"Act of God" is a legal term of art. You should be blaming lawyers and governments.

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.

"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?

I'm not going to deny most anti-social media and too much screen time is bad for humans, especially kids. The suggestion you make to have kids spend more time outside is great -- although it is difficult to implement if all the other kids they might play with are inside, and if parents nowadays face arrest for "neglect" if they encourage their children to learn independence outside the home. See the book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" and "In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness" for example.

All that said, there is a deeper issue here, which is that robotics and other automation including AI are changing the very nature of our economy, and "modern" schools were invented in Prussia in the 1800s for a very specific purpose of making most people into obedient cannon fodder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Underground History of American Education: Chapter 7 The :Russian Connection
https://archive.org/details/Jo...
"John Gatto Prussian Education"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
      The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte â" one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
      In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ...
      Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. ..."

And to do that, modern school teachers mainly teach seven lessons:
https://www.informationliberat...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. ..."

But do we still need to shape children to become compliant Prussians? As I wrote in 2007:
"Why educational technology has failed schools"
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
        But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [See John Taylor Gatto's writing on that.] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
          But then, with so much produced for so little effort [thanks to a post-industrial information age productivity], perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
    But then is compulsory schooling [designed mainly to turn human beings into compliant robots] really needed when people live in such a [post-industrial] way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

Got me curioser, so I googled it. One source said what I thought:

https://www.scientificamerican...

"Because gravity is necessary for density differences to arise, neither buoyancy nor convection occur in a zero-gravity environment such as space. Consequently, the combustion products accumulate around the flame, preventing sufficient oxygen from reaching it and sustaining the combustion reaction. Ultimately the flame goes out."

and

"Researchers learned that flames extinguish themselves."

and

"Oxygen could still reach a flame in a gravity-free environment if someone blew the gas into the flame or let it "diffuse" in. It is the diffusion process that spreads the scent of a perfume in a room without air circulation: the perfume slowly mixes with the air to try to achieve a uniform distribution. This process, however, is too slow to sustain a flame."

Other sites don't directly contradict this, but say fires in the ISS are dangerous because smoke doesn't rise and set off smoke detectors on ceilings like in homes, so they install smoke detectors in the ventilation ducts. Also that fires on the ISS can survive on lower levels of oxygen than humans, and thus are much more dangerous if they linger on. That's confusing; if the smoke doesn't rise, then wouldn't it smother the fire like the first site says? But if the ISS has moving air from ventilation ducts, maybe that is what feeds oxygen to the fires.

Thanks for tricking me into not being so lazy :-) But all I learned is that I don't know.

Doesn't weightlessness make fires much less dangerous, since heat no longer rises and can't suck in the oxygen they need?

Yeah, but if you figure many households have kids or elderly non-drivers, if it was roughly two people per household per car, then the high speed rail budget would be about $10K per household, which is in the range of the latest Chinese electric vehicles (without tariffs):

Example from: https://money.usnews.com/inves...
====
The average new car in the U.S. in March had a list price of $51,456, according âOEto Kelley Blue Book.

In China, there are more than 200 battery-powered models, including hybrids, for sale at less than the equivalent of $25,000, according to DCar, an information and trading âplatform.

Reuters compiled a list of the five best-selling electric vehicles in China that start under $12,000 using DCar data.

These small EVs aren't available for sale in American showrooms - and may never be - but for about the price of an average new car in the U.S., a consumer in China could buy all five of these EVs.

----

Geely [now parent company of safety-focused Volvo] EX2: Starting price, $10,060

The pure electric Geely EX2 was the top-selling model domestically for any kind of âvehicle in 2025.

The small EV comes with a bevy of nifty features: a front trunk, storage compartments throughout the cabin and a 14.6-inch âcentral âtouchscreen running on a system that âGeely developed. The top-trim version âhas a range of about 255 miles on the Chinese test standard.

Known as the "Star Wish" in China, the EX2 was a hit from âits 2024 launch and Geely began sales âin Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand last year.

"When you get in, you don't feel like you are in a small car," auto analyst Felipe Munoz said. "It feels better in terms of quality and bigger in terms of size."
====

It's actually more like 0.75 cars per person in CA looking it up. Admittedly I am doing some handwaving here. But, self-driving cars could pick up some of the slack by making it easier to share a car when needed.

Overall, my point is just to see that there are various surprising alternative options for spending lots of money ostensibly to help people. The point is not so much whether I have the numbers precisely. The point is that they are surprisingly close given *externalities* (like healthcare costs from pollution, the cost of the Persian Gulf deployment force, and so on) which an loosely-regulated market-based system often ignores.

Also, what all this leaves out is that my original argument was that giving people luxury free safer electric cars (almost twenty years ago when I wrote that) may make sense given avoided costs for insurance and healthcare (accidents, pollution).

If you then add another $10K per car from avoiding building high-speed rail, it makes the case even better, and we may be looking at $20k+ avoided costs per better car.

On your point on running up deficits, that's apparently the plan:
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
        "First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus."

Bingo. My essay on that idea from 2009: https://groups.google.com/g/op...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. ..."

The book "Abundance" has an entire section on the failure of high speed rail in California despite ldecades-long government support at all levels. In general, the argument they make is that regulations created in previous generations (to avoid the worst excesses of reckless construction) now get in the way of creating solutions to today's issues like a need for clean energy, improved transportation, and affordable housing. The authors claim the book is written "by liberals, for liberals" and there whole point is to show how a previous generation of "liberals" made it impossible for this generation of "liberals" to get anything done. This also happens in conjunction with conservatives who stop liberal projects by using laws liberals created, since it is much easier to stop things using the law than to make them happen. As another example, the authors say it is common for liberals to do things like put up signs in their yards that say they stand with the homeless while simultaneously voting for zoning policies to defend their property values by making it impossible to build affordable housing (including things like rooming houses, which are often prevented by minimum lot size requirements and also minimum parking area requirements for occupants who generally don't own cars).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller. Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. ..."

Thanks for the great insight on the roots of much artificial scarcity!

You might find this Trackdown episode from 1959 of interest -- as maybe life imitating art?
"A Conman Named [Walter] Trump"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The episode concerned a conman named Walter Trump, who attempted to scam a town out of their hard-earned cash by saying that a meteor storm would destroy the town that evening, and only he could save them. He would do this by building a wall. The name of the episode was "The End of the World.""

Have to wonder if Trump saw it as a teenager?

But, like "The Two Santa Clauses Theory", hard to argue with electoral success (whatever the consequences for the nation or the world)?
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
      "The Republican Party has been running a long con on America since Reagan's inauguration, and somehow our nation's media has missed it - even though it was announced in The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and the GOP has clung tenaciously to it ever since.
        In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ...."

Coincidentally the next story on Slashdot is about infrasound making people feel uneasy:
"The Silent Frequency That Makes Old Buildings Feel Haunted "
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
"What happened, specifically, was this: those exposed to infrasound reported higher irritability, lower interest in the music, and a tendency to rate the music as sadder, irrespective of whether it was the calming or the horror track. Cortisol levels, measured before and about 20 minutes after exposure, were also elevated. Kale Scatterty, the PhD student who led the work, notes that irritability and cortisol do tend to move together under ordinary stress, but adds that "infrasound exposure had effects on both outcomes that went beyond that natural relationship." That distinction matters more than it might seem. Previous theories about infrasound and paranormal experience have often leaned on anxiety as the explanatory mechanism, the idea that low-frequency sound triggers a kind of free-floating dread that the mind then reaches for supernatural explanations to account for. The new data don't really support that picture. Measures of anxiety didn't budge significantly. What went up was irritability and disinterest, a kind of sour, low-grade aversion rather than fear. That's perhaps a more honest description of how a lot of ghost stories actually feel in the telling: not screaming terror, but wrong atmosphere, a sense of unease that never quite crystallizes into something you can point at."

Presumably infrasound from wind turbines would also make people (and animals) feel uneasy in this way?

"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

The tools of universal global abundance (in this case wind, solar, and batteries) are available -- but some politicians (and their supporters) are still stuck in the mindset of trying to maximize private gain in the short term -- even if it costs their country and the world a huge amount of suffering. But, this damage also would not be possible without using the abundance tools of mass communication and bureaucracy to mislead people to vote against their own long-term interests.

That said, I'm not especially a horizontal-axis wind power fan compared to solar because of infrasound risk from wind power to humans and animals (especially whales). Vertical-axis wind turbines are potentially much quieter (but more expensive right now).

"Wind turbine infrasound: Phenomenology and effect on people"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

"Experimental investigation on noise characteristics of small scale vertical axis wind turbines in urban environments"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

This still is an ongoing area of research and contention though -- and with so much money involved it is hard to know what research to believe:
"No, Wind Farms Do Not Generate Harmful Infrasound"
https://www.renewableenergymag...
        "The Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Australia examined how infrasound from wind turbines impacted 37 healthy adults with sensitive hearing. The test lasted 72 hours. .... This groundbreaking study [showing no short-term effect of infrasound on some participants] will spark subsequent research in the field to corroborate the claim. Wind farms are not the only renewable energy source with queries about human health, and it is vital to debunk or unpack them. ....
        Scientists can prove the safety of wind farm noise as much as they want, but massive blades still produce noise pollution. Most turbines are horizontal-axis wind turbines. Vertical-axis alternatives, such as Savonius turbines, are becoming popular for being smaller and less strenuous on the ears. They are less domineering and more capable of urban incorporation, which minimizes land use debates over wind adoption.
        Building-integrated wind turbines (BIWTs) are another solution. BIWTs must have less noise output because installers affix them inside building structures. Shorter blades combined with infrastructure dampens sound. Blade coatings help adjust pitch, too. Additionally, their placement allows high energy-harnessing potential with lower rotational speeds, reducing opportunities for noise pollution.
      Innovation of quieter turbines is critical because removing this pain point redirects focus to other potential concerns with wind farms. Advocating their benefits alongside research is the best way to support their relevance while waiting for data to catch up. ..."

That said, pollution from burning fossil fuels harms a lot of people and animals too, and I expect that most current vertical-axis wind turbines overall produces significantly less overall harm than burning fossil fuels even if we could do even better. It's a complex topic:
"Which is worse for wildlife, wind farms or oil drilling?"
https://www.bbc.com/future/art...
"But the sensors also picked up on something else, which you can listen to in the recording below: deafening blasts from oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. "[The Gulf of Mexico] is a really noisy area because of all of the surveys that are associated with drilling, they do these seismic surveys that generate a whole lot of noise as they are looking for the oil pockets and understanding how the oil is moving," says Frasier." ... For whales, dolphins and other marine mammals that rely on sound and echolocation to find their food in dark and murky water, such loud and sudden underwater noise can be deeply disorienting, equivalent to being blinded, as well as being very distressing for them, research has shown."