I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or not, so I'll err on the side of naivete. The construction and operational validation has been paid for, which is the largest part of the cost. The ongoing costs are things like salaries, materials and supplies for subsequent operation, maintenance, and improvements, which are far smaller.

There is no scientist I have ever met who thought LIGO was, in the end, a poor choice of investment of national research funds. There were plenty prior to its stunning first detection (myself included) who thought they were chasing ghosts, but all of those doubters have been converted. The important thing to understand is that LIGO's contributions weren't just detection of a black hole merger (in itself, a hugely important event because it demonstrated the hypothesized existence of gravitational waves), but the establishment of a new field of astronomy based on gravitation, an entirely new means to observe the universe that provides information previously completely unobtainable. Our eyes have been opened where we were previously blind, and the ongoing results are, and continue to be, astounding.

There's a nice fact sheet summary at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/s...

I can't remember the last time I pirated something from HBO MAX, let alone paid for it. What shows do they even have?

For clarity:

Possession is zero tenths of the law.

I've been using it to write grant applications, and I share your opinion. It frequently makes mistakes (and 5 is worse in many ways than 4o). While it can certainly be used to create a rough draft of a document, the result is similar to what you would expect from a junior associate, with the same kinds of mistakes that create an, "OMG, no," response in the reader when it starts to make things up.

There was a lot of talk about how rapidly it would accelerate in performance. That progress seems to have stalled this year. I have a hard time thinking that we've started to see the ultimate asymptote of performance, but it seems like we've hit a region where the easy, early gains have all been made.

EBay is your friend. Plenty of them available there!

It isn't just that new factories are fully automated, it's that they must be so in order to be competitive. The only way manufacturing in America can be competitive to manufacturing in low-wage / already-automated countries is through automation. The era of factories being built with lots of human employees is gone, and even in the industries we thought would never fall to automation, robotics is making significant inroads. Why? People are just too expensive.

There is a lot of backlash against p-values. I won't enter that argument here.

But, accepted standards are that p-values need to be below 0.05 in order to be taken seriously in a biological study, and, even then, they aren't that strong until they get substantially smaller. (Note that in physics, they've been burned so many times by crappy significance values that the standard there is 5 sigma, or about p = 0.0000003.)

This paper, according to the summary, reported an effect at p = 0.079. That's substantially above p = 0.05. Me, I probably wouldn't publish anything at that p-value, but take my licks and move on to the next study, having learned how to design better experiments.

When I worked at the DNC, our practices for composing the email list left a lot to be desired. They were notionally opt-in, we didn't intentionally buy spam lists, but if "someone" dropped your email address into a form on our web page, we didn't ask twice. And I know for sure that a couple of my own email addresses that should not have found their way onto the list did so, seemingly by collection from downstream politicians' lists who had been even more careless about their list collection. I doubt that has changed for the better.

As near as I could tell, the RNC's practices were worse.

In the US, bus rides take far more time than driving because of the very frequent stops. Where I live, many urban bus lines stop every two blocks, suggesting that there's some underlying requirement that a passenger need not walk more than a block to the bus, which I find to be an absurdly low bar. Frequent stops not only make the bus ride take longer, they shatter any hope of the vehicle being efficient, importantly including the metric of particulate emissions from brakes and tires.

The subway, where I live, when underground, stops every half mile or so. When above-ground, it starts to act like a bus, again, which, again, is absurd, and deleteriously impacts both service quality and efficiency.

Until the number of stops for buses and trams is reduced, there's no possible way to make above-ground public transportation time-efficient for passengers, even with dedicated lanes on the road.

Why the venom towards academia?

More importantly, why is this post not marked 0: Flamebait? It's an ad-hominem attack based on almost no information, and certainly not an objective assessment of the interview or the book.

Yes, office real-estate owners are suffering right now. Know who else is? Everyone who has a 401k or pension fund that's invested in REITs, which is the vast majority of them, and thus, a heapload of people with pension funds. Does that justify a hypothetical ginning-up of RTO opinion? No, but attacking real-estate owners are deeply evil is stabbing oneself (or your siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, etc) in the foot. Don't have a retirement plan yourself? Well, that's just poor planning.

Why such disdain for experts? Are you not an expert in something? Do you not have skills that rise above others in some domain? Do you think your opinion on those matters are valuable, and if so, why can't someone else have a valuable opinion on their domain of expertise? If you need legal advice, do you not seek out someone who has spent years studying the law? If you need work done on your car, do you not seek out someone with years of experience with your model? If you need heart surgery, don't you want your surgeon to have done that operation thousands of times? If you fly in a plane, don't you want the pilot to have many thousands of hours of experience?

Or do you somehow think that being an expert in some field automatically means classification as an idiot? I pity anyone who thinks that to be true, because they don't realize how much they benefit from expertise every minute of every day.

I'm always trying to sleep when aurora displays might be visible in-flight, but thanks for the fantastic idea, should insomnia ever strike.

Flying westward, I was fortunate enough once to have had a window seat with a flight path that just kissed the southern tip of Iceland or Greenland (I'm not sure which). It was a brilliantly clear day, and you could see the flow lines of the glaciers and where they calve off into the ocean. It was one of the most beautiful natural scenes I have ever seen. Praise be to $diety, indeed.

The Godfather is on Paramount+. Scarface is on Hulu. The Wizard of Oz is on HBOMax and Hulu. The Dam Busters (1955) can be rented or "purchased" from Amazon Prime. I don't disagree with all of your points, but your list of movies are all streamable.

The top-most gear in a modern car locks the torque converter so you get the same efficiency as a manual transmission in the same gear.

The editors fly Spirit, maybe?

It's a guess. I know someone who used to work at Spirit in their IT department (QA in particular). After working there for a while, he emphatically told me to fly any other airline.

Patrick Winston, one of the fathers of classical AI, was known for famously, and derisively, predicting that we would have a microprocessor in every door knob, thanks to the microelectronics revolution. Thankfully, he was mostly wrong as even IoT didn't get quite that far. But it sure feels like AI is going in that direction.

Ferchrissakes, why do we need an AI to autogroup our browser tabs? I mean, WTF?