They were not the only source of fossil fuel generated power being imported from Utah.

When I used to live in Glendale, California, I noted from reports from the Glendale DWP that most of the power used by the city--and by the state--was imported from places like Utah. Power would be generated in Utah, then shipped by power transmission lines to Glendale.

Will California also stop importing electricity from coal-fired plants outside of the state? Or is this simply virtue signaling by the state as they continue to export their pollution?

When you're angry about the Klan being portrayed as the bad guys...

Neither would have any of the other anti-consumer policy changes that are liable to financially molest you.

Gambling has been lucrative since a bunch of cavemen got together and started rolling rocks in the back of the cave for the best cut of Wooly Mammoth. That's never going to change. The dropout will more than likely die a rich man.

I've been skeptical about the "Windows games on Linux" thing, but I'm hearing nothing but good things about Proton. If it is indeed as good as advertised, it could truly a way for young men to finally get out of the Windows world.

I would have moved my parents to Google's Chrome OS Flex, but while it's super fast and does a few things extremely well, its lack of support for things like DVD playback is a killer in the "Upgrade for Grandma" department.

It may never be a better time, but this is a huge reason why there will never be a "year of the Linux desktop". When Microsoft cuts support, most people will just knuckle under and buy new machines, even if they're happy with what they've been using. They bitch. They threaten. They shake their fist and tell Microsoft they'll go to something else. But most just give in and write the check.

You can add how they've recently reclassified transgenerism (ne gender dysphoria) to the reasons why people have lost trust in the mainstream medical/psychological profession, as well.

Psychology has always been prone to un-scientific activities, but it's become increasingly bad with the wanton politicization of diagnostic standards, on top of the un-scientific approach employed in making most individual diagnosis.

Maybe look under the large heading "Unsubstantiated claims" which lays out several examples known at the time the article was published. Now you might take issue with the depth in which they cover the unsubstantiated claims as such, but the article you cited here very intentionally and transparently acknowledged the fact that there were problems with the dossier.

Now shall we contrast that with a certain mainstream American press outlet's coverage of the Biden laptop?

I think you might have misunderstood what actually happened in the two examples you cited. In both cases they say the mainstream press took a more cautious approach when the reliability of the sources was questionable.

The critical difference was that those old machines, and the software that replaced them, were created to make human workers more productive. To grow company profits through increased worker output. AI is designed to increase profits by flat out replacing those workers, not making them more productive. AI is intended to kill two birds with one algorithm: create software that does human work better and faster than any human could, and then eliminate the costs of human employment.... salaries, insurance and other benefits, training, et al. That's the crucial difference, the intent to replace people, period.

Let's have a look, shall we?

Shortly after the Post story broke, social media companies blocked links to it, while other news outlets declined to publish the story due to concerns about provenance and suspicions of Russian disinformation.[8] On October 19, 2020, an open letter signed by 51 former US intelligence officials warned that the laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."[9] By May 2023, no evidence had publicly surfaced to support suspicions that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation scheme.

All that proves is that hindsight is 20/20. At the time the story was suspected by experts to be bogus, and in your view an impartial news media would have run with it anyway? The "fair and balanced" media certainly did. You might also recall that nothing came out of the laptop "scandal" other than a gun charge for Hunter. The idea that the laptop implicated the "Biden Crime Family" remains domestic misinformation. Moving on.

"On January 10, 2017, CNN reported that classified documents presented to Obama and Trump the previous week included allegations that Russian operatives possess "compromising personal and financial information" about Trump. CNN said it would not publish specific details on the reports because it had not "independently corroborated the specific allegations".[126][134] Following the CNN report,[135] BuzzFeed published a 35-page draft dossier that it said was the basis for the briefing, including unverified claims that Russian operatives had collected "embarrassing material" involving Trump that could be used to blackmail him. BuzzFeed said the information included "specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives".

So Buzzfeed published the dossier, and you're mad at CNN? Unrelated, while the more salacious details were never proven, the broader claims that Russia interfered with the election and the extensive ties between Russian nationals and Trump campaign people were true.

TL;DR - To demonstrate how biased the mainstream "liberal" press is, you offered up two detailed examples of them treating unverified information responsibly.

"As a European"...

You have zero room to talk. France has just collapsed. Again. France, Spain, Italy, and Greece all have debt exceeding 100% of their GDP. And you can't even defend your own shores from an army of military age North African men that are coming in waves specifically to sponge off of your welfare systems. Europe is a pressure cooker right now, and you're doing nothing to free any pressure.

I heard philosophy grads say the same thing. They were still always short on money.

Engineers have always made more money than the pure-science grads, and this accelerated in the 60's. Even the mathematicians jumped over, largely because if you have a talent for math, its fairly easy for you to slide into engineering, with is mostly math anyway. Just math with a real-world purpose. It's funny because, at the end of WWII, there was a big debate about where US science research funding should go. One camp wanted practical research focus with real-world goals... "Build me a generator with twice the output", etc. Lyndon Johnson famously summed up this approach with the question "What will it do for Grandma?". The other side argued for instead funding pure science research based on curiosity, and argued that practical advances would trickle down from those results. The pure science camp won for a short while, but what killed it was the Space Race. The US needed specific machines with specific capabilities on a specific deadline. "Pure Science for the principal of it" fell by the wayside to "We need that rocket to have a 60% thrust efficiency increase, next year". And it's been that way ever since. In the marketplace, and especially in the marketplace of ideas, practical engineering won. And what research we still did tended to be dominated by hyper-expensive physics projects that had practically no commercial applications at all. I think the death of the Super-Conducting Supercollider in Texas was the death knell of big pure science projects in the US. As a result, engineers are actually doing a good bit of our basic research now. It's just folded into their commercial projects.

Engineering spacecraft modules will get you a high income with steady, reliable pay. Choosing to look for particles that may never be found will not.