RE cooling, just last week saw this @NileRed YT video about how he pieced together a liquid nitrogen making setup.
(kind of at the level of assembling a PC, not deeper manufacturing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

(supposedly it can go low enough to also do helium, but he hasn't tackled that yet)

if you prefer, call it the "retreat to donut shops" or "defund the police" era, but it is clear as day in the statistics.

https://counciloncj.org/whats-...
(of course "opinions vary" as to the cause... as people argue about which variables are the REAL drivers and which social model to adopt, etc)

Yeah, as is often the case the headline and MSM article seem to confuse the claim and findings.

afaict the underlying paper and commentary article are about trying to quantify and predict which populations can do this and which can't. And, as you surmise, it's not even that the capability wasn't used before, it's that some populations had diversity among individuals in some drought tolerance traits... and this allowed the population to evolve/survive.
Whereas diversity in not drought related genes didn't help. (also doesn't seem surprising)

Although of were going to be precise/philosophical... there's also a "you can't step in the same river twice" aspect to this imo is a population that went through a population bottleneck really the same once it recovers?

Like let's say in 1500 all humans outside of Japan died and the Japanese recolonized the world... would we think of it as the same as it is now?

You're rolling a LOT of stuff in there.

The US has its problems, but they're generally long term and not primarily Trump related. Things like dealing with a post-industrial economy and economic inequality that's grown in the past few decades.
and then whatever AI's going to do to us (and the world).

Then there was COVID... and there still IS the Russia war...
And some things are actually going well...
e.g. it's looking like violent crime in 2025 finally returned to pre BLM levels.

and the stock market is still holding up.

"zero inventory" is what the philosophy is called https://www.netsuite.com/porta...

But more relevant in this case is that the two weeks thing is just a scare quote in the headline.

If i'd read TFA the first time... i'd see that the actual semiconductor people quoted said there were no problems. And the "two week" was from some consultant who said that in two weeks the SUPPLIERS of helium to industry would start to THINK about relocating production and finding some replacement suppliers for raw feedstock.

ummm... you're WAY underestimating both laziness and the growing anxiety around calling anyone. (and let's not even countenance answering an unexpected phone call)

What annoys me about the "2 weeks" things is that that's totally self inflicted "zero inventory" manufacturing BS that financial engineers choose to engage in. So a lot of manufacturing is very susceptible to disruptions in feedstock deliveries because they want to save some miniscule percentage by but building a bigger storage tank and not floating a 1 month supply on their books instead of 2 weeks.

The downside being that a bigger than anticipated blizzard and maybe a truck crash and bam the plant is idled for a week

I find it hard to believe that it can't be reclaimed since
there's no pure source to begin with afaik so it has to be purified somehow.

it was already "the end of history" in the 90s .. until it wasn't. And while I seriously dislike some of what Trump is doing , even more of HOW, and yet more of what he says and tweets...
so far we're still in NATO, still supporting Ukraine and the Fed and the Courts are holding just fine.

and even on DHS stuff it's better now than it was a month or two ago.

Also, the US is to the EU somewhat like China is to the US.... the economic dependencies aren't mostly of strategic choice, just economic reality. How long that lasts (in both cases) is TBD...

I have serious issues with these retrospective analyses by juries and the press.

undoubtedly they happen, which is why CYA has been a thing for decades, but it also runs counter to a lot of nuance in human culture.

Dak humor is a thing. banter is a thing. pretending that every statement of a literal declaration of fact or intent is... autistic.

I'm no expert but started looking into it was back during the Amanda Knox saga.

A lot of things there seen very anachronistic compared to, say, the US. It's like about Good and Evil versus evidence , logic and rules.

Ok, prosecutors in the US , and media coverage, are as bad or worse many places, but the courts here hold them to much higher standards usually so it keeps them in check.

It's just all very political compared to other Western courts...

yeah, that's a good point. Presumably the public keys in that case should be published ahead of time to prove there was no key swapping shenanigans.

Though in this case it seems the issue is something beyond losing the key anyway since the likelihood of the three independent copies all getting corrupted is pretty small.

it's a good point, but, arguably the result would be the same. If you can't verify the signature even for technical reasons, then you can't really use the votes.
Although certainly using a few separate signature keys and algorithms on the same doc could provide redundancy in case one of the key pairs is lost / damaged etc.

But encrypting data at rest (basically all storage) is a checkbox requirement in pretty much all security frameworks even if it's not clear exactly what that's protecting against, how the keys are managed, etc.

It doesn't have to be that rigid, Hollywood is project based, as is like construction work and both have heavy union involvement.

What a union/guild COULD moderate is better notice about who and when. less grind. more support from the companies between gigs, some sort of right to rehire when they ramp back up like there was in industrial unions. (which is what "lay offs" originally were iirc)

portable health insurance...
Unions have their own problems... and limitations, but having SOME level of collective protection would be nice nice.

(and didn't get me wrong, working at game developers is still a lot better than like in retail or sales or whatever, just a lot more like that than most traditional white collar jobs.)

This. The game industry has been like this for decades. It made a bit more sense when games were released on a CD and then not really updated compared to live service games, but still it was more akin to making a movie than a continually revving software product.

One thing that movie production employees got right in retrospect that games devs (and maybe other devs) haven't is that Hollywood is unionized. I'm still not quite pro union / guild... but that my be me just not wanting to admit the truth.

After some decades in software (only a few of those in games, mostly "enterprise" and saas) i wouldn't mind not having to argue with "idiot" managers entirely on my own. (though i say this even for cases where i'm a mid-level manager arguing with peers or execs so... )

Also i'll point out that lawyers have the bar as their guild. Doctors have the AMA and their whole licensing protection racket. Airline pilots all have unions. Professors have unions (and the whole tenure system). As SW engineers, managers etc. are we so smart to eschew all that ? i'm starting to wonder...
(though otoh one things those professions have in common is that they're not as easy to outsource. On the other hand compare merchant mariners... All ships are owned by and manned w/ developing world people entirely to bypass US labor laws so...

OT third hand, corporations have already done their best to outsource everything that's outsource-able to the point of diminishing returns so... would it be anything worse? )