Multilateral agreements, be they about peace or trade, are dead, even if a sane guy gets in the white house in a few years. No one wants to take the risk of signing something with the US only to have it be torn up when the next crazy guy gets elected.

It is worse than that.
The idiot re-negotiated the North American Free Treaty (NAFTA) during his first term, and became USMCA/CUSMA.

Then in his 2nd term he himself is violating it all by imposing tariffs on anything and everything on Canada and Mexico. In other words, he himself is shredding his own agreement.

There are no rules, no laws, no agreements, no trust ...

Even if the American vote in a sane guy the next time, what guarantee does the rest of the world have they will elect someone who is smarter and more evil the elections after that?

We are starting a post world order era, with no rules or decency of any kind, when it comes to dealing with other countries.

First, phase 3 studies are by definition not safety studies, but efficacy studies on a large number of test subjects. Safety studies are phase 1.

Second, ethics guidelines stipulate that you must provide state of the art care for those subjects which do not get the new vaccine, with very tight exceptions. For flu shots, it means that everyone gets a shot, either with a traditional vaccine or the new one, since it is universally accepted outside the new FDA that a classical shot is better than placebo.

And of course you can compare the outcomes. Comparing the new vaccine to an established one wrt efficacy and side effects is actually more informative than comparing against placebo.

And that is exactly what JFK Jr has been harping about in his insane rants, before he was appointed by Trump.

He wants every new study to be compared to a placebo.
But, it is unethical to deny someone a treatment that works.
Imagine patients of a certain type of cancer, and a new treatment.
Should we leave the control group without treatment? Or give them whatever is the standard of car for that type of cancer (e.g. radiation, chemo, ...etc).

You know what?
Let us just not do that because a senile lawyer thinks that medical experts are crooks.

Oh, and JFK Jr scared Samoan parents, and kids died because of his anti-vaxx agenda.

There's a lot of hyperbole (imo) about Trump and adjacent stuff.

But this one strikes me as particularly Orwellian / post-truth / straight out of Idiocracy etc

The government running public disinformation campaigns against individual defendants ... and modifying pictures... idk.

It is just the natural progression from putting up easily falsified lies, then defending those lies as "alternative facts".

Don't forget Spicer and Kellyanne Conway.

Yet, people fell for Trump again and gave him another term ...

I will just leave this here: Kessler syndrome.

They have no legal right to coerce a corporation to act on their behalf in doing so, absent a law being passed by Congress, which they have not done.

But ... the USA is now in the fascist era: corporations do the government's bidding.

Recent example: The Ellison owned CBS cancelled the airing of an investigative report on treatment of immigrant detainees.

And the Congress has a majority that acquiesce to the executive branch ... no spine at all ...

Sad, but that is where the US is now ...

As usual, in a gold rush, it is the guys selling shovels and donkeys that make the money ...

In the current AI rush, it is the GPU and RAM manufacturers ...

Lately, HA has focused on voice control, and there seem to be a strong push that yielded some tangible results.

I don't use it myself, so I don't have first hand experience.

But the web site now has a section on voice control.

And there was blog post on it too.

If you search Youtube, you will find people implementing the above too.

I am a Home Assistant user for at least 8 years.

Initially, it was for automating a few things, including existing door/window sensors from a legacy alarm manufacturer. Using RTL-SDR and rtl_433 I was able to intercept the messages, have them decoded, and into Home Assistant over MQTT.

Then it started to be essential for things like: if you leave a door or window open for more than x minutes, it will complain, unless you turn off that automation temporarily.

Now it does many things: Outdoor temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and rainfall. Indoor temperature, humidity, Volatile Organic Compounds, CO2, Radon.

It also emails me a weather forecast in the morning and evening. The contents are aggregated from the weather station, and two different sources for the forecasts (Environment Canada, and Met.no [Norway's weather service which covers the globe]).

It also runs my humidifier in winter, factoring in the values for indoor humidity as well as outdoor temperature (to reduce condensation on the windows).

And it interfaces to my Ecobee thermostat, via HomeKit, so it is cloud-free (not depending on an internet connection at all).

Overall, it is a nifty project. Very useful, very customizable.
My only gripe is that they discontinued support for running from a Python venv. I had to move to a Docker container instead. That made certain things that I have been using for years not work anymore (e.g. voice alerts, sending emails from shell scripts). I created workarounds for those, and they work well.

I wouldn't hold my breath ...

My view is: that battle has been lost, for a long time now ...
Bloat is here to stay ...

Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right though.

Thank you.

Always informative to hear from specialists.

Related to the topic at hand ...

I posted this last year when the topic of dark energy and the acceleration of the expansion came up ...

Anyway ...

Watch Subir Sarkar's lecture on Beyond The Cosmological Standard Model.

Sarkar is a professor at Oxford who has done some interesting work providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is NOT accelerating.

Instead, he is saying that there is a dipole effect because earth, and the galaxy cluster that we are in, are all moving in space, and that gives the effect of accelerating expansion!

He provides compelling evidence (for a non-specialist at least) for what he says and also casts doubts on the evidence for acceleration by analyzing their data (supernovae as standard candles, and their red shift), since a dipole effect is observed on that.

If his hypothesis is confirmed by other research and observations, then the Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter and Adam Reiss maybe for nothing ...

An area to watch for sure ...

FYI ...

Canada lost its measles elimination status this month ...

Because of all the antivaxx disinformation and anti-science stance, problems that were basically solved are coming back ...

Now that I know this from reading TFA, the next time I find myself in the position of kidnapping someone for their Bitcoin, the first thing I'm gonna do is knock their teeth out with a pipe wrench.

Thanks, Slashdot. You've made my career of being a terrible person that much easier. :)

I will do you one better ...

Just tie their hands behind their back. No gnawing can get one out of that ...

You owe me 20% of the Bitcoin you get that way ...

Our modern Western economies are messed up.

But even before modern economics, inflation was a fact of life.
See what a house sold for in 1850 vs. 1900 vs. 1950 vs. now.

The modern era of economics started with unpegging of paper currency from gold started this cascade of events.
From that point, money was worth what the country as a whole produced.

And we have this continued growth imperative, otherwise it is called a recession.

That is why people not spending money is 'bad' in the view of modern economics.
Because spending money goes into other people's jobs.
If everyone sits on their money, then goods will not be sold, and no services will be delivered, making other people's jobs' vanish.

But it is what we have, until something better emerges.
Just like democracy ...

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

Inflation is not a tax, despite many holding onto this notion.
Some inflation is good, when it is no more than 1-2% per year.

In our current Western economies that are based on continued growth, if there is deflation, then people will defer spending since the money they have today will have more buyer power tomorrow.

Japan is such a case: they have been in deflation for decades. Read up on the effects that made on society.

Another issue with no inflation is that there is no borrowing costs, and some investors will abuse this to gobble up real estate (e.g. some investors bought high rise rental buildings, then raised the rent, making it unaffordable for regular people.
Other people will buy homes, and the unnatural influx of buyers will raise the price for other people.

That is why central banks use interest rates as a tool to curb excessive inflation.

Under 2% inflation is the least bad of the options available.