Clearly. If NATO wanted to attack Russia, they could have done it ten thousand times by now.

To be clear, NATO likely *is* attacking Russia's *political power* because of the way Russia has repeatedly abused that power, but NATO is not attacking Russia's land, people, military, or buildings. And NATO would stop doing that if Russia would stop threatening its neighbors.

I'm not saying the military action was handled well, but the fact that even Russia, with its long history of defending dictators who mass murder civilians, said that Libya's government was doing something bad is quite telling. And there's still hope that Libya might end up with a stable, reasonable government at some point.

The thing is, you're going to have chaos almost any time a totalitarian regime falls. Gaddafi wasn't going to live forever, and it wouldn't matter if he died from natural causes or from Arab Spring. The power vacuum would still have probably been bad. Russia is going to see the same thing when Putin eventually dies.

Mod parent funnier, but what was Microsoft's version called? Probably still around with new branding...

You need none of these things to be successful. Money and connections do more for a person's outcome than any amount of brains. A century of middle managers marrying their secretary has brought us to this point.

Now don't blame middle managers for this, they as simply dumb beasts acting according to their nature. But blame a system that values the function of management over the actual work that labor performs.

But did ChatGPT cite Betteridge?

But me thinks the answer is "Ask again later" per the magic eight ball. By which time it will be too late to worry about it.

There is some evidence that secondary education in China is mostly wasted. Grades and degrees are often used as status symbols but the actual work is often unrelated to their education content. (That's a problem everywhere, but more so in China.)

Mod parent funny. But also sad.

Is that a legal adjectival form for fool's gold? But I bet I don't get my funny mod because I forgot to work the joke into the long comment...

That was how we usually handled it, especially for a bar crawl. Go to Daly City and park there for free instead of paying $30 or so to park for an evening in the City.
Right after San Jose got BART, I moved away even though I was about a mile from the station. Unfortunately, taking BART the whole way to SF from San Jose is quite a trek. It's nice for visiting the Easy Bay but not the best way to the peninsula (Caltrain is)

What I don't like about BART is that services ends at midnight. Meaning we either need to cut the bar crawl early or pay for a taxi/uber/lyft to get back. Getting from MUNI to SamTrans in order to take a bus all the way back to Daly City is a bit too complicated so we only tried it once. The real crimp is most of MUNI is shutdown around 10pm-midnight. And you just have the night owl busses that circle the city or the one that cuts through a bunch of neighborhoods (like the Mission)

Overall, SF's public transportation is decent. And I think I would like it more if I lived there. It's just a bit difficult to navigate in a car compared to San Jose*. Where as San Jose sucks because nothing is close, and it takes the Light Rail a very long time to get anywhere. The SJ bussing situation has improved somewhat but I don't think its ever going to be a walkable city simple due to its expansive size.

* - ignoring that Santa Clara County will have multiple names for many major roads. Example: El Camino Real (state route 82) to The Alameda to W Santa Clara St. to E Santa Clara St. to Alum Rock Ave. (state route 130).

Some lie more than others. Fox had to pay a $787m settlement for lying about voting machines. Internal emails made public showed they knew they were lying to gain ratings.

(Rupert Murdoch has a win-at-all-costs mentality. He'd pit his own children against each other to "spur their competitive juices" but it just created unnecessary family tension. All 3 children admit their father is a jerk that way.)

That attitude is probably why you didn't get the funny mods. The rational, non-humorous reality would be to use the energy from the coal plants to eliminate the coal plants as quickly as possible, which is basically the strategy the Chinese are applying now.

Some say to "block all home internet-connected devices from children" but that's easier said than done. My kid had MacGyver-like ability to find internet gizmos. I suspect they hacked into neighbor's wi-fi, as we changed house passwords twice. (Or bartered with a sibling or stayed with friend).

Do I have to complete the quote? It would be additional evidence. [And the moderators rated that FP "Informative"? Really?]

Also me thinks though dost not followeth the link and readeth the story. The original is on the clickbait-ish side, but the Slashdot summary version much more so. The original starts with videos, and I think the complicated answer is more along those lines. So here's a short summary of my latest thinking on the topic of human intelligence, such as it is.

Long time ago some general purpose computing units evolved. They were built out of neurons. Before the mammals showed up, though I'm not sure where to draw the line. Some of them got incorporated into specialized systems for processing certain types of data such as smells and sounds and images. There was no real design process involved in those times, just lots of trials and lots of errors, but Ma Nature is kind of efficient and the sooner the errors died, the sooner their amino acids were recycled back into food and fertilizer. (Going at that level because I'm currently reading "Amino-San No Himitsu", Volume 222 in the series of "good" manga secrets.)

But recently humans came along and subverted the hardware with strange new software. We couldn't do much with the smell stuff, but we added language programming on the sound system and wound up with stories and then implemented concepts like self-awareness and consciousness on top of that "new OS". Complicated part was integrating some of visual stuff into it, but I think the example of cats can help clarify things. A cat can hear and see a lot of stuff and can learn all sorts of complicated behaviors when it comes to catching birds and mice, but there is no language and therefore no internal stories of the cat itself and no external stories to teach to other cats. But working on the level of the sound system its basically a linear thing, like the tape in Turing's machine. From an evolutionary perspective, strings of sounds made sense, but at the level of good and bad patterns. The steady sound of the wind in the grasses versus the changing sound of an approaching prey or predator.

Then we invented written language and things became really perverse as we subverted the visual system. The evolved hardware did stuff like recognize lines and colors at the low level and recognize more complicated constructs at higher levels. Originally we could recognize the foods and predators and take appropriate actions, but when we recognized words we compressed concepts to a whole new level--but the general purpose neural hardware didn't care that it was solving much more complicated problems at much higher levels. Higher level processing of complex words, not simple corners. Very flexible programming indeed.

Now things have gotten really perverse in bad ways. The kids are now saturating their video channels with garbage like cute cat videos instead of complicated books. And the AIs are evolving by design to handle many kinds of problems that really strained our human hardware. "Simple" example from the LLMs. Humans are basically evolved to handle two to four dimensions at a time, but the AI chips are designed to handle thousands and millions of "dimensions" at the same time. We humans have to shift our levels of abstraction and reference frames to see relevant aspects of various problems, but the AIs just swallow the entire problem whole without even needing "meaning" for most of the dimensions...

Critical thinking skills should be included with the 3 R's: Reading, (w)Righting, (a)Rithmetic, and Reasoning.

The number of logic fallacies that pundits and trolls use is staggering. Typical examples:

1) A handful of (alleged) members of Group X did bad thing Y, therefore the entirety of Group X is bad. Proportions matter.

2) Guilty until proven innocent.

3) Buzzwords that have no clear meaning: "Weaponizing X", "Grooming kids toward X", "Real Americans", "Elites", "Deep State", etc.

4) If subject matter experts are wrong, then their detractors are right: it's often possible for both to be wrong. (Why one would expect amateurs to usually be better is puzzling.)

5) Slippery slope. The extreme of any viewpoint is usually undesirable, but in a democracy we have to accept compromise and probably should expect it.