Mixed bag. I agree the permit probably shouldn't have that requirement, at least not at this time. that's a whole bag of regulation: how much monitoring? what constitutes a micro plastic? what's the baseline for the ocean in the area? who consumes the monitoring data? how do you monitor? are there consequences when it goes too high? what is too high? are all microplastics made equal or do different types of plastics have different effects?
In an honest administration I would figure they would strike the requirement then go forward to answer questions like those to see if there's a need to form regulation around it. And an honest administration could probably bring forth those types of nuances to an informed and level-headed public and be accepted.
We do not have an honest administration, nor an informed or a level-headed public. His firing was likely both retaliatory for making them look bad when the information was released but also "we know this guy's not going to play ball and cause problems for us later. get rid of him"
Not sure why. looking at the polls it would seem the primary points are
1) Sony ending physical disks
2) potential high price of next gen.
1 is hilarious, even games that come on physical disks are already mostly useless without internet. I had a ps4 and bought "Last of Us" and the game is literally unbeatable without an internet connection. It has a game breaking bug that isn't patched on disk. Many other games are crap or broken without patches. Also jumping to PC where there hasn't been physical media in ages and 99% of games have DRM is just out of the frying pan into the fire. based on the market share for GOG I can assure you only a small fraction of gamers actually care about "owning" their games.
2 is kinda stupid, they mentioned a price point of $1,000, not sure you can build a next-gen-console comparable PC for that price. My current computer's GPU cost more than that by itself and anything but a pittance of RAM will too.
I mean go for it, more PC gamers the better (it's my chosen platform) but if you weren't already on board years ago not sure anything has really changed.
I'm curious if these systems form a net positive. The cost of a thing provides a pretty reasonable proxy as a summation of the energy put into it's creation. The implication being that a balcony solar system is probably roughly net-negative, environmentally speaking, until it reaches its ROI.
I wonder if enough of these systems reach return to cover all the ones that don't for some reason or another. Looks like ROI might be 3-7 years, at the high end seems probable people would maybe move and not be able to use them and never really get their money's worth out of it.
I think Monsanto is an evil company, like in a very real cartoonish-evil sense. I have no doubt they put their thumb on the scale of research leaning it towards safe.
That said I suspect glyphosate is probably not that bad, and among herbicides it may actually be the lesser of many evils. As in most things the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Glyphosate may have carcinogenic properties but also may not be particularly dangerous in the quantities that a normal person may encounter either in food or spraying the weeds around their house a couple times in the summer.
Probably the most convincing thing I can casually dig up is that despite massive increases in use[1] the per-capita rate of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma has been pretty steady since 1990[2]. Now suspiciously it did rise between 1975 (roundup introduced in '74) and 1990 but seems to have plateaued since then.
If it were substantially linked via casual exposure I would expect a stronger correlation with its use. I wouldn't go drinking the stuff but it's possible it's no better or worse than the myriad of other "safe but not really" chemicals we douse our lives with.
I'm curious as to how I would score, I would definitely count myself as "literate" but I wonder how well I'd do on the level 4/5 tasks and if they cross over into more general memory, intelligence, and study habit metrics that even a normally "literate" person would not do well at.
Though given those descriptions I can't help thinking those would be great tests for AI. I'd love to see the proficiency scores for various models.
EDIT: Ok I just needed to scroll further, they have sample items in the last section up to level 4 and even at level 4 the question seemed trivial.
The most wordy one is the Q Drum article (which by the way Q drum is a real thing, kinda neat idea) and there's literally only two basic criticisms (flat land and expense) and if you had any idea what the life straw is you can probably construe what the similar criticism in the email is going to be without even looking.
Based on the scores and the proficiency description I assumed they were actually targeting some sort of normal distribution and levels 4/5 would be genuinely difficult explaining the scores. I'm now much more sad that the scores are so low.
At least I got a laugh at how they refer to each test item as "the stimulus" which has such a sterile/clinical flavor to it.
to be pedantic you'd need to think a lot about how you power your human. Did you fuel up your human with beef or beans? local or shipped? were they operating a day in climate control? have to commute? did they need equipment like a large monitor? etc .
in reality basically all those concerns come out in the wash when you factor pay. energy inputs throughout the chain tend to materialize as expense. if the human was paid less then likely they used less energy.
wow, very interesting I can't say I've really ever heard of anyone financing research themselves, hope things work out and maybe a treatment arrives in time for you.
As an aside if you end up cryogenically freezing yourself for a future treatment don't forget to actually cure your boneitis when they thaw you out.
For anyone else out there that looked at the picture and their first thought was "are those tanks open to the rain?" thinking they were just open cylinders
And it prevents vapor loss or needing vapor overhead as the roof floats directly on the surface. Rain/snow water is pumped out off the top of the roof as needed.
I suspect It just sat fallow for 25 years because there was already a park nearby and nobody bothered to press them on using the land for it's donated purpose. It switched hands a few times. Likely someone turned it up in some meeting and realized at this point they were never going to do anything with it and might as well sell it.
Edit: In considering the protracted timeline, I revise the assumption to "nobody at the office knew why they had the land or any stipulations attached to it". it's even possible that the buyers in 08 didn't know the terms of the original deed from nearly a decade before. Not that it makes it right to sell it but the intent wasn't likely malicious, the land wasn't donated just last year or anything.
If the only interesting thing about a work is it's provenance is that work actually valuable?
actually in all honesty human works are predominantly crap, and a bit passé. If I'm going to visit a site whose whole shtick is provenance I'd rather see some really, objectively good, ai stuff. that would be way more interesting.
> The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.
Time and time again this proves to be rather irrelevant to this administration. There's literally no consequences for illegal actions and even if they're called out on it all that is reactionary. The system will be well broken before a ruling.
Kicking myself for not getting the other 2 sticks when I built my computer. I didn't really need them and had them in the cart, just never pulled the trigger.
Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.
Yep, this is the same thing they did with the video streaming.
The video thing actually made me cancel prime. The shipping isn't a big deal anymore and I was able to justify the prime as a bonus to the streaming service.
“Listen,” said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, “they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”
“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What's that?”
“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”
“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”
A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.
“What?” they said.
“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”
As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.
Good bit of survivor bias in the retired population. If you can put in 30-40 years of full time work and then afford to retire you probably don't have a propensity for substance abuse.