I'm just going to quote that here. I could write out a history of electric cars to scrutinize it, but what's the point really?

They did say a biology researcher. Whether that's corporate or university, they probably do have the computing resources available and probably shared among many researchers. Of course, you do run into the issues that, these days, those resources are probably running on cloud servers. So still quite possibly not actually local.

Yeah. Even just doing casual research you run into troublesome censorship of information issues with these LLMs. For example, I was interested in the whole process of production of pennicillin and I had a long discussion going over all the principles from scratch: how to find, isolate, assay, and force evolve the most productive strains of pennicillin looking at how things were done historically, how to grow in aerated flasks with continuous feed nutrient systems (with discussion about corn steep liquor being a traditionally ideal feedstock because it both feeds it, but also keeps it under stress so it ramps up production), carefully decontaminating all inputs and isolating the output through a drip system through an oil barrier, using amyl alchohol, and sufuric acid for extraction along with how to actually produce those, etc. Basically it was a very interesting and enlightening session. However, then I tried to more or less restart the conversation on another occaision to clarify some points and I started off with questions incorporating essentially a summary of the first session. The LLM basically refused to because I was asking so directly and it was worried that I was actually trying to set up an at-home penicillin production lab.

So, basically, while you can get information bit by bit from these things, a whole web of probably mostly liability-based safeguards get in your way. That is one of the real concerns (to add to hallucinations, etc.) with AIs taking over as the interface to human knowledge: they will censor it. Not necessarily for sinister reasons (though I have caught LLMs directly presenting corporate press releases to certain questions rather than generated answers, which I consider pretty sinister), but just for the same reason people who frequent certain heavily corporate forums have started to say "Yahtzee" and "unalived", etc. rather than the real terms even outside those forums. Basically, we have to worry about access to information becoming a compartmentalized, dumbed down, lowest common denominator situation.

The actual two main factors that cause oil prices to be high are the war with Iran, and the simple fact that we're nearing the end of oil as the dominant power source. Technically, we're already past traditional "peak oil" as it was originally defined. Because of advancing technology the peak oil target has moved, of course, so there's plenty of accessible oil, but the actual average difficulty of both extracting the oil and processing it to be useful has increased. We're at the point where new wells in the US need a price point of close to $70 per barrel to be economically viable, and that's just going to go up. There are places in the world where the price point for new wells to be profitable is lower, but a good portion of those are in the Middle East. Of course, the cheap cost to extract and process Middle Eastern oil is a bit of an illusion since those states actually absolutely rely on a much higher price point to actually fund their governments since they are critically dependent on oil. If we look at Venezualan oil, which Trump has pointed to as some sort of economic savior of oil prices, then it gets even worse with new Venezuelan wells requiring a breakeven oil price of something like $80+ per barrel. Meanwhile there's a demand crunch coming as we get more and more cheap renewables displacing oil in the energy market. Since Oil is a high capex industry, it can't scale down easily. So a demand reduction really, really hurts the industry. Basically, the industry knows this, but it's in denial, but it still means that interruptions like the Iran war can cause the industry (and therefore oil prices) even more damage.

I'm just curious if you would support the statement that the Trump administration are outrageous liars, including about whether this is a war or not? I also note that you completely avoided responding to the two points I mentioned: A. the fact that a brief spike is different than a sustained plateau, and B. the fact that the high prices during Trump's administration are directly attributable to a war Trump started, whereas the spike during Biden's administration had much less, if anything, to do with the actions of the Biden administration.

No it didn't. If you're talking about the dog tags thing. It started with Musk and ""You have said the actual truth." in response to an anti-Semitic repost he made, which lead to advertisers leaving Twitter. Two weeks later, he was in Israel getting the dog tags, shaking hands, etc. Then a couple of days later he was telling advertisers who left because of his anti-semitism to "go fuck yourself!". Later on, as a result, he also took a trip to Auschwitz.

So clearly not before his image needed it, especially since there were previous events. The Soros attacks and Protocols of the Elders of Zion style conspiracy theories about Jews supposedly flooding Europe with immigrants to destroy it. Various Hitler memes, his threats against the ADL and involvement in #BantheADL, his "general amnesty" for Nazis, Holocaust deniers, etc. and so on.

There has also been plenty in his image that needs sanitization since then. Not that dumb PR stunts ever have, or will actually do the job.

For a fictional example, see Cory Doctorow's Unauthorized Bread.

It's not presented as an apocalyptic scenario or anything, just standard enshittification. The main character lives in a low income apartment that comes with appliances, but all of them are super cheap (or possibly make the property developers money through a kickback scheme) and require the tenants to buy foods, dishes, etc. licensed by the appliance company or to pay a subscription fee. The appliances require a server connection and when the business models inevitably collapse, the servers go down.

Excerpt:

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?

Most of that does seem problematic. For gasoline, it can keep for a while if perfectly sealed, but the problem is mostly with the ethanol content that provides most of the octane rating in modern gasoline mixes. That basically degrades through various processes (especially combining with moisture) and separates and leaves the gasoline very low octane. I will note though, that one exception is AVgas. This is specifically for planes and is what you would find at an airport and it doesn't have ethanol. Also the tanks for that will be very well sealed. So AVgas could last a decade or more. Or are they getting gas from just regular gas stations too? Also, how long has it been since the collapse?

Sorry? "War"? I thought the terminology was now: "I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.". Also, the "all time high" metric for oil prices isn't a very useful measure. You're talking about a spike. In terms of sustained high prices they're much worse under Trump than Biden. Also, as others have pointed out, the spikes under Biden are clearly not so directly attributable to Biden. Trump, on the other hand, very clearly did start the current war with Iran.

Not so much a PR thing. It was more about establishing a unified command structure and it wasn't as direct as that. What actually happened is that the department of War was abolished and replaced with a department of the Army and a department of the Air force. An organization called the national military establishment was created to run the department of the Army, the department of the Air force, and the department of the Navy, which had not been under the department of War. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard was moved out of its temporary home in the department of the Navy and back into the department of the treasury. A secretary of Defense position was created to oversee the National Military Establishment. The problem is that the cabinet positions for the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air force were at odds with the secretary of defense. Oh, and NME seemed like an odd name for the department. Try sounding out "the NME will protect us from the enemy". So, finally, they renamed the NME into the Department of Defense and got rid of the cabinet level positions for the Army, Navy, and Air force. Also, later, the Coast Guard moved to the department of Transportation, but was then moved to the DHS a little over twenty years ago. It can still be shifted as needed under the DoD in times of war or by executive order, but it also gets treated as its own military service branch for some purposes, so it's a bit of an anomaly. Then there's the marines which have stayed continuously under the Navy the whole time, but also get treated like their own service branch for certain purposes.

So, it's not really as simple as the DoW being renamed the DoD and then being changed back. The actual DoD was never a renaming of the DoW, it was a renaming of an organization that absorbed the remnants of the DoW. The DoD also has not truly been renamed the DoW currently. Just like you're not actually dmb and I'm not actually tragedy from a legal standpoint, those are just nicknames we use on an online forum. There's a legal process to change the name of the DoD and, until it's actually followed, anyone calling the DoD the DoW is just using a nickname or alias.

I thought it was "freedom stems from valor"? Or, less officially, "come back with your shield or on it".

"...Travelled, and lived around..."? So, damn statistics, your tiny anecdotal data set is good enough for you? And what is "based" even supposed to mean? Is it good or bad? You don't actually seem to know.

To be clear, does the "you" in that first sentence mean "democracy"? Because that really seems like the only way to interpret it.

It's not a strawman, it's simple fact. A. The foliage won't be in the way of 95%+ of the sound coming from the launch. B. Foliage is mostly audio transparent to the most problematic frequency ranges from a launch anyway. The actual reduction in radius inconvenienced by launches is negligible to the point where it's just not even a consideration.

You actually originally wrote about Cape Canaveral since you replied to a quote about Cape Canaveral. I am realizing that you may not actually know this though since it looks like your original comment was replying to the wrong thread.

There are lots of things that could be pointed out like the differences and similarities between the vegetation at Cape Canaveral or the fact that foliage doesn't stop vibrations that propagate through the ground or from line of sight to the launching rocket anyway, or the fact that I've actually been there and you have apparently only looked at pictures, but it's obviously absolutely pointless, so why bother?

I will just reply to your last bit by quoting myself from 4 comments back in the thread: