Is on display right here in one posted story.

If you are pushing a message, and claim it's "the SCIENCE", and you are not getting the reception you wish for among the populace and your conclusion is that you need a way to either massage the information or manipulate the way you present it in order to manipulate people into doing what you want, You are NOT "the SCIENCE", you are NOT doing science, and you are going to undermine your credibility and the credibility of all science - you are doing POLITICS and everybody can see it. The manipulation of populations is POLITICAL. Science is APOLITICAL.

We can all go back and forth arguing about "climate change" - we've done it here on Slashdot many many times and no-doubt will do so into the future. This story, however, is less about climate change or science, generally, at all than it is about left-leaning politics and the complete blindness to the concept that by swirling politics and science together and using political techniques to try to manipulate the public, the very people who keep claiming to be the ones embracing science are actually the ones stomping all over the reputation of all sciences in the minds of the masses. I have come to despise this destruction of confidence in science which is being done by all this garbage. Stop claiming to love science while doing everything you could possibly do to undermine the public's confidence in it! People can tell they are being politically manipulated on the climate stuff. Stop it. If you keep this up, you will end up convincing people not to believe in chemistry and physics and think that even those "pure" sciences are actually just politics-in-a-mask.

If you are so certain about climate change, then by all means do your research and publish your results just as would be done in any other field of science, but then you need to let the public do what they will about it, as any other field does. It's NOT a scientific act to try to swing public opinion to accept a conclusion. You never see physicists trying to manipulate public opinion like this. The people involved in this are guilty of a classic error; they think THEIR field is the only field, or the most important field, and that everybody must be made to agree with them because they are the keepers of the sacred knowledge. The hubris is astounding.

be productive and invent new tech (like telephones, semiconductors, air travel, nuclear power, etc), help people around the world to eat, survive disasters, etc and occasionally intervene to stop the World Wars that so many of those "happy" less productive and smugly-superior people start...

I'm, frankly, tired of being lectured by people from inconsequential countries who then, in nearly every catastrophe, ask "Where are the Americans?" and whose representatives routinely show up at NATO, SEATO, and UN meetings to demand American taxpayers shell-out billions of more dollars for "the less fortunate", as though the people "happy" to be less productive are somehow blameless for being so less productive and therefore needy.

At this point, I'd happily see MY life made easier so I could be "happier", any new American tech kept only for Americans, and ALL American tax funds to entities outside the US completely shut off, with the answer to all requests/demands for American funds/support answered with a firm, "NO, our citizens are happier now"

Let's see here... In the 40 years you cited, the minimum wage went from $3.25 to $20 and you dismiss that?

Remember: the so-called "minimum wage" is not supposed to be the wage a head-of-household takes home and uses to provide for a family. It's a starter wage intended for highschool and college students and others who are getting their first jobs in fast food places and grocery stores etc. It's a wage for unskilled people who are developing some work experience and a few skills that will, in turn, help them move on to better paying jobs with more responsibility. There was a moment in one of the "town hall" discussions leading up to the 2008 election where a guy asked then-candidate Obama for help making it so that he could support himself (and a presumably a current or probably future family) on his burger flipper job at McDonalds... and when I saw this I knew we were in trouble. This guy clearly did not understand that he needed to develop some skills and MOVE ON, freeing up that job for some other newbie. There need to be entry level jobs for people just starting out, and some jobs simply do not add enough value to justify a wage fit for a family to live on.

Boosting the minimum wage is nothing but an inflationary act. Mandating that somebody pay more for a job than the value that job provides causes one of three things: [1] The job will go undone, [2] The job will be done illegally with workers paid under-the-table, or [3] the job WILL be done at the higher wage and then workers just above the old minimum wage will demand an increase since they are suddenly at or below minimum, and then the ones above them will demand raises, and as this propagates the prices for products and services must rise, etc and in the end everybody is back to where they were (relative to each other) but all the prices are higher and the unit of currency is worth less than it was. Sound familiar? Yeah, the basic economic laws are as inviolable as the laws of physics.

Raising (or even HAVING) a minimum wage is great politics; it makes ignorant people temporarily happy and get them motivated to vote for some candidate. Over the long run, however, its only real impacts are to encourage illegal actions in employment (hiring of illegal workers, un-taxed under-the-table payment, etc) which actually hurt average workers, and to be a driver of inflation. This is why the minimum wage is never enough and there are ALWAYS calls to make it higher - it's simply economically IMPOSSIBLE to ever make it high enough. Over time, the economy will adjust to any change in it, and everything will drive the numbers so that the minimum wage is a starter wage that will not support a family. The era of it acting to help employees in inescapable company-run coal mining towns is as long gone as the 1930s and just as likely to return.

some of these same people are responsible for making kids more ignorant than kids the same ages were decades ago. The people currently failing to teach kids to read and write and do math "at grade level" are NOT going to make things better by letting Microsoft talk them into introducing AI to the kids.

We need to get the computers out of the classrooms altogether. Kids have never needed to "learn computers" at school - the young are ALWAYS more easily adaptable to new tech than the old. Any kid will "get" the computer thing and browsing the web, streaming videos, messaging, etc on their own. Any kid that wants to "learn to code" will be able to (we live in the era of YouTube, after all) and those that don't want to are not going to need to anyway. What CANNOT be easily learned later on in life without serious lifelong penalties is READING. If a school is failing to get EVERY kid to read "at grade level" (a minimal expectation), then that school is a failure and ought not waste time and effort on ANYTHING else until this problem is corrected.

Late in the Biden administration, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommended all high level federal government officials "Adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps." Here is the PDF on CISA's own site. The fact that this was done so late in the Biden admin, combined with CISA's role in censoring conservative voices on the internet over the preceding years, made this order very suspicious to many Trump supporters who presumed it was some sort of a setup.

I point this out for two reasons: [1] This is why people will see suspicions and conspiratorial thinking about this by Trumpsters, and [2] it establishes the FACT that actually this is not Trump-administration-specific. We can all think anything we want about this particular story, and this particular administration, but the one tidbit of info cited which makes this use of Signal appear to be an oddity of the Trump people is misleading.

Here is where the honesty test kicks-in: We here were all aware of the Signal app recommendation back then, so anybody here on Slashdot who tries to paint the use of Signal by members of the current admin as unique, weird, deceitful, corrupt, etc is not being honest, AND anybody trying to suppress this post highlighting that objective FACT by modding it TROLL is also being dishonest. The signal app recommendation was from the government's own supposed computer security experts, to politicians and bureaucrats who are [mostly] not up-to-speed on high tech stuff. This would be the case if the people involved were "establishment" Republicans, Democrats, Trump people, or "the squad" people, etc. It's simply NOT specific the the politics of the government officials involved. What should concern us all is NOT that it was Marco Rubio, but that it was ANYBODY in public office, of ANY administration and what it bodes for the future, both in and out of government.

Again, feel free think anything you want about the current administration, the President, etc. As we used to say: "It's a free country". But you're not entitled to an entirely alternate set of historical factoids. We cannot have an honest political discussion if we cannot even agree on well-documented historical FACTS.

Who said anything about race? Oh, yeah, that would be YOU.

I've actually worked on the design of a black box (FDR not CVR) several decades ago. You do not understand the interactions between the manufacturers and regulatory agencies. When a US-built aircraft, or a US operator, is involved in a rapid unscheduled disassembly (contrary to internet memes, Elon did NOT coin that term, I first heard it from engineers from an aircraft manufacturer that no longer exists) the NTSB gets involved, even if the carrier was foreign. It's also generally true that regulatory agencies have contacts with the airframers (Boeing, Airbus, etc) and the avionics companies and they get them involved in the investigations. India's handling of the black boxes in this incident is unusual. Nobody understands the data storage of the avionics systems better than the people who designed them, and the investigators and regulators know this, so they use them as a resource. Everybody involved understands the importance of getting to the actual facts of the incidents, we all tend to be very aware of the lost lives, and the potential to save more in the future with lessons learned. On the internet, people trend to get very cynical and so you probably assume a bunch of stuff about these situations that is untrue.

As for your comment which seems to dismiss the data in a Flight Data Recorder, that's an obsolete view. Early Flight Data Recorders recorded only a few basic parameters with scratches on a long aluminum tape. Then the industry moved to magnetic tape and more parameters were stored. FDRs these days are completely digital and record a very large number of parameters. I do not know exactly what a 787 box captures, but I'd bet it includes a large number of parameters for every system and possibly even the positions of all controls and switches. If the data from one of the boxes is intact and in the hands of somebody who knows how all the data is encoded and stored, they'll already know everything that happened on that plane. It's the WHY questions that they will need to work to understand. The preliminaries generally take the NTSB about a month, and the final conclusions about a year.

What, exactly was wrong? You had the perfect opportunity to answer some specific point with a contrary fact, but instead you just waved your hand and announced the entire post as "so wrong" and then tried to further dismiss my post as "talking points".

The term "talking points" actually means something; it's traditionally been a list of things to say (often excuses, misdirections, or quasi-answers) that are handed out by some political entity to supporters who might otherwise be left standing there with nothing to say. My post was not derived from anybody's talking points and you've no evidence it was.

Sooner or later, you guys are going to have to realize that when you respond to something you HATE with just a rant or a non-specific accusation, and no actual arguments or facts, it's YOUR position that gets undermined. Any reasonably intelligent reader can see that your intellectual gun holds only blank rounds. Some of you try to avoid that problem by using mod points to mark posts you hate as "TROLL", but that's worn pretty thin too over time and no-doubt that tactic is also becoming more obvious to average readers.

Try having a specific argument and something at least resembling a fact next time.

Please clarify. It's impossible to answer such a question without more info.

Somehow I suspect the question was intentionally incomplete and unanswerable, because you sought no answer and just wanted to rant and fling insults. "numbnuts"? "far right rags"? Yeah, those are clues.

Next time don't bother unless you have something intelligent to contribute. Insults and expletives don't count.

I'm not confused by the term "AI", rather I am observing human use of such terms and the corruption that circles around the deployment of buzzwords in corporate America. I certainly get that there's a difference between the AI of some stupid chatbot, and the AI code that drives a Tesla, or assists the folks at SpaceX, or other such things. I've been in the tech world for decades and am aware of the protein folding work etc. That's not the point I was trying to make, and hoped would be apparent from the flippancy.

It's very easy for geeky technical people to get bogged-down in arguments about this or that particular AI implementation, spiffy new uses of technical stuff, etc and all-too-frequently we all fail to consider the wisdom and efficacy of things; we, the people who SHOULD know the potential upsides (and downsides) of bits of tech tend to pay too little attention to how the stuff will actually be understood/used/abused by the society and people with more cash than common sense. That means the people entrusted to have the wisdom to decide how this stuff is used (or abused) tend to be the people least familiar with technology.

My concern here is about the potential for extreme corruption of nearly everything when large quantities of investor cash are involved and the fact that nearly every business and industry these days is trying to attract investors by attaching the term "AI" to their business in one way of another.

Add that to all the garbage that was involved in the MRNA-based COVID-19 "vaccines", and we would all be wise to be very alert.

and it will be a LOT less impressive when it breaks someday and it's seen that nobody knows how to fix it, in part because even the guy who supposedly wrote it actually did not and has no clue as to how it works.

Super glue, chewing gum, duct tape, wood scraps and paperclips can be used to make something interesting. In the hands of a Hollywood prop maker they might even make something that LOOKS amazing. They do not make useful things that are sufficiently structurally-sound enough for people to entrust with their reputations, their fortunes, and especially, their lives.

"Vibe coding", like so many other things that are used to bait corporate execs and investors into thinking you can violate reality (for example by playing with man-months by adding more bodies to seats) look really great while implementing stuff that primarily LOOKS great while doing very little of actual importance. Not so much, when used in the aviation, medical, drilling/mining, etc fields. Do people even remember all the amazing stuff people used to show off in the "demo scene" era??? Programmers then did some amazing VISUAL stuff... but nothing of any usefulness came of it. Some of those guys, no doubt, ended up coding in game studios IF they could discipline themselves enough to work as members of teams and on projects with actual architecture and testing...

People on the right are NOT saying there's no value in ANY college degrees and that people need to be prevented from going to college and get forced into menial labor jobs. NOBODY is saying that. It's apparently the product of your fevered imagination.

What people on the right HAVE been arguing is multiple related things that are bit more complex than you can apparently handle.

1. Obama's federal takeover of college loans was a BAD idea and implemented VERY BADLY. He effectively made it so any kid could borrow any amount of cash to spend on any major at any college/university. This was HORRENDOUS. It enabled the most gullible consumers (kids with little real-world experience with big purchases and, lacking full-time work experience, little appreciation of how difficult paying-down big debts would be) to get talked into huge debts by colleges eager to mop-up all that cash and willing to provide USELESS degrees in majors that would sound good (and easy) to kids. Right-leaners back then warned that this would drive-up college costs as the school operators discovered this new fountain of unlimited money, but they were derided as "anti-education". To see how dead-on the predictions of the right were on this, lookup the inflation of annual college costs pre- and post- Obama. Nobody needed to be a wizard to predict this, one only needed to understand basic economics and basic human nature.

2. Many of these useless college degrees now provide kids with no better job and pay prospects than they'd have had if they'd gone to trade schools and learned skills the country truly needs and which are in high demand (like plumbing, electrical, and welding skills). Had those same kids gone the trade school route, many would now have good jobs with good incomes and NO COLLEGE DEBTS. This has been proven true. Yes, a brain surgeon will take home more money (even after making monthly loan payments) than an average welder, BUT the average welder will find it easy to get a job wherever he wants to live, start earning a good salary at least 3 years before his college-attending peers, will not be having to make any college loan payments out of each paycheck, AND his pay will be higher than that of many non-technical degree holders.

3. Having huge numbers of illegal aliens in the country doing many jobs has pushed down the wages and benefits for those jobs, making them unattractive to American workers. This too is provably true. Americans used to do ALL those jobs, and not that long ago. All that illegal labor has also had another negative effect: it made that work, done by human hands, so cheap that it does not pay to automate it. Had that labor force not been there, there would have been a demand in the marketplace for all sorts of new automation and lots of new small American companies would have arisen to design and build robotic systems to do many of those menial tasks (particularly in agriculture) and THOSE automation jobs would have been great for American workers.

4. NOBODY of any importance on the right is talking about preventing anybody from going to college to get a good degree in some useful thing. Certainly SOME are indeed against garbage degrees (like gender studies) that will put a kid in deep debt and only lead to a job as a barista, but the last politician IIRC who actually pushed legislation to control how many people could get a degree in which fields in any given year was Hillary Clinton, who proposed this as part of "Hillary Care" back in the 1990s. She thought the government could control healthcare costs by indirectly rationing specialty care, by controlling the numbers of doctors graduating each year with degrees in the various medical specialties.

The truth is that, rather than federalizing all student loans, and taking the borrowing limits off, and then occasionally going hyper-cynical and teasing the idea of "loan forgiveness" (to try to buy the youth vote in each election cycle), what we SHOULD have done was to teach high school kids to have a clear view of not only whether they were suited to college or trade schools etc, but we should also have taught them the basic economic law of Supply and Demand. Kids needed to be shown which degrees would be in demand and thus provide opportunities and pay well, as opposed to things like "Gender Studies", "Art History", Klingon Grammar, or Taylor Swift studies where the entire nation might need a total of five or six people with the degree (in Art History... Paramount might need one person with the Klingon degree, if cheap enough, but there'll probably never will be a demand for a degree in Taylor Swift).

The idea that a kid's best interest is served by some high school coach who is assigned to be a "career counselor" a couple of hours a week telling them to "follow their dreams", aided by some college recruiter with glossy brochures showing an amazing campus who assures them that they should not worry about the costs, is simply evil and reckless and destructive.

I would not trust AI to write a comedy routine. Why on Earth would any SANE person trust some experiment in language processing to design a new drug???

Has everybody forgotten the whole COVID-19 thing already? We had a government official declare himself to be "the science" and help push-through an entirely new sort of vaccine without any reasonable testing regime, resulting in a drug pushed onto the public as "100% effective" but later shown to be possibly no more effective than a sugar pill and officials admitting under oath that they never tested it to see if it would prevent or even reduce the spread, etc. All indications of problems were silenced, rather than considered and tested, because there were political and financial motives and agendas at stake. Now, we're thinking of allowing an AI-designed drug at a time when everything is getting the term "AI" attached to it ti invite investments and drive interest. There's gonna be more money and power on the line (over the long haul) with this than with the COVID drugs.

When BILLIONS of dollars are on the line, Caveat Emptor.

A properly trained and responsible air crew should know what to do in both single-engine and dual-engine failures on takeoff (when there's no time to crack open the owner's manual) and should have practiced this a few times in the sims. The captain and first officer should have talked about their plans for those possibilities before they got clearance to take off; that's proper cockpit resource management. This (understanding the specifics of a make and model of plane) is part of why pilots get certified to fly particular jets, not a generic cert for all jets.

The checklists are NOT there so the pilot can crack the book open and read the instructions for the first time in the middle of an emergency; they are there to help the crew not make a mistake. There's a huge difference. The pilot, in such an emergency, should assume control of the aircraft (if he's not already in control) and the first officer should pop out the checklist WHILE THEY HANDLE THE EMERGENCY AS THEY'VE BEEN TRAINED TO in order to be sure they do not miss something. The failure to understand this and to be properly trained on this is one of the reasons for the differences in safety records of first- and second- world airlines and third-world airlines, and it's PART of the reason that the two Max8 crashes were in third-world airlines with crews trying to consult the manual and figure things out on-the-fly during those emergencies. The basic rule for flying a plane that's supposed to be drilled into the heads of all pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" (Keep the plane in the air, know where you are and where you're going, and talk to the ground and other aircraft as appropriate). Nowhere in that list is "pick up the plane's manual for the first time and learn how to fly it"

Jet fuel is a refined kerosene. AvGas is a high octane gasoline. They look different (different colored liquids), smell different, and are dispensed from very different sources at a typical airfield. An individual (a really dumb one) MIGHT make this error on his own at a small airfield, putting fuel into a his general aviation aircraft improperly (putting avgas into, for example, a King Air) but no professional crew that services large multi-engine passenger or cargo jets at a large commercial field could.

If you presumed a massively incompetent ground crew doing this to an airliner "by mistake", then you'd have to assume they'd do it to all the planes they serviced (again, assuming it's not deliberate sabotage) but no other planes met the same fate that day, and nobody has suggested the plane was fueled by a new ground crew that had never fueled a plane before.

IIRC the Dreamliner uses a combination Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder and simply carries two copies of this all-digital combined "black box" (one under the cockpit, and one near the tail). As a result, only one black box needed to be found intact, which India did immediately after the crash. They did not send these to the American NTSB or Boeing and instead moved them to an Indian government lab to extract and process the data themselves.

Either the Indian investigators did not like what they found (it implicated the crew, ground personnel, airline, etc rather than the plane maker) or they were unable to understand the data and were not willing to admit this and hand the boxes over to the experts.

Why would I presume this?

Simple. They've announced the recovery of both boxes, so we know they have all the flight data and voice recordings. If there were data recorded to indicate a problem with the design or construction of the plane, there would have been immediate notifications to the American and European air safety agencies and the plane manufacturer, which would have been followed by airworthiness notifications and possibly groundings. When there's a known safety issue with the design of an airliner, the various safety agencies are not just gonna sit there on their collective hands.