Maybe I should make this simpler for the hard of thinking.

Smoking impacts your chances of getting lung cancer. It is not a 100% guarantee, but it's pretty damn high. It is called an impact by anyone with anything close to an intellect that actually functions.

Having a vaccine impacts your chances of getting a disease. It's not a magic forcefield. It increases the payload needed to overwhelm the initial immune response, and it increases the severity of the infection needed to be anything more than a brief annoyance, but it isn't Harry Potter. And some would probably whinge about magic fields if it were. In many cases, the impact is a 90-95% level of protection, but we call it an impact.

God, the level of brain-dead morons here is so depressing.

If X alters Y, then yes X impacts Y. That's, like, basic terminology.

I do not specify magnitudes anywhere. If you saw them, please see your local pdoc as you're hallucinating.

Do you have problems with English?

Physics has used indirect testing for many years, and I don't think anyone expected string theory to be any different.

There are research papers that detail specific properties that must be present in any string theory-based model of gravity, for example. If we find, in our efforts to study quantum gravity, that those properties can't hold, then string theory cannot be correct. Not just a specific string theory, ANY string theory at all.

Any string theory that requires a supersymmetry that is reachable by the LHC once it gets updated will be falsified within a very short space of time. If we persist in not seeing supersymmetry after this further round of updates (and we've already had several to improve luminosity), then none of the string theories involved can be correct. They have to be false.

None of these allowing string theory would prove string theory "true", but if any are false then string theory cannot be true. If ALL of them permit string theory, then whether or not string theory describes anything real, the maths that has been done must nonetheless describe real things.

You are correct, AI (which is basically a neural network, and thus really just a glorified classifier) is superbly good at classification and if you want to classify what a condition is and how it connects to other conditions, then classifiers are by far the fastest and most reliable way to do this. You've said as much yourself, and I absolutely agree with you on every detail of what you've said about AI.

A lot of my private research into AI is to push it to the absolute limits and see where it fails. It fails in some fascinating ways, too. So, yeah, I also agree with your conclusion. It is really good in some areas and completely bad/potentially damaging in others. My personal efforts are centred around trying to parameterise exactly where that line is, but ultimately I think we're both absolutely agreed there is a line and we need to know where it is.

Providers have fatigue because they're overworked - in terms of caseload, in terms of cognitive effort per case that's needed, and in terms of how long their shifts end up being. You're right that AI could have reduced the caseload and cognitive effort, but you're right in what you say about the medical services needing more staff and shorter hours per staff member, and that it's an entirely legal failure cascade.

It's not clear to me how to fix the law (analysis suggests politician skulls are made of some sort of dwarf star alloy that seems to occupy most of the head region). I've generaly filed politics under Social Quantum Mechanics (you can either see the solution or create policy, but never both at the same time).

Please, do "educamate" me. It's the best you're gonna do, given that I probaly understand medicine, biology, and indeed statistics to a far higher level to some snotty-nosed brat whose UID runs into 7 digits.

What you eat and drink, what you do, how you stand, how much you exercise, who you hang out with - you're seriously telling me these don't have an impact on health? Whew, you've got a LOT of learning to do. I didn't know anyone was still that naive, post the 18th century.

Your physical and mental health, past around 50, is directly dependent on how you treated your body up to that point. Anyone who says otherwise is either an AI or a nematode cos there's no way anyone with more than 6 functional neurons can imagine otherwise.

Old age is only bad because you were moronic through childhood and adulthood, resulting in a body that couldn't handle old age.

Sorry, I have no sympathy for your self-inflicted issues.

Because any medical system worthy of the name treats everyone to the highest standard they can.

Of course, that raises some serious questions about whether the system the US has is worthy of being called "medical"

Steve Jobs had too much ego to consider anything outside of the stuff he did (hence the panic over the web) but Apple learning from BeOS (and possibly Plan9 as well) would probably not have hurt.

And the climate has the deciding vote, yes. No nation has immunity from the consequences. Britain has just gone through a heatwave hotter than the most severe summer on record. In May. This matters - a lot - because most of our water comes from snowpacks formed during the winter. We are in for a really bad summer and it is likely we'll suffer significant deaths from both running out of water and - after summer breaks - the inevitable catastrophic floods that will follow.

I doubt anywhere in Europe will fare better.

Russia has expended all its resources (and those of several other nations) on an incredibly stupid war and therefore has nothing to put in place to handle any climate emergency they might suffer. Of course, it's also possible that one of the reactors in Ukraine will explode. If the prevailing winds are blowing into Russia at the time, that could be really inconvenient.

It's hard to tell if the global stupidity is priceless or worthless. Depends on how many can survive it.

Then why didn't they work collectively to put someone on the ballot they could vote for? I mean, let's face it - the two top parties manage around 50% of the vote in each election out of 60% of the people. So they only really have support from 30% of the nation each. Your alternative has the potential to win 40% of the people, pushing both the alternatives so far out of the picture that both parties will be forced to choose between oblivion or reality.

But you don't.

Why?

It's not about money, the 40% who aren't voting aren't voting less because of how much each side spends. All you need is to be known. And lots of people manage that daily.

So what is it about? It's about the fact that what you're saying is nothing but excuses and you know it.There isn't an option that 40% of the nation will like, because 100% of the nation is determined to hate anyone different to them.

This is "victory" because the Dems like the environment, so stopping anyone from knowing about it is ergo "beating the Dems".

Same reason the Republicans were all about demolishing the ACA (an act written by a Republican and then edited by Republicans because the Democrat proposals weren't acceptable to them). The ACA was voted on by Dems and therefore had to be destroyed, the fact that it has led to many Americans being without any healthcare at all and more than a few dying as a result is considered an acceptable price to pay for killing something Democrats voted for.

"Victory" is not about doing anything worthwhile, it's about "owning the Dems".

Of course they colluded with foreign powers. However, it's irrelevant. Since the legalisation of corruption (Trump abolished any enforcement of corruption laws), the US has slid from an already disastrous level of corruption into total degeneracy. It will take years, maybe decades, simply to root out all of the evil that is now in place and by then those who committed treason will either be safely overseas, or their records will have been "accidentally" destroyed, making any investigation impossible.

I would point out, though, that the countries the GOP has historically strong ties with also have extraordinarily high levels of corruption - and have done for a long time - and nobody bothers to do anything about it. This is what Trump is relying on. Once corruption at this level is normalised, everyone just accepts it and moves on.

Worse, I just don't see any serious will to fix the issue amongst any of the other political groups in the US. The Democrats aren't being honest with themselves over why they lost in 2024, and have swung so far to the right themselves that Ronald Reagan would have considered them right-wing extremists.

This is something voters can fix, but almost half of Americans have totally disengaged at this point and the other half believes themselves so powerless that (to use a Douglas Adamsism) they're only concerned with preventing the wrong lizard from being elected.

I'm sure you're familiar with the countdown protocol, all the pre-flight checks, etc. These power up a range of subsystems, motors, etc, so that everything can be verified prior to ignition itself. The complete sequence takes a very long time. Under normal flight conditions, you can't check for absolutely everything (instrumentation is mass, and mass is the enemy) but there's still a lot. However, during an engine test, you can pack a lot more sensors in.

This is where you'd want to be spotting loose connections, pumps that aren't quite even, pressures that aren't as steady as they should be, vibrations that shouldn't be there or do not match expectations, turbulent flows, and so on.

At ignition, it takes between 3-6 seconds to go from stopped to 90% thrust. For humans, that's near-instant. For a computer sensor that's operating a million samples per second, that's 3-6 million readings. A computer performing a billion calculations per second shouldn't have much difficulty in comparing 3 million readings against model predictions and determining if both the values themselves and the rate of change at each point such a sensor exists are all good. Emergency shutdowns during those first 3 seconds are perfectly viable.

Vibrations are the ones that are likely the most interesting, because those are likely to change before something breaks, not sure how fast you can make infrared sensors, but that's also an area where things are likely to alter before point of failure.

Lazy, yes. Bright, no. If you can't trust the average person to figure out that bread that's loaded with salt and sugar isn't healthy, then you can't trust the average person to figure out what a healthy balanced meal is.

The evolutionary pattern was created because food was unreliable and energy demands were unpredictable - but high, due to the large brain. (Possibly larger than it is today, but there seems to be conflicting data there.)

Now, rationing extreme energy foods is certainly one option, but it's not a particularly satisfactory one as the energy demands vary by profession and by time within a profession. You simply can't predict what people will need and there's no way to standardise this.

There is a second option. Intense focus is impossible for beyond about 45-90 minutes at a stretch, or for more than 3-5 hours in a day. Meetings degrade intelligence, according to psychological research, so you want to minimise those. After about 7 hours, work will mostly have negative value. If you increase the amount of high physical activity for at least an hour a day (and potentially longer if the amount of soft work is minimal in the job) then you will improve physical fitness and general health, without having to substantially alter diet. However, that still only gets you so far, because a poor diet still impacts physical and mental health, and can lead to brain decline. (It's a big factor in poor brain health in children in schools.)

A third option, then, is to actually improve meal quality in schools and for workplaces to work with the food industry to provide cheaper/easier access to high quality foods that actually taste good, not merely sensible energy foods. This would seem to be target solution, with in-work exercise to supplement it.