AI is not eliminating jobs it is changing them, just like computers and robotics has in the past and the assembly line did before those. Everytime we have had a leap in technology it has made some jobs obsolete but the reduction in costs leading to cheaper prices has increased demand leading to more people being employed to run the new technology.

Yes it is disruptive and it will require people to retrain for different jobs but that has been the case with all leaps in technology: short term disruption but longer term higher employment and increased quality of life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that AI will be any different.

Exactly, so how is it that guns are perfectly legal while you are banning fireworks? The UK has very strict gun control laws but every Guy Fawkes day lots of people set off fireworks in their back gardens perfectly legally. California had 11 deaths due to fireworks while the UK had zero firework related deaths in 2022/23 and only 7 deaths in total from 2010-2023.

So making fireworks legal - while putting some limits of the types of fireworks allowed - seems to save lives, especially when you factor in that the population of the UK is 70% larger than California.

China's economy can always sell product to Chinese people. There are a lot of them. Not to mention the rest of the world, which is happy to trade with China, if only because China isn't constantly making unreasonable and incoherent demands on everyone.

"Mad Max" seems to have seriously underestimated the creativity of Australians regarding energy production :)

Yes, we are all going to die at some point but if we can avoid all the problems and health issues that typically come from aging before we die who wouldn't want to do that?

There are _no_ proven attacks of orcas on humans in the wild. In one case, an orca was documented doing wild contortions to avoid hitting a human, after it started an attack run, possibly mistaking the human for a seal.

They do attack boats, though.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

You should absolutely refuse such a request because if a UK minister is telling you to focus on "defense" they are clearly a foreign spy. The english word is defence.

Yes it is only once or twice a year but it's not something I'd be willing to give up so it's an important once or twice a year and it's the main reason I'd not replace the vehicle we use for such trips with an EV at the moment. Even a fast charger takes 30-60 minutes to charge you vehicle which will reduce your driving time by 1-2 hours assuming ~2 rechargers/day unless you are willing to run it down to almost zero and have a town with a charger in exactly the right location.

I'm sure the technology will improve - it's already come on by leaps and bounds in terms of charging speed from a few years ago - but until it does long distance road trips in an EV are much more hassle than in a ICE.

No, billionaires should not have any increased say over elections and laws due to their wealth than any other person. However, they should still be allowed the same voice as everyone else in supporting or opposing ideas although in practice holding them to that is going to be extremely hard to do.

The no-EDI directive already went out at few months ago. I know because I work outside the US but in an US-led collaboration and our US collaborators have had to shutdown participation in any and all DEI initiatives. However, if you read further down the article you will see the following:

This cut is much, much more than the funding spent on DEI and will basically mean that the NSF has to slash lots of major research projects. I'm not tied into the US system enough to know what this will mean in practice but in my own field of particle physics I suspect we are going to see one or more major US-led collaborations terminated and US involvement in others stopped or heavily reduced.

This isn't the pendulum swinging the other way, it's someone cutting the pendulum's cord.

Ok, so let's just assume for the sake of argument that your assertion is correct. How you would fix that? The obvious approach is to revamp the grant selection process and/or provide better guidlelines and criteria for studies you want to fund. The NSF had a less and 50% success rate for grants before the cuts so it is not like they had more money that applications and just had to fund whatever came along, if they really are funding "idiotic" studies it is because they are selecting the wrong studies to fund.

Taking a slash and burn approach to major science funding agencies budgets while simultaneously providing no guidance or instructions about what studies you want to fund is not going to fix the problem you claim exists. All it will do is decimate science across the US, culling both the research you like and that you do not equally because you have done nothing to change the selection process only reduce the level of funding.

That being said it is going to be great for those of us outside the US because now all the best students are going to be looking elsewhere to do research. However, overall we will not be able to fill the funding gap left by the US which means that some future excellent researchers and research projects are going to fall through the cracks and that's bad for science in general but terrible for science in the US. This is brexit-level stupidity and the consequences will last at least as long.

If you actually mean maize then I'd agree because the US select varieties for human consumption rather than for use as animal feed which is what most other places us it for. In the rest of the world corn is a generic term for cereal crops like wheat, barley etc. and the US varieties of those are different to Europe and so much less popular there.

I have a browser plugin that removes it so I don't have to remember to ignore it.

I think they expected that since they had paid to purchase the game, they would be able to play that game for as long as they cared to, i.e. same as the deal you get when you purchase a book or a DVD.

You can argue that they were wrong to expect that, but that's the usual way of thinking about items that you buy, so that's what people (who haven't yet thought through the implications of software shrink-wrap licensing agreements) naturally expect.

If being able to play the game perpetually isn't a viable business model, then perhaps the publisher should be required to specify up-front how long (at minimum) they will guarantee purchasers access to the game; that way nobody will be surprised when their access goes away, because they understood the time-limit on what they were purchasing before they made the purchase.