... would you ask large language models for weather advisories?

But ... but ... how can I get panic and outrage out of that???

Pick up a pair of Allen Edmonds with leather sole with a rubber traction pad glued to it. These can be repaired multiple times and last long time.

Jeeps are not known for reliability, so you shifted some items by about 5 years. At the same time, Jeep are so common and parts are so cheap that it isn't a big deal if you DIY.

Everyone is so literal. My office doesn't have jack squat on the wall. I was using what I assume was a common metaphor. Also every lawyer and physician I know (wife included) does have their diplomas on the wall and insists on being referred to as "Doctor" or "Attorney" in a professional capacity.

Where I work, the reverse snobbery rule is in effect and you get the side eye if you introduce yourself as Dr. So-and-so.

Masking toddlers in the context of covid wasn't about compassion. It was about humoring the delusions of neurotic people. I consider that harmful. Always.

He isn't making it up but the WAY they did it is more complicated than hitting delete. They played the usual data manipulation games and discovered if they only reported data which conformed to a standard implemented in 1983 it both reshaped the data to support their climate narrative and gave plausible deniability "we just dropped old data which wasn't up to modern reporting standards."

Despite inconsistent reporting standards the older data clearly showed FAR more forest burned and if anything the inconsistency of reporting means it was UNDER reported.

first thing that came to my mind....haha

>"Something like Windows on TPM is the gold standard for losing control of your hardware to some random software vendor."

LOL! So perfectly-worded :)

No, being too cheap and lazy to start them on purpose in a controlled, planned, and rotating pattern is why the forests are unhealthy and the wildfires are such a big issue.

Just look at AZ, they've got massive mountain redwood forests as well and even drier climate but the feds manage them so you don't see all these headline grabbing wildfires each year.

What is it about linux that makes anti cheat so much harder to make work on it? Admin/system rights management that's more pro-user?

I specifically meant that the value of NOAA's data and services, each year, well exceeds the annual cost to taxpayers.

Sure it's probably true that overall value of NOAA's services provide more value than the worth of the funds allocated to them. Of course you can't force someone to agree to spend money; even if it's a small amount of money, and the benefit of spending it is obviously worth 1000x the cost -- it is possible that for some reason they choose to disregard that value or that deal and prioritize other things even more. And if they had been persuaded, then the taxpayers would likely not be cutting that budget.

To be pedantic: taxpayers didn't cut the budget, their representatives in Congress did. It is not at all obvious to me that this is what taxpayers want.

The thing is in a representative democracy: Congress speaks for the taxpayers. The actions passed by the House of Representatives are the taxpayers' voice. They vote their duly elected representatives, and confer with their elected representatives from time to time, and the representatives speak on their behalf. That is how the whole system works.

I suspect that if you were to ask taxpayers across the country, and present them with the numbers, the majority would say that NOAA's budget is not actually that large, and that cuts to the premier weather service in the country seems like a bad idea.

The taxpayers delegated their voice in the matter by action of their vote. It is the representatives' job to understand what the taxpayers do not and make the governance decisions. The representatives' collective decision is the taxpayers' decision and word on the matter; even in the case of public disagreements and lack of consensus outside the representative body.

at the moment, Congress appears to be particularly pliant to the whims and demands of the Executive, with a particular animus against science and expertise, even when Congress ought to know how penny-wise-and-pound-foolish it is.

The executive was just chosen specifically by vote of the taxpayers less than a year ago. The things they are choosing are extremely unwise, but it is actually what the taxpayers have chosen and voted for. Generally immediately after the election the executive has a public mandate to do exactly what they campaigned for; it is a decision coming from the taxpayers who had a chance to vet their representatives and might have failed to do so sufficiently before voting them in.

I had a toddler at the time and I felt like I was being made to punish my kid for what I knew to be an absolute nonsense reason. The harm *is* I was making my kid do something uncomfortable and unnatural for an absolutely pointless reason. The pointlessness being

Yet my town's board of health spun it as absolutely essential for everyone's health. I don't blame them. I listened in to one of their zoom meetings and I came in thinking they were caricatures of arrogance but came away realizing they were scared people trying to make the best of a bad situation and deferring to what they understood to be an authority that could help them navigate it.

All the more reason I am appalled at the arrogant and downright predatory behavior of that scientific authority. People were scared, and the false certainty projected by "the science" or at the very least the failure to dispel that false certainty by individual scientists in the public eye gave people a reason to mandate stupid and harmful stuff.

That was the harm. And I will not forgive it.

Precautionary principle: a form of CYA and/or institutionalized cowardice. The social contract is not that you're my mother. It's that you manage your own risks and I'll manage mine.

Said like someone who has read about children in a book and has never seen them in person. And also by someone who must have been deliberately not paying attention to the plethora of data from January 2020 onward that showed small children were as a group not susceptible to covid the way older adults were.

Again: Known at the time to be implausible, known at the time to be pointless. Yet still mandated by people citing science and scientists who did nothing to dispell the nonsense.

And now we've seen 1) that this kind of advice was ineffective when it counted and 2) it got extended where it didn't belong, like long-form on-camera or podcast interviews and at-length blog posts where people stuck to the simple sound bites. And people listening saw the inapplicability of the general simple message to their own messy circumstances and concluded that the talking head was decidedly empty and not worth listening to.

The power move is a tool for managing subordinates who don't know their place. This does not describe the relationship of free citizens with eachother or with their duly elected government.

Science is heirarchical...a vestige of its origins in medieval universities. People who go through it forget sometimes that the rest of the world ain't like that.