If the US government would nationalize the US AI companies, I am sure other companies would spring up in other countries. And I suspect the us gov run AI projects would be mired in bureaucracy and incompetence, giving an edge to the competing ones.

How much acrobatics does it take to get into a position where you can aim a kick at a window? For a typical overweight driver? In a crowded car? Full of smoke? With a broken leg? When you start to panic?

You could as well say that your forest operation has employed 300 lumberjacks, 200 people and 100 modern tree harvesting machines. Or that your scribe force consists of 100 scribes: 2 calligraphers, 49 typewriters, and 49 typists.

If those machines would be counted as people, they would have to be responsible for their mistakes. forestry machine leaks oil into a protected meadow, it is the human operator and/or the owning company that are liable for damages, not the machine. For the machine can not own cash to pay the fine, or be jailed.

Maybe it is the other way around. At the time when the depressions starts to lift, people can get around to be more active, and also do more exercise. Once the depression is over, they look back and see that as soon as they started exercising, things started to get better.

> What we could have done is have brutally stringent anti-spam laws and a federal task force which actively enforced the laws

I guess you mean "brutally stringent US anti-spam laws" and "US federal task force". Which might have helped a little, locally in the US. But would have made no difference to the rest of the world. Most of the spam I receive here in Denmark is sent from somewhere else, and claims sender addresses from yet another place.

I am past 60 now, and still (!) reading a lot. When moving to a smaller apartment, I got rid of most of my books, only keeping those that I felt I would want to read again. These days I get almost all of my books from the local library. If I have read a book twice, and think I might read it twice again, I consider buying a copy. But OK, I live in Copenhagen, where we have a great public library system, and the university libraries are available

Fun fact: i grew up in Finland many years ago, and Abloy was the standard lock just about everywhere. We used to laugh at American films where apartment door locks could be opened with a plastic card or easily picked.

Most of the comments here seem to be about how high our 25% VAT is. But for that we get all kind of services. I can order almost any book at the library, and they get it for me, even from very far away. Free of charge. And free education and health care as well.

I suffered from sleep apnea for many years. Breathing problems often triggered nightmares, several times a night. A CPAP machine changed my life, I could finally get a whole nights sleep, and the nightmares stopped. I can still recognize an apnea nightmare, which I get if I don't use the machine. Sleep apnea is known to increase many medical problems and to shorten life. I guess other conditions could also provoke nightmares.

I have met a few people whom I would say were in the 10x category. What they had in common was a deep understanding of the technology and the domain they worked in, and a very humble attitude - certainly not bragging about being better than the rest. And a certain dislike of getting into management.

We already have a system - not perfect, but ok - for dealing with academic fraud. This kind of tricks should be considered on the same level as falsifying data, or bribing peer reviewers. Huge mark against the guy, making sure his career ends there.

Couple of years ago I bought a FairPhone 4. It has replaceable battery, and almost everything else. I am not sure about guarantees, but the company is still supporting previous versions. It can be opened without tools for battery and sim card access, and the rest just needs one screwdriver. Unless it gets stolen or seriously broken, I hope to keep it for 5 or 10 years more. Extra bonus is their policy of fairness, taking care where they source their materials and components from.

Also from the Finnish news: The police is investigating this as a crime, the ship is being held back both for the criminal investigation, and now also for a private suit from the cable owners. 9 members of the crew are forbidden to leave the country (a bit less severe than getting arrested). They have found traces of a dragging anchor that are over 100km long, and the anchor itself right where the ship was stopped. Even if they can not prove it intentional sabotage, the ship owner is still responsible for the damage it caused. The authorities are carefully not blaming Russia, at least until they have all their evidence laid out. It may be difficult to prove Russian influence. But there is not much question that it was this ship that broke the cables, and it sure doesn't look like an accident.

Once upon a time programmers struggled with writing machine code. Then some clever people came up with a system for specifying what you needed in almost plain English, and the computer would do the rest. It was called COBOL, and coding was never quite the same. But still, programmers were badly needed, and once everyone was on board with these newmodern "plain English" ways of coding, the requirements just escalated so we still had more than enough work to do. After COBOL, ALGOL, and FORTRAN, there came new and improved languages, and yes, the machine coding guys were a dying bunch. But there always was work for people who could make computers do the things that were needed. I guess it will be the same this time...

Could we please get a maximum noise limit on cars, motorbikes, and scooters. At least within city limits.