That there is no evidence to support it does not mean it cannot be true. But it should inform your assessment of probabilities.

Bingo. That is an absolutely correct factually true statement.
What you left out is that the job of the individual is to correctly assign probabilities.

Odd, I thought he was working for Putin.

Insulting people doesn't help convince them.

Be careful. It has not been absolutely proven that vaccines never cause XXX. It probably can't be. It's just that there is no valid evidence that vaccines do cause autism. (At least that I know of.)

The original claim was a deliberate fraud, but many people believed it, and their part in it was not a "deliberate fraud", at least not on their part. But they *did* believe it because they wanted to, in the face of contrary evidence.

China has a history of not caring about people outside it's borders. This long predates the CCP.

Hey it's good to cote nuance and I don't have the patience today to nuance all your points as well but I think you know all those points in the nuance still show the stark contrast between the parties. A difference that is more clear now than anytime In my life.

The Tylenol thing is absolute performative though but hey considering how the lawsuit against Comet and James have gone I expect the government to have pay Tylenol for damages by the end of this. Also Paxton is the dopest of all dopes, I can't imagine being so down I have to pin my faith and nuance on Ken fucking Paxton. Bleak.

Unfortunately there are really only two practical ways to get into farming these days.

Some of us are. I did my BS in computer science. Spent 15 years in IT working mostly with Linux servers.

I now run a large farm. My background is actually a really good fit for farming. In fact I think farming would be a good fit for quite a few Linux enthusiasts and makers.

We still have running tractors from the 1940s and 50s. John Deere two-cylinder "putt putt" tractors.

If there was a golden age of tractors, it's hard to pin it down. Yes the 4020 was and is a great tractor, but it's not a tractor you'd want to run all day every day. It's loud and the cab was never comfortable. The Deere 50-series tractors from the 1980s were pretty good, and the cabs were comfortable and quiet. In the 90s there were some good ones too but ideas on what looked good were really weird in that decade. Our current tractors are all 15-20 years old with about the right amount of electronics for my taste. However the engines from this era have a mixed reputation for longevity on some models.

So it's a mixed bag. Computer-controlled engines sure start nice, even in the winter. But a fully mechanical engine can be rebuilt several times.

This is just "perfect is the enemy of good"

Can you point to any law anywhere that has t had some bad actors or some bad outcomes?

Everything when applying law to society is a cost/benefit analysis. The existence of mistakes does not mean we throw out the entire concept when as you said, everything since then has learned and gotten better.

The counter to that example is what would happen to many of those folks if left unvaccinated, not what if better vaccine.

I'm sorry did the 17th not get ratified by 36 state legislatures?

Like many of us he's enamored with the fictional tech from Star Trek that portrays talking to an intelligent computer and seems like a great idea on screen at least. So futuristic. Computer, please reconfigure my warp core for more power. Done. Best idea ever.

That and touch panels everywhere! Works so well on a star ship, why not put them in our cars?

Never mind that copilot, like all LLMs, confidently lies. And "super smart" really means it reads rubbish posted on the internet and pretends it is accurate and truth. There's no way it can be super smart because it was trained on all our data! At best it's average smart. And we want copilot actually in control of our computers? No thank you. I find it mind blowing he would think giving copilot agents physical control over a PC is a good idea.

Anyway, Star Trek has a lot to answer for!

It depends on the precise definition. But teleportation of sizeable objects is probably impossible. In the use of the term in quantum experiments it means something like "moving the state of one particle to the state of another without determining what the state is that you moved". And it's "moved" rather than communicating because the residual state has been changed. I.e., for a macroscopic analogy, if I "communicate" something to you, it doesn't make me forget it, but if I teleport (say a book) to you, I no longer have it.

Yeah, the word was chosen because it sounded catchy, but it *does* describe a legitimate effect that has no macroscopic counterpart.