It seems we 100% agree, but based on your final jab I think you missed the key point. I am not saying "both sides are bad." A more accurate paraphrasing would be "anti-science positions are wrong no matter what side they come from." But even that misses the crucial point. Take a look at what the OP posted:

This person asserts that typically, conservative people question the use of fluoride, not liberals. Anyone watching the current US news cycle might conclude that too. But historically, it was the other way around. My point was this: People should stop associating concepts like "liberalism" with Democrats, and "conservatism" with Republicans. It doesn't work like that. Parties change their positions over time and cannot be mapped to these basic (and overbroad) concepts.

This realization helps people break free of partisan thinking. I have had hyper-partisan family members who don't care if their position is stupid. But if I remind them that a liberal once held that position, well suddenly they question it. I've seen the look on their face: "How could I possibly have had a liberal thought? Impossible!"

You are exactly right when you stated "Mainstream Republicans took the stupidest ideas from the lunatic left and made them the center point of their platform." Just understand this completely shifts people's assumptions about party identity. If someone chooses to, based on data, consume raw milk, consolidate power in a unitary executive, and raise tariffs -- that is totally fine. But they should not call themselves conservative. And we should call it out when people erroneously assume that a belief is conservative or liberal when really it's just "dumb."

The anti-fluoride and anti-vaxx movements have always been on the Democrat side. Under Trump, those anti-science conspiracies are being embraced by Republicans as well.

This is, once again, a reminder that Trump and MAGA are not conservative movements. Anti-science positions are not, and were never, solely the domain of one party. They just chose *different* anti-science positions. The Republican who believes that climate change isn't real is applying the same kind of wrongthink as the Democrat who believes that alkaline water cures cancer.

Nah, the large Microsoft hops they have their documents on the cloud anyway. Share drives and local SharePoint have been replaced with OneDrive, Sharepoint online. Outlook is in the cloud, messaging is Microsoft Teams, etc. Half the people open a document from SharePoint and edit it in the online Microsoft Word and don't even know they are doing it. Then if you get really fancy, you have documents in ERP systems that are on the cloud too.

PLUS: The hybrid solutions are sneaking into things that are supposed to be on-prem anyway. So IT goes through all the work to setup their ERP system on-prem (SAP, Oracle, etc.) but then a bunch of features require cloud connections to work anyway. So technically the documents are local, but maybe your indexer, search, analytics, virus scan, and reports all require the cloud. It's the worst of both worlds, and it is becoming the default.

Perfectly said! The "claptrap" came from the very people who are complaining today. Those who are screaming about teachers feminizing male students are the anti-intellectuals that defined masculinity to be violence and stupidity. They perpetrated that culture upon themselves, then when it turned out that punching the smart kid in the face wasn't a useful job skill, they blamed their failure on the schools.

But at half the range because of the lower energy density. Americans are very concerned about range.

So time will tell which is the winner. Sodium-ion will only be viable if it can provide some superscalar benefit. Suppose it winds-up half the capacity, half the price, and charges in half the time -- then it is really just equivalent to halving the lithium-ion battery. Hopefully it will be much much cheaper, because that is the key factor that will drive adoption.

Then the Sierra Club should spend money researching sodium batteries or building a battery plant. And your own post says "Except for transportation" so sodium batteries aren't a solution anyway

93's point is not dependent upon them being the same organization. It does not matter. The point is that the administration is controlling and does not care about privacy in general.

The US has access to a lot of lithium. That's never been the problem. The issue is that the US has virtually zero lithium refining capacity. China has lots.

I would be totally on-board with this if they used a local AI like Apple does. Or even "use a local AI if your machine meets these requirements" or "only if you turn it on." But as-is, I am forced to send everything to Microsoft's cloud. Which, I admit, 99% of people don't care about so us privacy-focused nerds are an ailing relic. How about a plug-in that lets me change the engine? I know Microsoft's Semantic Kernel allows for this, so it should be easy for them to do if they are eating their own dog food.

Until then, I run ollama so I can use any model I want locally. Performance is just fine using llama3.1 on my mid-level machine.

The US builds a lot of infrastructure then cuts the maintenance budgets. The engineers knew those cloth wires weren't going to last forever, but some politician probably decided that as long as it lasts for one more election cycle, it would become someone else's problem. This happens with schools, nuclear power plants, sewers, etc.

This isn't about technology obsolescence: NY could replace the cloth-wrapped wires with new cloth-wrapped wires. But they can't just leave them to rot.

Two words that should never have been put together are "Malicious" and "PDF" -- Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash are two of the most vulnerable pieces of software ever written. A document viewer should not be able to compromise an entire server! There is something fundamentally wrong about the foundations of software engineering that such a thing is even possible. This is equivalent to a poorly designed lawnmower destroying company HQ.

^^ This post is what the entire discussion should be about.

If AI can adequately replace a human, is there a reason we should object to it? For over 100 years, we have allowed technology to displays humans. Is this time different? If so, why? Is it because it replaces us in ways we morally object to? Is it because we are concerned that there will not be jobs left for humans? Is it economically unsustainable? Or is it just history repeating itself and people are afraid, just like we were during the advent of the steam engine or the typewriter?

Replying just so I know for the future: A quick Google search says that indeed honey bees do pollinate corn. Corn is also pollinated in other ways such as by other insects and by wind pollination. I would post links but there are so many it seems unnecessary.

I wonder why the dude posted this? It's irrelevant anyway, even if I had chosen a poor example. *shrugs*

Even without the financial expense: imagine that you manage a fleet of IP cameras in a secure building. They use HTTPS, hence they require certs. The only way to update the certs is to connect to each one's web interface and upload the certs. Usually this is no problem, you make the 10-year wildcard cert *.camera.internal.net and you are done.

This resonates with me because I manage a fleet of embedded devices where renewing certificates is a big deal! Te company ships the devices with a given certificate, and some (but not all) organizations will replace the certificates. Those organizations also put the devices in an SDMZ that blocks all outgoing traffic. So updating the certificates is currently manual. The devices browsing the embedded devices are similarly limited, so no OCSP or CRL validation is allowed. We recently released an update that included new STIGs that required those validations, and several of the devices became inaccessible causing customer complaints.

Everything about these plans assumes public web sites. But HTTPS has become the application protocol du-jour so there are countless devices that now require certificates. And it is kinda dumb too: imagine a camera on a conveyor belt in a manufacturing floor, or a robot transporting medical samples around a hospital, or a kiosk in a secure facility. It's frustrating enough that we even have to put certificates no these devices at all! But renewing them regularly is awful.

Hopefully, browser manufacturers and HTTPS library authors will not try to enforce this. If they require ConveyorBeltCamera1.ManufacturingCompanyInternal.net to be updated every 47 days, I am going to wake-up one morning to a VERY bad day as I find that a dozen companies around the global are suddenly down because Google or Microsoft pushed an update.