The ones that the writers of the piece liked.

There's a continuing narrative that we hate journalists because of "malign influence" or some bullshit. That people are rubes, easily manipulated, and if political leaders would just take charge and prevent the "wrong" media, people would love journalists, politicians, etc. But people came by their distrust honestly. For much of my adult life, journalists have talked down to their audience (when it was a mass audience, anyway, before it fractured into pieces). I still remember Peter Jennings, in 1994, sourly lecturing viewers on how they voted the wrong way. The tone was very much Just what do you people think you're doing, anyway?.

Trust in these institutions is gone, and probably will never return in my lifetime. And it's entirely the fault of the people in those institutions. No one else.

Arrogance gave you Brexit. Your side wouldn't listen to voters, and you and the entire political class that you align yourself with called them oafs, and fools, and generally discounted their concerns and told them to know their place. THAT got you Brexit. And that fact that you still haven't learned this... that you still can't admit defeat, that you still look down on "them" as dirty, unwashed masses that should conform to their betters' wishes, that you continue to blame your loss on sinister outside forces instead of your own shortcomings... means that you'll almost certainly make the same mistakes again.

I suspect none of you did so I will summarize it:

Everything humans do that keeps us alive is killing the planet and making it uninhabitable. Farming, fishing, transportation, building, heating, cooling, everything. Literally everything about human existence is killing the planet.

The report doesn't even say we need to cut back on this n that to level XYZ (which would obviously require billions fewer people alive for any useful XYZ, anyway). It just says it all kills the planet.

So, uh, ok, thanks...? What are we supposed to do with that information? All just die? Stop eating? Stop farming?

If there was a useful and actionable set of advice, then great, we could examine the list and see what we can do. There isn't really. It's all just "humans are bad".

One thing I thought was interesting is everyone who helped write, review, edit, joined discussions, wiped someone's ass, was called out and thanked by name. Their funding sources got a 2 sentence shrug off. Anonymous, apparently. If I had donated millions to some large group of people to produce a report about the coming destruction of the planet I'd think I might like a quick "hey thanks" at least or something like the people who contribute to my local theatre get. I know what each contributor to my theatre gives every year, by name, but here, nothing. No names, no numbers. Call me cynical or whatever but follow the money was always a good idea.

Intel banks on Apple publicly saving an American trainwreck to butter up the orange utan for favors.

That's it. It's the only strategy here. None of this would happen absent Trump.

My reputation? On slashdot? LMAO! That is the funniest thing I've heard here in a long time. This is a totally dead social media site. There's only a few dozen repeat posters and a few more who very rarely post on specific topics. And 99% of are anonymous posting under some silly alias or worse literally posting anonymously. There are more sock puppets here than real people. If I cared about my "reputation" among a group of mostly brainwashed leftists I could easily karma whore my way to excellent karma and keep it there forever by posting the same easily refuted nonsense others post here all the time. You can score a +5, informative here without a link, without a statement of fact, just bash the right and the troll mod sock puppets crawl out of the wood work to +5, virtue signal the post. Happens every day. But post a solid fact they don't like backed by a reliable link? Oh, it's instant -1, troll from the same intellectually bankrupt clowns.

My reputation? What a weird thing to say. Are you concerned about your slashdot "reputation"? If so, why? No one here has a reputation.

Now then back to the drought topic, I already said California has varying climates. That includes drought zones. And there's nothing about those which has ever been consistent either. Drought might be for a season or many many years. And then it rains a lot, the reservoirs refill, hopefully, and everything is ok until next time. The only thing consistent is the inconsistency of the rainfall and drought patterns. There is no pattern to the droughts, they are not predictable.

Invasive species... ah yes... are you aware that pretty much EVERY species currently in California is not native? Go back to before Europeans showed up and most of the plant life was entirely different. Not 100% but most. And what could possibly have an effect on drought, the water tables, rain fall, the snow pack, etc, etc? It couldn't be humans changing the entire water system, could it? At least check over 90% of the available water goes to the farms. To make dumb shit like water thirsty cash crops like almonds. And a huge number of those almonds get shipped out over seas. So California in a sense is literally shipping water to other countries. Yet they're a drought heavy state. No one can make it make sense. The state's forest and water policies are fucking crazy.

The best thing we can do for the forests is leave them the fuck alone. Stop building cities literally inside forests. Stop stomping out every little fire. Do go back to controlled burns, cutting fire breaks, thinning out older areas with logging to keep those huge old trees from becoming the source of fuel for next mega fire, stop running fucking high power lines through forests. Jfc, these are not hard things to figure out.

Will there still be fires and even sometimes a huge fire? Yes. Will there be way way fewer huge fires and much less horrific damage done to both people and the forests? Overall, absolutely, yes. But it requires intelligent forest management which the state hasn't seen since I was a kid.

Which country was that those evil Jews are committing genocide in?

My .sig is for you.

Hey, you know the Middle East used to have Jews everywhere, right? Until they were genocided and ethnically cleansed from every single country. That's something you've written a lot about and upsets you greatly, right?

Hey, maybe if it was the other way around and them darned Jews crossed into Gaza and fucked up a peace and love music festival, committed untold atrocities (which they filmed and released online themselves just like Hamas did), brutally gang raped and murder countless women and children, dragged naked corpses of young women around while cheering, and then kidnapped a few hundred of them for further rape and torture, then maybe you'd be on the Jew side of those because that's the kind of action you support.

And what happens when the enemy kills your satellites?

Now, I completely agree that stealth is overemphasized, but stealth is just part of a larger problem. The US military, particularly the Air Force, has a seriously bad tendency to rely on "magic bullet" solutions... a hyper-expensive technology that they think will win wars in a single blow.... instead of taking a layered approach that mixes new solutions with old. Which is important, because, war after war, we have to relearn the painful lesson that magic bullets tend to fail.

The F-4 Phantom not only met expectations, but far exceeded them, to the point that the USAF adopted it (even though it hurt their pride being a Navy program). McDonnell started the design in 1955, the prototype rolled out in 1958, and it entered USN and USMC service in 1960. After it was bloody obvious that the F-4 was far better than anything the USAF had in it's so-called Century Series of fighters, USAF adopted it in 1962 and their initial version... the F-4C... entered frontline service in 1963. It would dominate USAF's tactical fighter wings, with F-4's making up 16 of their 24 wings at one time. All on time, and on budget, with multiple versions being developed along the way (notably the RF-4 photo reconnaissance aircraft, and USAF's ant-surface to air missile "Wild Weasel" F-4G versions).

China is more reliant on satellites in this case.

As the defender they're subject to all their land based targets getting smashed with non satellite based targeting as opposed to a carrier group moving at 33+ knots putting planes in the air which can strike from 500+ miles away without in air refueling and use radar, lasers, inertial guidance and other non gps targeting systems.

For fleet vs fleet action, China doesn't have a fleet to speak of. These silly comparisons of number of ships is just dumb. Very few of their ships are blue water capable, most are them are the equivalent to our coast guard vessels and none of them stands a chance against a blue water navy.

Their first 2 air craft carriers are crap they used to figure out how to build one. Their third is barely seaworthy, vastly inferior by every metric to US older carriers much less vs a new Ford class carrier. They carry fewer planes, run on liquid fuel not nuclear so range and endurance are very limited, they misbuilt their deck layout so they can't use more than one runway at a time. They have zero navy combat experience or training or any form of doctrine. Their pilots have near zero flight time compared to American and no combat experience, doctrine or training. Their weapon systems are completely untested in the real world. And generally speaking everything else they make is second rate tofu dreg but we're supposed to believe their military is different. Ok, sure, cool story.

Food: yes we subsidize food. Specifically corn. What does that have to do with anything? That's a weird thing to say; very non sequitur.

The CCP are fucked. It's only a matter of time before Xi dies of something or is simply executed/disappeared like so many other CCP (former) men of power. Once that happens I hope we have produced enough of that subsidized food to help out the Chinese people until they can form a healthy government and not suffer another of Mao's 50 million dead from starvation events.

Back to the military stuff for a bit: please do some reading. You won't find detailed facts about either military on random American hating sites. There are many military focused web sites and YouTube channels that can explain everything in much greater detail than I can in a single post on a dead social media site like this. If you're honestly interested the information is out there and it bodes very poorly for China's future both in any serious combat and in general as a country over the next 10-20+ years. Their goose is cooked.

This site. Became a left wing echo chamber long ago. Remember all the complaining about politics infecting our technology discussions? We were rudely told off that the personal is the political and there can be no neutrality in the age of King George W., the president who was literally Hitler. Remember when we used to have actual NASA scientists comment on space articles? Drove them all off, with the rest of the dotcom era crowd. And I've been reading this site since it was a web log called Chips N Bits. I've been nodded into the dirt by a behind the scenes cabal who silence anyone to the right of Mao. If you wonder why there aren't 500 comments, a decade of far left politics replacing tech topics is the reason. I think I'm about done, too. I eventually left EFnet IRC and I'll leave Slashdot too. A relic of a bygone age. This entire comment thread is the hard Left whining they don't get their way. Politics instead of tech.You killed Charlie Kirk and it's OVER. Americans are sick of your shit. Go find another country, you can't stay here with us, that much is clear. Go now and lick the hand that feeds ye, and may history forget ye were oura countrymen.

Way mo fire than you bargained for

I mean, you make a decent point. But, using the [I admit, arguably appropriate] term "luddites" just makes you sound like a pretentious, wine sniffing prick.

When AI throws tens of millions of people out of work...

You mean 6.1 million, right?

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+truck+drivers+in+us
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+uber+and+lyft+drivers+in+us

Having come out of the tech startup world, met many VCs and done some work for a few, I must note that VCs are not people who can differentiate between good and bad investments.

They don't know anything about tech. They don't know anything about business. They don't know anything about anything. The entire VD business model is to put money into lots of things with the understanding that most of their investments will go to zero and hopefully hit one out of the park every so often which makes up for all the losers.

VCs are just playing a version of the lottery but for business investing.

If a VC told me 2+2=4, I'd wonder if our entire system of math had changed because VCs spend most of their careers being wrong.

Does China make better stuff than the west? They make it cheaper but it's state subsidized so that's fake cheaper. Is it higher quality? Uhm, no, hardly ever. Are they making better batteries? Not the ones they put in their EV's that lack the safety designs western ones have. Are they making better solar panels? Absolutely not. US and Canadian panels are vastly superior. But they are making tons more shitty panels which will have to be landfilled much sooner than the Us/Canada panels and produce much less power over time.

Someone posted something about the Chinese military being superior. Jesus Christ... no. Where do you get this stuff from? They have a larger useless land army. They have tons of completely untested stuff they cloned from Russian designs (see how well those are doing in Ukraine) or based on US equipment they got from Afghanistan that doesn't actually work. They can't build a proper fleet. The idea they can sink a US air craft carrier from thousands of miles away is ridiculous. They'd be lucky to get within 50 miles of one once a war started and all the satellites went offline.

And China has a huge demographic bubble that's at the leading edge of bursting. I've been waiting 20 years for this, in another 5-10 it'll hit big time when the average worker age sky rockets along with the number of elderly who can't work anymore but still need to eat. Maybe they'll just let hundreds of millions starve, I dunno, but the one child policy was dumb and they're about to pay the piper for that one.

I have absolutely zero concern this is ""China's century" or they're going to displace the US or any such thing. I'm not enjoying watching the decline for the average Chinese but I am getting a kick out of watching the CCP and Xi make an endless series of reactive and dumb decisions which is leading to the CCP's destruction. Maybe after the mandatory period of chaos when a large government falls, they can have a decent republic/democracy of some sort. One can only hope. I had hoped Russia might go that way but the strong man corruption thing was too engrained in their culture.

I, for one, am glad SOMEONE has stepped in to defend the evil megabillion dollar corporation and tell off the little guy. But you go! Speak truth to the powerless!