The Thwaites Glacier melting would lead to about 65cm of sea level rise. The higher figure is likely based on this collapse destabilizing the entire ice sheet over West Antarctica.

I think the more concerning thing is that the rate of change in reality is streaking out ahead of what the models predict.

She wanted to move from a state with a lot of a highly infectious disease to an area that from memory was essentially free of the disease. She wasn't imprisoned. It was very well publicized that if you wanted to make that move that you would have to quarantine for 14 days. This was not some big surprise. Howard Springs is former mining accommodation. Is it 5 star? No. It has air conditioning, internet, decent food, and accessible outdoor space so it's quite manageable for a couple of weeks. I'm not sure what she was hoping for - that the people at her destination would just trust that she wasn't bringing the virus into their neighborhood? People have grown sad selfish and weak.

If you allow this you're setting your department up for disaster. When Mr 55 hour weeks gets promoted and replaced by someone working regular hours you're down nearly two work days a week right from the start. Add in that the new guy will take some time to get up to speed you're realistically down 3 - 3.5 work days per week. The bean counters sure as hell aren't forking out another budget because you got this much work done with this staffing level last financial year - get it done. It doesn't take long for that to snowball and your before long some of you other experienced and competent workers decide to pursue other opportunities with other employers. Now you've lost your mentors who could help your new guy when he was stuck and get him up to speed. Your department is getting heavy on the new and mediocre. Anyone with experience and skill still left at this point is actively looking for the exit. All that remains to be seen is how many other departments which depend on your work will get sucked into your black hole with you. Seen it a few times and it's never pretty.

Your employer can have exactly the hours of work they pay for. I'm quite sure they're not just handing out extras to customers who didn't order quite enough of something.

I think you're missing the point entirely. This is about the right to control one's likeness which is already widely protected to varying degrees and is absolutely within the purview of government. Do you support a position where a person's name and likeness could be used to sell or promote anything, no matter how abhorrent to them, and there was nothing they could do about it? If so, edgy, but I don't want to live in your ideal society. If not, why then should these web sites be able to use someone's likeness without consent to supply a product presumably in return for ad impressions? (or however they make their money)

Seriously? To train a basic doctor you've got 4 years of undergraduate degree and four years of medical school before you even get to your residency, dentistry I think is five plus a couple more for any specialty like orthodontics,

That's consistent with what happens in Australia. Before polls open a citizen who is not a member of any party is called into each polling centre and invited to inspect the ballot boxes and satisfy themselves that they are empty. . The ballot boxes are then sealed and the citizen signs to confirm the seal numbers. The ballot stay in full view from then on. A polling station is issued a set number of ballot papers and the votes cast plus the blanks must match the number of issued papers with very low tolerances. A the close of polls the seals are broken in front of scrutineers from both parties and the ballots are counted at the polling centre under the observation of scrutineers. Once counted, the ballot papers are packaged, sealed again, and transported under very high security to the Australian Electoral Commission where they are counted again. I can't think of a single instance where I had any doubts about who was elected at any level of government,

As a side note, we did lose just over a thousand ballot papers in one state a few years ago. The High Court (roughly equivalent to US Supreme Court) ruled that the election had to be re-run in that state.

In fact solar can enhance farmland. Australian sheep farmers have reported gains in production of up to 15% for sheep grazing under solar panels. The sheep don't have to go far for shade, the drip lines off the panels create strips of green grass even in drought. The farmer gets more wool and an extra source of income. The solar farm gets the grass kept down around the panels (reduced fire risk) at no extra cost. Who isn't winning in this scenario?

That is one thing my state government in Australia has done a little bit about. There's a state government website/phone app that lets you see all fuel prices from all fuel stations on a map in real time. The fuel stations are required by law to provide prices up-to-date. I will happily drive an extra 2km for 17c/L off the price of my petrol.

If anyone is interested https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fuelcheck.nsw.gov....

Can somebody boot it up with a copy of Winamp on the same machine? Inquiring minds want to know what happens...

I'm not convinced on the superior results. I circles I moved in the reason for the switch was much simpler that that. The Google landing page was fairly small and loaded quickly. I know a lot of people who switched to it because they didn't have to wait for the news, sport, weather, shopping, and other random stuff to load before they could search. In days when there was still a lot of dialup that made quite a big difference..

And one of the lessons of capitalism that we have learnt - or rather not learnt - several times over is if there is no spending power it goes pear shaped very quickly. It doesn't matter how efficiently you make a thing - if nobody can afford to buy it, you're going broke. Traditionally companies make money through selling goods/services and pay their employees wages and their shareholders dividends. Employees/shareholders spend that money on goods and services and money circulates. If we were to see AI companies as described with almost no human employees you're going to create money funnels where a large portion of the capital is concentrated in the hands of relatively few shareholders. Now a shareholder might be able to afford 1k meals and 5k coffees a day but the reality is they are going have 3-4 meals and (probably) less than10 coffees. If nobody else can afford these things the AI that can make 25k coffees an hour may or may not recoup the cost of its construction and energy. Now I'm sure AI companies can get by selling each other services for a while but each time around their buying power is diminished by their energy and maintenance costs.

The second related lesson is that if you diminish people's quality of life they will sit around being miserable - up to a point. When that point is reached they tend to start breaking and burning stuff. Make them sufficiently unhappy and... it might not be a fun day to be a shareholder. Sure, you could build AI defense that will massacre the great unwashed in their tens of thousands as they approach with their torches and pitchforks. What are you left with? Even fewer people who hate you and still cannot afford to purchase your very efficiently produced goods. Your wealth is now a group of circle jerking AIs whose primary goal by this point is to dig up half the planet (automated AI mining of course) for the raw materials to maintain/replace their power sources and computing systems.

The AI future described is not the pinnacle of capitalism. It's where capitalism goes to die.

The French tried a 10 day week just after the revolution and the Russians tried a few week lengths between WW1 and WW2 but both reverted back to a seven day week. Interesting to note that in both cases suppression of religious practice seems to have been a significant factor. In the case of the French I believe the change was fairly unpopular primarily because workers went from 6 to 8.5 days between a full day of rest.

There have been plenty of thought bubbles on the subject but I honestly don't see any change to the week in the foreseeable future. There is zero chance of getting widespread agreement with significant Muslim, Christian, and Jewish populations likely to be fairly solidly against it and plenty of other people won't want to change because they don't like change and/or don't see any great benefit. From an IT perspective I could only see it as a major pain having to support both in software. Excel is painful enough with dates as it is.

I'll consider the possibility it could happen in the distant future shortly after the US embraces metric and completely abandons their pounds, feet and miles.

I apologise if my comment came off as an indictment of the whole field. It was more a reflection of my sourness at some of the things that have gotten through on tenuous evidence at best in an area where it matters. If you roll out a cosmological theory based on very speculative math you may be wrong but at worst you've wasted some research dollars. Non evidence-based research rolling out in education and therapeutic fields can end up breaking people.

Much respect for the work in education/learning science. It's probably one of the most important fields of research. Having worked in adult ed I have unwillingly had a front row seat to how much is can mess a person up if they have a bad run through the education system. It's not the whole picture by any means but it is most unhelpful when pedagogies that are something between an ideological thought bubble and a philosophical musing get rolled out without regard to whether they have a solid body of proof they actually work or are appropriate to the particular educational setting.

As far as what the survey means, without knowing their sample size, margins of error, how they asked the question and where, how it was funded, etc, who the hell knows? To quote a lecturer from an introduction to statistics subject, "what answer did you have in mind?"

I hope you have better evidence than that. I suggest you do a quick search of your favourite source of scientific papers papers and see how many articles used both of those words prior to 2020. In science certainty is a big word so you're to see potential and an range of synonyms from serious scientists fairly often.

If you can't reproduce or falsify the results then strictly speaking it's not really science. You have some observations and your conclusions which may or may not have value.

This is a big issue I've observed particularly in social and behavioral sciences. It is really to control for the many variables and I would be very doubtful about leaning to heavily on the outcomes unless you really can get the same results time after time across a wide variety of subjects. And do not get me started on those who cite old experiments which were done once and we can never reproduce because they are (and were) wildly unethical.