Take a breath. You seem really worked up over this. It's not healthy to get that invested (so to speak).

The economy always oscillates between boom and bust periods. Government intervention aims to smooth that out, and sometimes it doesn't work well, but this cycle is natural and eternal. Trump is temporary. Political winds shift. These are the waves that we ride.

The notion that "low information voters make critical decisions" is a bit more contentious though. It IS true that the vast majority of voters are not political scientists, and spend most of their time working and engaging with family/entertainment. So, their voting decisions are mostly motivated by party loyalty and/or sales pitches. This is a foundational weakness of democracy, so, it's just something we accept when we choose to operate like one.

In the case of the USA, we are only a democracy at the surface level. Officially we are a "constitutional republic" which keeps the complicated decisions out of the hands of voters who are ill-equipped to understand them, let alone vote on them. Unofficially we are an oligarchy, with all the really important decisions being made by a tight group of super-rich elites. They are neither elected nor appointed and are patriotic only inasmuch as it benefits them to be so. Their value system is starkly amoral, but the self-interest angle is what keeps things going forward. They, unlike everyone else, have the education necessary to make the important decisions, and they know that their wealth evaporates if the economy collapses. That isn't a very noble arrangement, but it IS functional. For the most part.

So relax, these low-information voters are just playing tug-of-war over social issues while the real business of managing the national economy is in the hands of our version of royalty. No amount of rage or awareness-raising on your part will change this, so you may as well just accept it, and figure out your best strategy for adapting to it.

Nuclear reactors use most surface water, not ground water.

Datacentres are no pickier. You can even cool a datacentre with saltwater, you just need a heat exchanger.

Also, closed loop does not evaporate. The loop is not closed if stuff escapes from it.

You're arguing with the actual terminology used in the nuclear industry. "Closed loop" or "closed cycle" designs have the water pumped in a cycle through cooling towers. The towers lose water to evaporation, taking heat with them, but the rest of the water is returned to be reheated again. "Open loop" or "open cycle" designs have no cooling towers. The water is heated and just discharged hot. They consume much more water (over an order of magnitude more), but most of that is returned. Closed loop are more common, but you see open loop in some older designs, and in seawater-cooled reactors.

"How often do you think I print?"

Seemingly not very.

I've printed many hundreds of kg on my P1S, thanks.

I do not consider having to write data out to a card and transport it back and forth between the printer and the computer to be the pinnacle of convenience. That's something that would be considered embarrassingly inconvenient for a 1980s printer, let alone a modern net-connected device. And it's designed to be inconvenient for non-cloud prints for a reason.

Agree. Gemini and Claude are both super useful, so long as they are used properly. I haven't had as much luck with other models, so I stick with these two.

But how you use them, and how much you use them, depends greatly on the nature of your project. It still requires intelligence and skill to use them well, and if you use them poorly the results will burn you. And for some specific parts of a total solution, you simply can't use them, and will need to do those parts yourself. And it is on you to recognize which parts those are.

If you fall into the trap of just letting some tool like Cursor or Claude Code "do it all" for you, you will end up like the people in this article. Both of these are useful tools, but there is no other way to say it: you have to use them wisely. And you have to know what you are doing. If you are using them to solve problems that are too hard for you to solve, you (and your codebase) will drown.

Gamestop charges way too much for used games. I can buy one much cheaper on ebay. Similarly, gamestop pays way too little for used games, and I can sell one for more on ebay. I guess that makes their interest in buying ebay kind of make sense.

The last time I walked into a gamestop I saw walls covered in toys. And trading cards too. The market is clearly shifting.

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

New tech has never and will never benefit workers in-and-of itself.

The only way for workers to reap the benefits of new tech is to force the issue through law and/or unionization.

I am well aware of the problematic nature of unions, and of the problematic nature of over regulation of business. That doesn't change the fact that they are the only two tools we have to improve our working conditions. If we don't use what we have to push for what we want, then we won't get what we want. It's that simple.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

Ageism is illegal. But that isn't stopping Fidelity from ditching the senior level staff to replace them with a bunch of greenies.

I think maybe you are joking. But in any case, I will offer some clarity:

There are rival interpretations that equally account for the experimental data, and some of them include randomness while others are purely deterministic.

For example, the Copenhagen interpretation includes randomness in the vector state collapse (the moment when a particle is "measured" by some interaction with another). Whereas pilot wave theory posits the existence of a zero-volume particle that had a specific position prior to this interaction (giving determinism back). These models differ in other ways of course, but the math DOES work and it covers the experimental data.

So the bottom line is that "quantum mechanics" does not automatically tell us whether or not the universe is deterministic at the "bottom layer." Plenty of scientists have all picked their favorite interpretation, but there is as of yet no experimental data that definitively eliminates the popular rival interpretations.

Most people have an above-average number of limbs.