Does anyone have a source for the non-degree holding unemployment rate being 6.9? That's a very interesting piece of the puzzle.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

1,006 megawatt-hours total. I guess they used all that up, so now they're closing it.

It also rounds out the teams nicely: Red, Green, and now Blue.

What is .xyz?

Hype.

"So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only âoeutilityâ for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."

https://www.usenix.org/publica...

Ah yes, the disgusting and false refuge of Chinese (and Russian) apologists and propagandists to the worst abuses of authoritarians: âoethe US does it too.â

These abuses are not âoeallegedâ; they are happening, and they are not based on dubious âoeresearchesâ [sic]:

https://www.propublica.org/art...

There is a genocide happening in Xinjiang; one that is erasing an entire culture, language, religion, and history of a people.

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Use https://feedly.com/

When Google killed Reader, I did, and never looked back.

From: Dr. Tara C. Smith

I've also seen this misrepresented already. "SARS-CoV-2 RNA was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic & asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the DP but before disinfection procedures had been conducted"

Say it with me: *viral RNA doesn't necessarily mean live virus was present.* Now you're going to see "coronavirus can live on surfaces for 17 days!" over and over, but we don't know that based on this study and for those using live virus, it's much shorter.

https://twitter.com/aetiology/...

...and while it sounds great, it's been a disaster for funding the needs of the educational mission of the university:

https://badgersunited.org/key-...

When Kwast says things like, "The technology is on the engineering benches today. But most Americans and most members of Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what is going on here. But I've had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these scientists. This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour," the only thing he can be talking about that has a connection to reality is something like what SpaceX proposes with Starship:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zq...

What does Data's evil brother have to do with this?

In an nVidia video about this they show a green screen mode. The system knows the camera field of view and projects a green screen (with tracking markers) over only that area. The rest of the surrounding scene is displayed normally so that lighting and reflections are consistent.

It's not supposed to be "impressive", and if the amount of plastic in the oceans has certain environmental consequences, the Earth doesn't do per capita calculations when deciding environmental impacts.

But yes, by all means: let's keep focusing on straws and bags, ignoring China and India on greenhouse gas emissions -- because they are "developing", or they have more people -- and rejecting nuclear power.