As a reasonably experienced outdoorsman I've heard it said, mountaineering is a self-cleaning oven. If you are attempting to summit a peak with zero experience and zero idea of how to gauge the risks as you walk through them, Google is not the problem. Even without google inexperienced hikers get themselves into trouble all the time. And then there's people who've googled something and suddenly consider themselves an expert. Frankly even high quality trail and route information is often not accurate and conditions can change especially after weather events. There's no avoiding due diligence on those wanting to head into the outdoors, you need to seek up to date information on conditions and even talk to people on their way back down - they'll tell you what's up. It's up to the individual to not have a confidence level mismatched to their ability and knowledge level. Google should strive improve their information of course and put some warnings in, but beyond reasonable steps that they are not accountable for stupidity. But if google introduced information on the relative grade of a route then that's a whole new can of worms where the grade might be incorrect. That is certainly something should not do.

... we need to get everybody into an EV or PHEV and a renewable decentralized electrical grid. Still vulnerable, but much less vulnerable. You can charge an EV anywhere, you can generate electricity just about anywhere. Oil, Gas and coal depend on fragile supply chains linking the consumer to the few locations the stuff is extracted and refined. It's an enormous vulnerability to a few blockades and well targeted attacks that can seize any developed nation, pinch of fossil fuel supply and you have the nation by a fist full of short and curly hairs.

This looks more like a repair job than something out of the factory. Factory would have easy access to the correct component and would not be so likely to do this. This was likely an "inventory" car ie from a cancelled order and the repair job conducted by Tesla staff rather than send it back to the factory as a quality issue.

It might have also been done during a warranty claim. Found a rattle of some sort, strapped it down. Didn't tell the customer they'd done some hack job of dealing with a squeak or rattle.

We're well practiced now. However this new skill is unevenly distributed, only a handful of countries have crushed Covid-19 with successful strategies and others still have running outbreaks, second waves or even first waves that weren't properly put out. There's still a lot of pathways for the flu to spread globally and many governments ill equipped and disorganized to respond. So yes, it will not spread very quickly, but it will spread.

What we should wise up to is the magic money tree. Allow me to explain.

New Zealand like many countries had decades of neoliberal shitfuckery which had run the health system down to run at close 100% capacity most of the time, especially in winter, in the name of "efficiency". When a crisis hits it's hard to run it back up quickly. The lockdown of some form was necessary because of this while decades of damage is rapidly undone before anyone wises up. The large overall rapid spend up by the government was also necessary so nobody sees the whole system fall over in the first gust of wind.

But now the public have seen the magic money tree the government has, and they can't put it away - you know that one governments bring out for war and tax cuts but there's somehow never any money for hospitals or roads or whatever - and it's be used to pay workers of closed businesses, healthcare and interestingly, house the homeless during the lockdown. Note the government is going to keep housing the homeless in motels etc. permanently. It's not kicking them back out on the street that would be a bad look, plus that would draw attention to the magic money tree thingy, and thus uncomfortable questions would come up.

We could comfortably afford to do one full lockdown due to low national debt, the government paid wages and stacked it on the national credit card. Basically we borrow from future generations to make up the shortcoming of contemporary neoliberal capitalism: it's fragile and unable to cope with any kind of crisis because the free market can't price being prepared and resilient.

But we couldn't cope here with a second lock-down, that would really> hurt.

What bothers me with our self-back patting we are doing in this country right now is how perilously close we came to disaster and how much that is our fault as a nation. We should not be comfortable about that. That was a close call.

You are citing one province of Canada to judge the entire outbreak? This virus does and has kill people, thousands, under 60. The only category that death is truly rare is 0-9 years old. The point is it produces serious/critical illness at a high rate in all age groups, thus the swamping of even the best healthcare systems. A lot of young people pull through when on a ventilator, which is why Italy started prioritizing younger people when their healthcare system was overrun. The death rate for younger people will soar when this rips through populations with poor access to healthcare. India has 11 ventilators per million people.

Usually that improbability argument is based on the odds of some organic chemicals in a test tube spontaneous combining to form life. It is usually defeated by the fact we had trillions and trillions of test tubes covering an entire planet iterating for millions of years. Re-run the equation suddenly you get life emerging very quickly. Which is exactly what happened.

For a creationist to be engaging in that argument, that god must have started life on earth billions of years ago, they are inadvertently admitting evolution is real, just bio-genesis had a bump start from an invisible hand. Certainly possible, it's just not a view point consistent with their other beliefs and therefore a strange argument to make.

Actually they would be forced to offer the job back to him. In New Zealand, an employment law win for the laid off employee usually requires the company offers the job back. Though the person has probably not sought that out or that detail was just omitted from the article.

We need something a simple as restricting the amount of packaging based on a formula. Ever noticed how that box of cereal is only half full by volume, and is also far from the optimal shape to save material. It's designed to look as big and eye catching as possible on a shelf because.... every other box of cereal is like that. A simple regulation about packaging surface area vs volume and shelf front presentation maximum size and suddenly you have wiped out about half the packaging in a supermarket.

Much investment, talent and consumer spending has been drawn to smartphones over the last decade, and to a lesser extent tablets and lesser again, consoles. As for developer talent, Apple/Android ecosystems have been a black hole for sucking up developers. As such, desktop class computing and handheld non-touchscreen tech hasn't got much love and VR and haptics are consequence. If we'd not had such a huge diversion since the late 00's things would be quite different right now. Also we're all kinda poor having to buy new smartphones every 12-18 months due to planned obsolence. Now the cloud and AI rush is getting the capital investment so VR/AR/MR/WhatevR is going to be struggling for a while yet. Though interesting now the smartphone world has plateau'd hard and is out of ideas, that there's coincidentally in love by investors for 3D on desktop class hardware, and basically new generations of consoles are now going to be powered by what is basically PC hardware.

I've been reading Slashdot for 20 years and the year of the Linux desktop has always been at at hand.

It's finally been shortened to "the year of Linux" to finally admit desktop Linux will never happen and to reshape the claim to fit the reality for once.

But the year of linux isn't really here. The populace aren't really using Linux are they? Most experience of Linux is Android, or a cloud service, somewhere buried under a stack of abstraction is linux, and that in many cases could be replaced by a new OS without the user even noticing. Examples Fuschia (Google), Tizen (Samsung).

I strongly doubt this because its the classic question, can machines ever be alive? Which can be further reduced to the base question you're actually asking: can an arrangement of atoms be alive? Why, of course they can and sentience is an inevitable an emergent property of arrangement atoms that is alive.

We're further along than we realize.

We live in a universe apparently tuned for life to emerge by itself and progress to sentience and whatever follows. Evolution did all this by itself, with only the right conditions and time to do it, without external influence. Therefore therefore superhuman AI intelligence can emerge simply from the right conditions which we seem to be trying damn hard to create.

I have a massive problem with the concept of "jobs" as a source of meaning. Fact is, human beings have a lot to do other than our work roles that can give us meaning and purpose. Children, stay at home parents, retirement age people don't have work, yet find meaning in their lives, ironically by work-like things, such as gardening, children / grand children / care-giving, even just a daily routine of things you need to do is enough to make people feel productive, socialized and engaged.

That's before you get to things that get pursued out of interest, art, entertaining, sport, volunteering, and most importantly science.

Hold on to your tinfoil hats, crazy speculation follows.

First some background. Back in early 2000's the IPCC was criticized for fear-mongering, when they included a worst case scenario in their projections. Measured warming since those predictions has far outstripped the worst case scenario predictions, and warming has shifted gears again in the last 5 years, outstripping revised predictions. 16 of the 17 hottest years on record global are this century. I've read a few articles and papers that notice this mismatch between what as supposedly solid science and measured reality, nobody is talking about if there was more motivation there than just cautious science. There's a number of reasons for real though, better models, new stuff we know about global climate. But still, one wonders.

Now we are also getting studies popping up forecasting quite alarming warming and sea level rises, along with studies of paleo-climate revealing how fast the climate can actually change when it's really pouring it on (Try 1 degree warming... per *decade*) they appear to outliers that can be dismissed in the light of the totality of good research, but there's a good many of them. We're also getting analysis like the original article, showing that we're being fed some form of optimistic scenario deliberately, it's being played down, and perhaps intentionally - they know slack science-illiterate journalism will miss that kind of thing hiding plain sight.

I'm thinking there is a good chance climate change is worse than predicted and there is a big chance that we can't really humanly do much about it, even if we up-ended the global order to focus on this one task. I also suspect a faction of the deniers (the non-crazy faction of them) know it's real and worse that expected, but for economic reasons are casting doubt to stall drastic action which would be devastating to some special interests (Of which a number aren't even really related to the petroleum industry). The are taking their last runs at revenue extraction from every pie they have their fingers in before the sunset. Some which may prefer a disaster to befall humanity because they can capitalize off that too.

My point is, it's not a case of truth vs denial, within each side of the issue there are sub factions driving their own take on what to do. Even in the cautious science end, through best intentions toning things down to not frighten everybody too much, but frighten them enough to do something. But ultimately we're being lied to by absolutely everybody.

After all when motivating populations to act, the "we can fix climate change" is a better sell than "we can slow it down a bit".

It's a nutty idea to entertain, but much milder than many conspiracy theories and I'm starting to get creeped out at things supporting this idea. I like my crazy theories better when they aren't the least bit real! Very open to debunking please.

When an Eagle's talon strikes a Lithium Polymer battery it may not end well for the attacking Eagle. Although the impact of the bird alone is not healthy for such batteries, drones are designed with impacts in mind. Puncture wounds not much.