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Comment who told you that the Chinese Communist Party? (Score 1) 411

oh sure just a big conspiracy, who told you that the Chinese Communist Party? The Wuhan level 4 virus labs is one of the few labs in the world specifically studying corona viruses from bats The lead scientist Zheng-Li Shi has been studying specifically the parts of corona viruses that make them infectious to humans without intermediate infections to other animals. In addition Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally. 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace (Seafood wet market) https://www.sciencemag.org/new... We know that this started Nov-Dec 2019, and was covered up by the CCP. So we can't trust them now when they claim it's not accidentally released from the lab.

Comment WTF It always melts in the summer?! (Score 0) 185

Can we cut the crap, As long as we have been recording temperature on Greenland it's been warmer than 0C even in the middle of the ice sheet in the summer. usually it get 15-20C that's easily warm enough to melt some ice. Man made global warming is something we can stop with emissions control, but we can't stop the natural warming of the planet, we've been coming out of the last ice age the entire length of human history.
Sci-Fi

Are We Living In a Blade Runner World? (bbc.com) 223

Now that we have arrived in Blade Runner's November 2019 "future," the BBC asks what the 37-year-old film got right. Slashdot reader dryriver shares the report: [B]eyond particular components, Blade Runner arguably gets something much more fundamental right, which is the world's socio-political outlook in 2019 -- and that isn't particularly welcome, according to Michi Trota, who is a media critic and the non-fiction editor of the science-fiction periodical, Uncanny Magazine. "It's disappointing, to say the least, that what Blade Runner "predicted" accurately is a dystopian landscape shaped by corporate influence and interests, mass industrialization's detrimental effect on the environment, the police state, and the whims of the rich and powerful resulting in chaos and violence, suffered by the socially marginalized."

[...] As for the devastating effects of pollution and climate change evident in Blade Runner, as well as its 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, "the environmental collapse the film so vividly depicts is not too far off from where we are today," says science-fiction writer and software developer Matthew Kressel, pointing to the infamous 2013 picture of the Beijing smog that looks like a cut frame from the film. "And we're currently undergoing the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. In addition, the film's depiction of haves and have-nots, those who are able to live comfortable lives, while the rest live in squalor, is remarkably parallel to the immense disparity in wealth between the world's richest and poorest today. In that sense, the film is quite accurate." [...] And it can also provide a warning for us to mend our ways. Nobody, surely, would want to live in the November 2019 depicted by Blade Runner, would they? Don't be too sure, says Kressel.

"In a way, Blade Runner can be thought of as the ultimate cautionary tale," he says. "Has there ever been a vision so totally bleak, one that shows how environmental degradation, dehumanization and personal estrangement are so harmful to the future of the world? "And yet, if anything, Blade Runner just shows the failure of the premise that cautionary tales actually work. Instead, we have fetishized Blade Runner's dystopian vision. Look at most art depicting the future across literature, film, visual art, and in almost all of them you will find echoes of Blade Runner's bleak dystopia. "Blade Runner made dystopias 'cool,' and so here we are, careening toward environmental collapse one burned hectare of rainforest at a time. If anything, I think we should be looking at why we failed to heed its warning."

Comment Big downside, not much upside (Score 1) 137

Base Stations Will Require Three Times As Much Power; 5G is expected to require far more base stations; 5G May Drain phone batteries, *likely all the routers have Chinese spyware installed at the factory. Wow That's a whole lot on the minus column, not seeing to many benefits yet.

Comment Nobody's buying, robots sort it faster? (Score 1) 148

So just to be clear, the US, Canada's and Australia's recycling program up until now was just stick it in containers and send it to China and 3rd world countries because nobody wanted to buy and use the diverted newspaper, plastic and other recyclables other than aluminum, steel and glass. So the answer now is have Robots separate it? How about we just go back to Aluminum Steel and glass, and get rid of the plastic instead?

Comment Not a great precedent (Score 1) 100

Whatever you may think of the guy, and he's not great I know, I would argue that extradition does not make sense. He's a Finnish German national, living in New Zealand and headquartered in Hong Kong. How does he have to stand trial in the USA? He's not American, the business is not American. He doesn't live in America. If you say his customers are in America, we sure, and Ebay has customers in Saudi Arabia, and China. If you argue that he broke laws in America. Then you have to except that the head of Facebook or Ebay or Google could have to be extradited to China or Saudi Arabia or wherever because they broke the laws there. Not a great precedent. The case should just be thrown out.
Earth

Plastic Waste Dumped in Malaysia Will Be Returned To UK, US and Others (cnn.com) 133

Malaysia will return 450 tonnes of contaminated plastic waste to the countries that shipped it, in a refusal to become a dumping ground for the world's trash. From a report: Nine shipping containers at Port Klang, west of Kuala Lumpur, on Tuesday were found to contain mislabeled plastic and non-recyclable waste, including a mixture of household and e-waste. Yeo Bee Yin, minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change, said the plastic was shipped from the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, the Netherlands and Singapore. Five containers of waste were returned to Spain last month.

On April 24, Malaysia launched a joint task force to crack down on the growing problem of illegal plastic waste imports. The authorities have since carried out 10 operations. Last year, China banned plastic waste imports as part of an initiative to clean up its environment. That move caused a ripple effect through global supply chains, as middlemen sought new destinations for their trash, including Malaysia. A recent Greenpeace report found that during the first seven months of 2018, plastic waste exported from the US to Malaysia more than doubled compared to the previous year.

Comment Accident rate related to number of DUI's? (Score 1) 306

When i think of these things I think of someone who just got their drivers license cut up for having a 3rd DUI, they are wearing an ill fitting bike helmet not done up, and careening wildly from the sidewalk across three lanes of traffic without looking to make a left hand turn narrowly being missed by a bus while giving everyone in the intersection the finger (i think that's how they signal their turn, since it's not by the turn signals) Most seem to have modified their scooters from the 20mph limit to be able to go nearly 40mph as I've been stunned to not be able to keep up with them as they fire along a street and through a school zone like they are on a run away vehicle.

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