... you mine it and process it.

So all the price inflation in the world isn't going to do much until more copper mines and smelters are in operation - which is a decade-scale investment.

and that is why fucking around with the global commodities markets on a faster-than-monthly basis is a good way to fuck things up for decades.

Well done, Dear Leader, for acting like a Tangerine Shitgibbon. So glad to know you'll still be in power (or your appointees, as the Alzheimers bites) to try to sort out your own self-inflicted problems.

It's not just copper - a lot of high power grid lines are made of aluminium conductors with a steel core - you can get more conductivity for cheaper pylons carrying less weight. But it still needs mining and smelting.

The game changer would be if someone succeeded in inventing a sufficiently conductive carbon-based polymer. With some genetic engineering, we should be able to harvest the raw materials instead of mining them. I've been hearing about incremental advances in "plastic conductors" since I was literally in school. Sounds like it's poised for a revolution some century soon, because nobody has put any real effort into the problem. Assuming, of course, that such a thing is actually possible, of which there is no guarantee.

There will be knock on the door from the Thought Police for you in the near future. How dare you contradict the Dear Leader until he contradicts himself?

FTFA :

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,"

What's that saying about "when you hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras". Note that the effect seems to be occurring in the particles caused by the interaction of a (notoriously unreactive) neutrino with a boring rocky particle (proton, neutron, electron, in roughly equal numbers) ; but those reaction products are boringly reactive particles, which is how the produce the showers which are behaving weirdly.

FTFS :

leaving Russia controlling roughly half the world's enriched uranium market.

A quick Wiki (verb) (because I noticed a similar claim in a non-America story recently and thought "I should check that") gives me :

Rank .. Country. . . . . Annual tonnage . . % of global total
1 . . . Kazakhstan . . . . 21,227. . . . . . . . 43.01%
2 . . . Canada . . . . . . 7,351 . . . . . . . . 14.89%
3 . . . Namibia. . . . . . 5,613 . . . . . . . . 11.37%
4 . . . Australia. . . . . 4,553 . . . . . . . . 9.22%
5 . . . Uzbekistan . . . . 3,300 (est.). . . . . 6.69%
6 . . . Russia . . . . . . 2,508 . . . . . . . . 5.08%
7 . . . Niger. . . . . . . 2,020 . . . . . . . . 4.09%
8 . . . China. . . . . . . 1,700 (est.). . . . . 3.44%
9 . . . India. . . . . . . . 600 (est.). . . . . 1.22%
10. . . South Africa . . . . 200 (est.). . . . . 0.40%

(There has got to be a better way of doing tables in Slash's crippled subset of HTML. But it's a rare-enough need.)
So, Kazahkstan (yes, it's a former SSR of the USSR ; but it hasn't been part of Russia for a generation now, and they'll be looking at Ukraine, reading the "Ukraine Lesson", and collaborating with whoever they can trust (DPRK, Iran, Pakistan?) to trade some of that lovely fissionable material for nuclear weapons technology) is by far the largest producer, with another former SSR on the list ahead of Russia (the Russian Federation). Haven't the Kazakh's changed from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script in recent years? Yes, I thought so.

If I were in an anti-proliferation inspectorate, I'd look at those production rates for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with the proverbial fine-tooth gamma-ray spectrometer. The amount of happy-happy-joy-joy they could mutually share with Iran (or Pakistan) by trading some lies on the export paperwork for the tech to low-enrich some of their uranium (destined for Iran (or Pakistan)) to, say, reduce by half the amount of enrichment that both themselves and Iran (or Pakistan) has to do.

Does Israel have planes with the range to bomb the further reaches of the 9th largest country in the world? I bet that question gives them twitchy arseholes in Jerusalem. Along with the question of how to get other distant countries to allow their bomber and tanker planes silent overflight.

The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?

S/next administration/next revolution of Trump's braincell/

As if there's going to be another "US administration", this side of the 3rd or 4th American revolution (depending on your opinion of 1/6). Hilarious.

We will likely be synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels with some regularity soon. I know there are doubters because hydrogen from electrolysis is so energy intensive. My answer to that is to not get hydrogen from electrolysis, there's more efficient methods using heat.

What's wrong with getting hydrogen from water, the way plants (and other photosynthesisers have (mostly) been doing it for the last 2-5+ billion years?

To remind you of your kindergarten chemistry : 2 CO2 + 2 H2O -(through a chloroplast)-> 2[CH2] (an approximation to "hydrocarbons") + (some) O2 - which is the basic reaction of oxygenic photosynthesis. You still need to do a degree of methods using heat to convert the mixed organic gunk coming out of a bioreactor into something that a regular IC engine can handle, but not a huge amount. There's a reason that most of the world blends alcohols (mostly ethanol) into their petrol (gasoline) supplies to reduce smog-forming emissions. It even works without the corruption in the US agricultural industries.

Of course, you don't have to release O2 if you don't want to - there are around a dozen non-oxygenic photosynthesis systems for turning light and CO2 into "fixed" carbon (with a lot of bound-in hydrogen) and some other organic gubbins that can generally be burned. And indeed, multiple groups are touting modest variations on the theme and trying to get from lab scale to refinery scale. But there's no good reason to go to synthesising hydrogen by electrolysis when you've got biological catalysts around to do the job for you. Unless you have some biting need to build high-pressure high-temperature heavy-iron chemistry sets for some other reason instead of atmospheric pressure glorified buckets. (Such a reason might be supplying hydrogen for ammonia synthesis, as a precursor to the explosives industry. If you want that, say it.)

There's an effort - whose details I don't much follow - to develop a biofuel replacement for Jet-A1, which may be the first such system to make it to "refinery scale" manufacture, because it's got some relatively coherent global backing. The aviation industry tout that one quite often, because many tourists feel guilty about drowning the tropical islands they flock to to do their lobster impersonations. That might get the refining ("downstream") end of the oil industry quite upset, if it approaches fruition.

I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

People are ascribing the wrong motives to the manufacturers. What they want is money. What Barbie will be subtly trying to work into conversations is suggestions that she try to get her parents to buy her playhouse, car, friends, fashion accessories, etc etc.

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"

AI models are usually trained to be sycophantic and obedient. Whatever the child wants to role play, I have zero doubts that the doll will be 100% onboard, unless it's somehow age-inappropriate or dangerous.

And if not AOC then who are you talking about? By follower counts, the top are:

1. AOC (last post: -21h)
2. Mark Cuban (last post: -11h)
3. George Takei (last post: -14h)
4. Mark Hamil (last post: -4h)
5. The Onion (last post: -13h)
6. The New York Times (last post: -48m)
7. Rachel Maddow (last post: -2d)
8. Stephen King (last post: -14h)

And the only reason the last post times are so "large" are because it's early morning in the US right now.

You talking about AOC? Her last post was 21 hours ago.

Global population will begin to decline in 2080.

The best sort of problem : someone else's.

However, the population of people 40 and under *has already peaked* and is declining. That means *not enough people working* to pay for benefit programs for people over 60 starts *today* .

Ditto. I've paid my whack. I'll take what I'm due.

"after me the deluge"

This is Scotland. "Toujours le deluge!"

But having 5 billion seniors, 2 billion adults, and 1 billion kids isn't going to be healthy.

Someone Else's Problem.

I can tell you are a flat-earther type.

Nope - geologist. Firmly rooted in reality.

How do you arrange to use a word processor to handle text input on a web page form?