationâ program, but pensions are so small and state support is so thin that people have no faith that the government will take care of them in any way at all, so they save obsessively. China has made some incredible accomplishments in the past century that the west ignores (eg a legit billion people raised out of poverty), but you are completely confused about their strengths and weaknesses.

But you cared ssssoooOoooOoOOOOOooooo much about what Biden’s sons were doing.