It's not like we didn't have police, just not what we think of as a modern police force. We had organized law enforcement consisting of sheriffs and constables, with the power to deputize when needed.

This is much the same as we didn't have organized fire brigades, instead we had government officials with the power to organize a response to fires by recruiting more manpower from the populace to fight fires.

Asking if we need a police force because we didn't previously have one is like asking if we need a fire department because previously we only had an informal volunteer fire department. These things only worked in the past because the need was small enough that we didn't have the economy of scale to support a professional firefighting or police force, but with growth, the professionalization required necessitated the formation of these things.

Also the "cops are just slavecatchers" thing is a largely made up and exaggerated talking point by the far left that they repeat ad-nauseum. The first professional police forces in the US were formed in northern cities like Boston and were decidedly *NOT* slavecatchers, but rather organized out of groups normally deputized to enforce the law, turning them into professional employees -- in much the same way a volunteer fire department becomes a full time employer in cities that grow enough to need it.

Some early southern professional police and sheriff departments *were* constituted out of slave patrols, as these were people who were often deputized, but these were not the first police departments, nor did they constitute the majority of them, not even in the south.

Why not say "School starts when the sun has been up for one hour. During these months school starts at 16:00 TAI, and in these months it starts at 17:00 TAI.

Use the time measurement consistently. Imagine "daylight saving length" where "For these months, start measuring things as one inch longer" and having to change how everything is measured..

The vast, vast majority of Americans don't live in "remote areas". They live in towns with infrastructure, and don't drive long distances except for the occasional road trip (a rarer thing these days). While the typical American daily travel experience is a longer distance than in the rest of the world, this is by virtue of car-centric infrastructure, with more people in other developed countries walking or taking public transit, but among people who *do drive* in other countries, it's not a huge difference in terms of how far people drive in a typical journey.

In terms of cold temperatures, the performance differences are vastly overstated by ICE apologists. The country with the highest EV adoption in the world is Norway, a country not exactly known for its mild winters, particularly on the coastline facing the Atlantic. I've lived in a cold climate myself and know the experience well of spending much of the year with my gasoline-powered vehicle's auxiliary heater plugged into an electric socket just to keep the vehicle from freezing, but for some reason that constant energy use was never figured into the calculations. With batteries, you know your range will go down a bit, though that is being mitigated somewhat with newer battery chemistries, and you figure that into the range of the battery capacity when you buy the vehicle.

Resale value is the only point I'll concede, but that's really more a factor of how fast the tech has been developing vs the very mature ICE technology. The exact same thing happened with early gasoline automobiles. As the tech matures you'll see the market for used EVs stabilize, and this is already happening somewhat.

An EV from ten years ago is now very usable on its old battery pack. When you buy an ICE vehicle, you look at the odometer and if it has a lot of miles on it you figure the reduced reliability into the price you're willing to pay. EVs have far more mechanical reliability, so you're more figuring in the functional range on the battery pack in the price you're willing to pay rather than the remaining lifetime on the engine.

I'm sure that statement is correct in that the encryption algorithm itself is secure, but there is probably a backdoor that got put in when the French government arrested the CEO, then mysteriously released him.

He wasn't saying "ban the car". He was saying "end car dependency." which means constructing multiple modes of transport with the same amount of priority, so that people can choose from the modes that are available, as opposed to building a massive network for cars and only token transit, if at all. People use good transit when it's available, the problem is that the US tends to build either crappy transit or none at all.

This is true, people go to Australia all the time.

Most US city centers have rail going through them. Freight rail. To some degree the land is already available if you're willing to take it back from the freight companies.

VRChat is everything Metaverse was trying to be, and is wildly successful. It succeeds because it is directly created through user demand, rather than a top down approach that considers users as a necessary evil at best, or a product to be actively sold at worse.

The reason for the chicken pox/shingles issue is that if you contract the VZV it colonizes your nervous system and remains latent. It periodically reactivates and sort of gives you a free exposure over the years, basically a recurring booster shot.

People have been fine with this in the past but some researchers suspect that the latent infection has long term potential damage and there could be a benefit in preventing a latent infection in the first place. (Similar issues with latent herpes infection have been posited, but there's currently no herpes vaccine.)

I'm happy to pay taxes for a public education system that works. Unfortunately, what we have today is a system encumbered by too many administrators, hampered by unfunded mandates, exploited by public unions, and micromanaged from every level from (superfluous) department heads to district administration to state legislators to the federal government.

From 2010-2019, the number of administrators in public schools nearly doubled, while the number of students and teachers only went up by ~8%. Those administrators generally cost a whole lot more than classroom teachers. To justify their salaries (and their staff), they are always chasing the latest fads in public education, whether it's "social emotional learning," Chromebooks, "student support time," AVID, teaching kids to "analyze texts", abandoning math facts and phonics, or "diversity/equity/inclusion" programs, each at tremendous expense both in dollars and disruption. The amount of inefficiency and waste is staggering.

And that's just on the local level. State and federal mandates, or "money with strings attached," adds tremendously to the cost, while burdening the actual teaching. What have we got in return for these enormous costs? Just about nothing. Part of the problem is that, since it's a government program, all the political incentives are front-loaded, and there's little incentive to review what has been done, and to weed out what isn't working. NCLB didn't move the needle. Neither did ESSA. Common Core was a disaster, and Race to the Top didn't help, either. More standardized tests, and linking funds to test scores, only provided perverse incentives. But we are still operating under the burdens they imposed.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in your post that public school is the only way for kids to develop a sense of civic engagement, social skills, new friendships, independence, meeting people from all social strata.

Certainly, a public school *can* be such an environment. However, over the past few decades, I've watched public schools (at least in the US) devolve into an environment where independence is quashed, left-leaning (or outright far-left) values are taught as doctrine, and students are given little time to actually socialize in meaningful ways, all while teachers' administrative burden (and our taxes to support it) continues to rise and core academic rigor is neglected.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint. The whole "socialization" argument is one of those urban myths that has long outlived any relationship with reality. In our local elementary school, the kids get a single recess per day. When they arrive for school in the morning, they are expected to sit silently in the hallway outside their classroom until the teacher lets them in. Their lunch period is so short that there's barely enough time to down their lunch, let alone talk with their peers.

My kids are homeschooled, but have one foot in the public school world for electives. As a result, we get to observe both sides, and what we see is a dramatic difference in social skills. For example, two weeks ago, at a birthday party, about half the attendees were homeschooled, and the other half were public schooled. The homeschooled kids were generally engaged, respectful, and having a great time. The public school kids? They could hardly utter a full sentence without someone blurting out "6-7!" and were actively trying to disrupt and ruin the party for everyone else, including the birthday kid. Individually, kids from either side can be great. In a group setting, however? I'll take the homeschoolers every time. They've escaped the herd mentality that a public school system engenders.

Because of the time efficiency of homeschooling, my kids have plenty of time for extracurriculars, free time, and part-time work. When it comes to "socialization," (however you define it), that part-time job, working around adults, provides tremendously greater value than being surrounded by 2,500 other hormonal, brains-not-yet-fully-developed teenagers who are trying to define themselves and understand how they fit in the world.

You're confusing the task with the mechanism. Classic autoconplete uses statistical methods, often using some variant of a Bayesian algorithm. The task is to predict the next word, the method is statistics.

But if I asked *you* to predict the next word in a sentence, you would not be using a simple statistical method. Neither is the AI. It doesn't have the breadth of multi domain training data that your neutral network has, so it doesn't really think like a human does, but the way it functions is much closer to your brain than it is to a classical autoconplete.

It's hard to stress enough how profound that difference is.

If I may offer a modification to your statement, it would be that car infotainment systems age poorly. Not the cars themselves. I currently own three examples that have aged quite well. All are near or over 20 years old. New enough to have OBD-2 and great reliability and repairability, old enough to be focused on real utility and avoid the invasion of useless (or worse) tech and complication. No $700 LED tail lights or $1500 mirrors with cameras, or everything-is-a-module-connected-to-the-canbus. Now get off my lawn! :)

Why not deploy more, cheaper, less efficient AI processors, but run it only during the daytime when the solar farms are pumping out excess energy? It won't be the highest performance and have more heat output but you don't have to worry about energy availability or build grid storage infrastructure to support it. You could then offer it at a discount for customers that are willing to wait a little longer for training tasks to complete.

This is obviously not good for on-demand inference tasks (e.g. talking to AI customer support agent), but inference is orders of magnitude less demanding on the hardware.