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Comment Re:Decreased obesity (Score 1) 98

Y'know, it feels intuitive to assume that going through some sort of Massively Traumatic Event (e.g. WW2 or Great Depression) would have depressed survivability, but apparently that's -- again, totally counter-intuitively -- not necessarily supported by studies.

For example, this study comparing Holocaust Survivors lifespans to control group in Israel demonstrated that while Holocaust survivors had more chronic health conditions, "mean age at death was significantly higher in the survivor group compared with the control group."

I've seen some hypothesis that these sorts of massive events sadly cull the population, on average leaving a population that will actually be hardier than otherwise, which ... both makes sense and is a bummer.

Comment Re:Probably people entirely disillusioned (Score 4, Insightful) 160

Good for the MAGA morons, because they can claim "unemployment is down".

Not necessarily. While that is absolutely what the administration will do, and is doing, for a lot of the "angry boomer" set, they will be feeling this on the ground and in their community, and it can lead to one of the cardinal rules of politicking being violated;- "Dont tell the punters that the thing they are experience isnt what they are experiencing". When politicans say "The economy is great, look at this GDP!" but people are feeling like everything is more expensive, their kids cant find jobs, their own job is becoming more insecure, and the rent or mortgage payments keeps going up, then people just get angry and feel like they are being lied to and betrayed, and its that sense of being lied to and betrayed that lead to so many people going "Well this trump guys kind of an asshole, but at least he's honest".

Now, you and I know that "Honest" is literally the opposite of what trump is, but when Trump was out there campaigning that washington technocrats where letting people down, well he wasnt wrong. The institutional Dems and Republicans where very happy to stick with a status quo that had been getting worse and worse for average people ever since the sub prime mortgage crisis. Obama promised hope and change, but other than a marginally better health care system, not much changed. Biden seemed content to just try and fix some, but not all, of Trumps damage from his first term. People where angry, because the technocrats where telling them that "Everythings fine, America is America-ing, everything in its place" , meanwhile jobs where still fleeing offshore, grandma cant afford her diabetes meds, and wages where pegged while inflation ran rampant. Trump promised to fix that. Trump DIDNT fix that, and in fact made it worse, but the promise not the reality is what got him in the door.

There are lessons for Trumps opponents here, but the biggest is, the people on the fence about MAGA and the people who where marginally MAGA *can* be reached, and when the Dems get back in power, they actually need to concretely resolve the anxieties that caused Trump to get in in the first place. Because if America was working, Trump would have been impossible.

Comment Re: Probably for the better in the long run (Score 1) 111

Tell us more about how you're smarter than the experts who actually did what you say they didn't do

Re-read my post. I literally work in climate research so dont go fucking argument-from-authoritying me, you wont win that fight if we have to start pulling out our credentials lol

I am straight up telling you climate scientists are always being asked to tone down findings and make them seem less dire than they are by government funding bodies. That in practice has led to a pretty cautious approach thats lead to the public not being fully aware of just how dire some of this really is. Thats not saying that scientists are *lying* and hiding the severity of climate change, but rather that when tuning models theres an bias against models that predict the more catastrophic outcomes. When I was working with the CSIRO some of the models where up with predictions that basically have us venusing the planet. We tended to not go with those, because our intuition was that if the planet *could* do that, it *would* do that. But we dont know if thats a sane assumption, so those models dont make the cut for publication.

So yeah. we could end up venusing the planet. Probably unlikely, but just so you know. My most educated guess is the full permafrost scenario isnt a complete venusing but rather a 10c rise. Which isnt particularly compatible with human life, but life finds a way. Lets hope we get a grip on things before we DO completely melt the permafrost

Comment Re:Isn't this called (Score 1) 109

Technically its supposed to be the workers seizing the means of production for it to be communism. However in practice this rarely ends up whats happening.During spains brief flirtation with communism prior to getting smashed by Franco, the anarchist CNT-FAI controlled territory was doing this, and by all accounts it was a pretty great thing. But whe spanish communist party territories where just doing state control. But yeah authoritarian-marxist parties historically have not shown a great history of being particularly ... marxist.... about it all,

Also, whats happening here is more Corporatism than Communism. Its more about trying to appease dear leader than it is about sharing the wealth with the country.

Comment Re:You kind of have to (Score 1) 62

Thats actually a really good point. We are far from untangling the legal mess this stuff brings. Fully AI genned code does not have copyright proection at all (My boss was a bit shocked when I pointed this out to him after he vibecoded an internal tool. I also found about 10 different serious vunerabilities in that mess after about 10 minutes of inspection lol. Hey man, this AI shit is existential threat territory for me......) and partial AI genned stuff is ...... still somewhat undefined copyright legality at this stage, because we have *no* idea how those copyright suits will pan out if one of the litigants ever decides to stick it thru. MOST of those cases get settled out of court to avoid precedent.

Comment Re: Spot on... (Score 2) 62

In this particular instance though, the Godot maintainers have been disrespectful to humans attempting to contribute for several years.

Oh nonsense. Godots a huge project with literally thousands of contributors. Theres always a handful of people who are serial garbage submitters in any large project (Ask the kernel people about this, they have a terrible time dealing with this stuff) who throw giant wobblies when their buggy nonsense gets politely declined. Theres also those contributions that arent necessarily bad quality but simply dont fit the plan.

Godot has a particular direction it goes in. If folks want to change that, theres an RFC proposal project and then it goes to the community for review. If the community, particularly the community that have to maintain it, reject it, then its not in.

Fortunately the GDExtension system means its rare that rejected code , if its major feature stuff, has to stay dead, as it can just be made into an extension and placed in the asset library.

Comment Re:The open source world is going to fork bomb (Score 2) 62

Those godot forks dont go far. There was one over..... shit maybe it was the code of conduct or something like that. It had 4, maybe 5 conrtributors. The Godot engine it self has 34 separate teams (Ie "core", "network", "physics") each with their own leads that do pull request merging and eventual pushing shit up towards juan who fills the role of basically linus torvalds for Godot). Its a shockingly big operation these days, and yeah. There was a reasonably larger fork over technical issues but it wasnt a hostile fork, and PRs its smaller changes back to main. Pretty much how most succesful open source projects go.

But the political fork? Yeah all big projects get those, and they always die.

Comment Re:This is the plot for "The Blob", isn't it? (Score 1) 58

There are tons and tons of pathogens with high mortality rates without medical intervention. There are tons of pathogens that only see minimal death rates without active medical intervention because vaccination reduced the penetration that those pathogens have into the community and may have even forced evolution for increased transmissibility in lieu of virulence in order to spread at all.

Comment Re:The reason I got it (Score 4, Informative) 91

It got a lot cheaper compared to what it cost 5 years ago.

Last time I looked at it, the time-of-use rate plan offered by my utility worked out to where the savings would just about pay for the cost of a battery installation right around the time the batteries are pretty much shot. You're also gambling that there isn't going to be any out-of-warranty failures with the inverter/charging equipment before you've achieved ROI, too. Plus if you have to add financing into the mix to pull it off, forget it - then the only entity actually making any money from this scheme is the damn bank.

Obviously, if you got a subsidy or use an insane amount of power so the savings adds up more quickly, batteries might end up being worth it. Here in Florida though, batteries aren't likely to save you any money, but solar might (again though, you're kind of gambling that a hurricane isn't going to trash your panels).

Comment Re:Global Warming is Hitting Florida Hard (Score 1) 124

Those of us who practically live along the coasts

Thats why we dont ask people who dont ("practically") live on the coast. We fucking measure it.

For reference, the sea levels have rose 7 inches since the 1970s. Wont seem much if your coast is a wall. But if your on a beach thats has an angle repose of 5-6 degrees, then you just lost 15 feet of beach.

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