Insects tend not to stay exclusively in natural preserves, unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.

Insects migrate. They move around to feed on food sources outside the immediate area. Some, like the monarch butterfly or the dragonfly, migrate thousands of miles, even across entire oceans. The notion that a preserve would protect insects from pesticides is based on an assumption of localized effect that doesn't always line up with the real world.

When a large percentage of insects that leave the preserve don't come back because they fed on crops sprayed with pesticides, that diminishes the population of the preserve, both directly by their loss and indirectly by the loss of offspring that would have come back in a future generation.

And if we reach a point when the only place where the insects are surviving is in the preserve, the loss of insects that leave the preserve would also reduce the genetic diversity of the preserve and accelerate the collapse of the species.

5,000 Indians controlling 100,000 robots, though, would represent a huge cost savings in this case.

First, you wouldn't have to hire in the local market, so the labor would be cheaper. The median salary in India is about $350 per month. California's minimum wage (assuming four 40-hour workweeks) is $2,640 per month. So that's almost an order-of-magnitude reduction in cost by itself.

Second, at least half of a delivery person's time is spent in a vehicle going from place to place, and in low-density areas, that increases to maybe more like 80%. Assuming the vehicles are autonomous, the workers controlling the bots won't have to do anything with a bot while it is in transit (and presumably the autonomous vehicles themselves will require only occasional human intervention), so one person will be able to control a large number of bots, taking control of a bot only when one arrives at a destination.

Third, if the bot is autonomous except in exceptional circumstances, the percentage of time that a human will be in charge will be reduced even further.

So if you assume that the cost per hour is lower by a factor of 7.5, that 75% of time is spent driving (no interaction), and that 90% of deliveries are done fully autonomously without human intervention, and that intervention takes only a quarter of the time that it would take to deliver a package entirely by hand, that would mean that a remote delivery driver would cost 0.75% as much per delivery, and that would only improve over time as the reliability of automation improves and the number of interventions decreases.

The end of for-pay non-artistic manual labor is near.

They're now a multiply convicted monopolist, which means everything they do from now on is going to be under much more careful scrutiny, by the courts, by other companies' lawyers, and by the DOJ. As a result, they're likely to get a lot more cases and *lose* a lot more cases. And at the rate things are going, fines are the least of their worries. They should be worrying that the DOJ might demand them to spin off the entire App Store ecosystem into a separate company and completely lose control. A little bit of short term profit doesn't really balance that out.

Sick of politicians who use their power for their own benefit instead of the general welfare... which to some extent is almost all politicians, but not remotely equally.

You misspelled Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller. The mistakes happened back when Tim Cook was still VP of operations. My exact words when those iOS App Store rules were first announced were "This is an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen." It was an obviously bad idea seventeen years ago, and the antitrust landscape has only gotten worse for Apple since then.

These big tech companies need to hire legal counsel with a more paranoid opinion of the law. They'd get in a lot less trouble if they paid some of their lawyers to tell them whether they should do something, rather than paying them to find ways to justify doing what they've already decided to do and look for legal loopholes to help them get away with doing it.

Yeah, I think they misspelled "lottery ticket". It was an incredible opportunity when the platform was new and nobody was there yet. Now, it's a sea of flappy little bird games, all alike.

Yeah, the first thought that came to mind was that maybe they're in trouble because the company is A.S.S.

Or somewhere in between. I mean, I can buy dissolvable PVA 3D printer filament right now from Amazon or whatever. But there are limited uses for plastic that can't get wet.

His policies are completely out of touch with reality. Everything about his behavior screams "sociopath". The guy deliberately moved materials around in Mar a Lago to hide them from searches by government agencies with the authority to repossess government secrets, repeatedly spouts Russian propaganda that nearly every media organization in the world other than Fox News and a few even more far-right outlets agree is full of s**t, and basically acts like Putin's puppet when it comes to America's position in the world. On top of that, literally nothing I've ever seen him say sounds like a coherent sentence uttered by someone who is fully mentally competent. Listening to him makes me understand Van Gogh.

At this point, I've concluded that he is basically second-term Reagan; his strings are being pulled by powerful oligarchs, both at home and abroad, convincing him to vote for things that benefit them, and he is basically exactly what the Republicans accused Biden of being. Funny, that. The Republicans keep accusing the Democrats of doing things that they themselves are doing. Over and over and over again.

And yet you think that he is qualified to be POTUS. Even if he had not encouraged, or at least completely failed to talk down, an uprising against the U.S. government led by his followers in his name, even if the various commissions concluded not that he wasn't a Russian agent, but rather that he had obstructed justice to ensure that they could not prove that he was, even if none of these things were true, he still would be someone who inspires through hateful fear mongering, spewing anti-immigrant, anti-world trade propaganda that is contrary to the success of this nation financially, contrary to Christian values, and contrary to basic human decency, and he does these things precisely because he knows that fear will motivate a large number of people who don't actually understand how governments operate, how economies operate, etc. to look back longingly at "the old days" that are completely infeasible to return to because technology moved on decades ago, and vote for him based on downright absurd claims that he will somehow return us to those "glory days" (short life expectancy and all) because he somehow cares about them and their problems, despite ample evidence now from both his terms that he cares only about things that benefit him, either directly or by benefitting people with large amounts of political power in his inner circle.

No, people who believe that Harris, someone who spent most of her career prosecuting criminals, who has spent years in government learning how it really works, is more qualified to be President than Donald Trump, whose failed first administration was so toxic that he lost southern states for the first time in a long, long time, whose businesses are only successful in the "they haven't completely failed yet" sense of the word, who apparently doesn't even understand how tariffs work, much less how the rest of government works, and who has spent most of his time so far releasing criminals, violating the constitution flagrantly, and generally making a mess of everything he touches, are likely neither mentally ill, low IQ, nor necessarily folks who listen only to specific news channels.

Try again, this time with more than cheap ad hominem attacks, which in case you haven't noticed, will score you zero points on Slashdot.

Not sure who "The Cackler" is. If you mean Kamala Harris, she's a heck of a lot more qualified for the job than any twice-impeached convicted felon with a long history of sociopathic behavior and obvious word-salad dementia speech patterns could possibly be.

Ultimately, in the end, there may be no good candidate — only mediocre and bad candidates. I would never have voted for Harris in a primary, because her record is too Republican for my tastes in many areas. But she was clearly better than the alternative. And now that we're seeing President Trump doing all of the horrible things he said he was going to do, that his defenders kept saying he would never really do, those of us who voted for her are saying, "I told you so."

Remaining physically and mentally active in general slows the progression. And in spite of obesity being worse, we're doing more to combat at least some of the negative effects of that, and people are retiring later and working for more years, and people are doing more mentally because of tech. All of these things likely play a role.

Reduction in organophosphates also likely contributes (banned for in-home use since 2005). Declining use of trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene since the mid-1990s has also probably helped, as those are likely linked to PD. (They are also in the process of banning those completely in the U.S.; consumer use has been banned since 2016.)

BSE, scrapie, deer chronic wasting disease.... Officially, it is generally believed that scrapie isn't transmissible to humans, but this is likely false.

But nothing really interesting happened in that area until they banned using animals in animal feed in 1997, and a majority of the impact from that would already have been realized, because the incubation period is usually single-digit years, though it can be longer in some cases.

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's both involve misfolded proteins. Call them prions or don't, but that sure sounds like a prion disease to me. And tau proteins exist in cows as well. It wouldn't surprise me at all if differences in the way beef is slaughtered has reduced the risk of transmission of these proteins contaminating the food supply and reduced the rate of those diseases over time.

In particular, I think the age at which cattle are slaughtered has decreased over time, and the level of prions in a diseased animal increase over time, so that decrease in slaughter age means reduced risk of transmission to humans.

So... maybe that might be part of it.

If someone can log in, they have your password, which is a concern in and if itself. But I agree about 9 of 15. 90 of 150 distributed globally would be a more practical number from a data loss perspective, because it is awfully easy to take down 7 servers, but much harder to take down 61. I assume that makes the crypto harder (but I hope not less robust), but if you are just decrypting a key that you then use for the real decryption work, that might not be a big deal.

Trust me, it's a WTF from my perspective, too, but I at least understand the psychology of folks having a need for safety, whether real or illusory.

The eight security guards, I can kind of understand. Four vice-principals makes no sense unless the school is way too big to function, in which case there's your problem. Same for twelve counselors; unless your school has 7k+ students, that makes no sense.

My guess is that your school is big enough that normal administrative processes start to break down, and that's why it is accumulating excess administrative overhead. Small schools are inefficient because you can't pay for enough teachers to cover all the classes. So you don't want schools to be too small. But economies of scale only work up to maybe a thousand students or maybe two thousand.

Above that threshold, the larger the school becomes, the harder it is to manage, and the deeper the management hierarchy tends to become. Not being able to get things done quickly enough causes people to throw more people at the problem, which makes getting things done even harder and slower because of communication overhead, and the problem snowballs.

And school systems have a similar problem, where larger, more complex districts are harder to run than smaller ones. At some point, the best thing you can do is break them all up until they stop being too big.