When was the last time you went to a movie theater? The one thing I find most notable about 2025 compared to the previous century is that the previous cheap fold-down seats in movie theaters have been replaced by wide, comfortable seats with plenty of legroom. In most of the theaters built recently the seats recline as well.

For the most part, you also choose your seat when you buy your ticket online, so if the only seats available are in undesirable positions relative to the screen, go to a different show.

The key thing that somebody reported was a suspicious gray Nissan. Once they zeroed in on looking for a grey Nissan at the crime scene, they looked at the surveillance cameras, found one that had in the right place at the right time, and used the Flock cameras and license plate readers to discover it was also present in Brookline at the MIT professor's shooting, then used the Flock cameras to follow it to the storage facility.

Maybe "regular police work" could have followed it through the change of license plates to a facility two states away, but maybe not. You do know not all crimes are solved.

I'm not sure why you think that. America does have this political belief that the government shouldn't be doing research, but should instead fund outside entities to do so, in the belief that outside entities are more efficiently run. NCAR, of course, reports to the National Science Foundation, why do you think it would somehow be different or run "more efficiently" if it were "absorbed" by the NSF?

What in the world do you find "shady" about it?

What in the world are you talking about? There are many government agencies for which the budget has no accountability-- when the military misplaces a billion dollars, their response is "Well, it hard to keep track of everything," but the NCAR budget is public and completely transparent.

Interesting link, thanks!

The war against using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" was lost years ago. Even the dictionaries have conceded, although I'm amused that the definition 2 in the web Merriam-webster actually uses the word "literally" to mean "literally" in the text of the definition of "literally" meaning "not literally."

2 informal : in effect : VIRTUALLY —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible
I literally died of embarrassment.
" will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice."—Norman Cousins

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merriam-webster.co...

When people are starving, it is the calorie value that is the problem.

Interesting.

For much of the world, avoiding starvation is the principle goal, so for these areas, higher crop yields are beneficial despite lower nutrient density.

For most of the developed world, getting enough calories to avoid starvation is not a big deal, and lower nutrients in food is undesirable.

Another thing to keep in mind, of course, is that increased carbon dioxide is going to play havoc with existing farms and fields due to climate change, with areas currently producing high crop yields becoming less farmable, and (presumably) other areas not currently farmable due to drought or other climate-related factors becoming more farmable. This will create an unknown amount of economic disruption.

I did. And gave a link.

No article was linked. Your assertion, on the other hand, contained both a fact ("the pollutants were actually causing clouds to form, cooling the environment") and an editorial ("a bad idea".) The fact is accurate. The editorial addition is an opinion.

If you had linked an article, probably this one, you would discover that it nowhere contained the editorial you added to it, "a bad idea."

The phrase "a bad idea" is editorializing. It is true that sulfate aerosol emission from shipping had a cooling effect, and reducing these emissions had an (unexpected) warming effect. Whether reducing these emissions was a bad idea or not depends on whether the beneficial effects of reducing sulfate pollution outweighs the negative effects of the slight reduction in cooling. The cooling effect of the marine sulfates was estimated at about 0.12 w/m^2, which is small compared to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, currently estimated at about 3.5 W/m^2.

True, but it turns out that waste heat is a very small contributor to the global temperature change compared to greenhouse gasses. Basically, if you emit one erg of energy from a heat engine, that's one erg of energy one time, and done. On the other hand, if greenhouse gasses absorb one erg of energy and reradiate it downward, that same carbon dioxide will keep on absorbing and reradiating energy for the lifetime of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, estimated to be hundreds of years under current conditions.

It's the difference between a one-time input of energy and a continuous input of energy.

Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?

Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".

What do you say, and why is it also "no"?

Well, peak rate of extinction is not the same as "all the glaciers gone."

And, glaciers gone just means that the flow rate will equal the precipitation rate, rather than the precipitation rate delayed until the spring thaw.

Basically, not true. There is, of course, an energy cost to making pretty much anything. Cars. Your shirt. A solar panel. But that cost is a one time cost.

Burning fuel to produce energy, on the other hand, incurs a continuous cost. Every day-- every second-- you are making energy, you must keep burning fuel. This results in a cumulative cost. Cumulative costs overwhelm the one-time cost.

And... the cost of making solar panels, and for that matter wind turbines, keeps getting cheaper as the manufacturing technology gets better. And, yes, that includes the energy cost.

Sort of.

Humans have removed most of the natural predators of birds, but cats, who have the ability to live alongside humans, have adapted to that ecological niche.