For our first kid, we used resuable. Reusable diapers mean you must do laundry every day. Even if you have enough diapers that you can skip a day, longer than that, and the odor becomes intolerable. So, for the most part, it's laundry every frelling day, and you cannot do something like forget to move it to the dryer.

That relentlessness, on top of sleeplessness, on top of full-time job, meant hubby put his foot down for kid number 2, and we switched to disposables. It wasn't about convenience, it was about sanity.

Now, if you are fortunate enough to have someone helping you with your kids for an extended period, perhaps a professional housekeeper, then washables are a viable option.

A book / web site will give you likely better training on new algorithms than an overpriced, needlessly complex gadget (should they ever release a 3x3), and will be more cost-effective. In all, this is a product that won't have much of a market. ... but you'd think about spending hundreds of dollars to get a little better at cube solving? Why not take that money and do something really good with it, like give it to some charitable organization? Even if you just give it to your local elementary school science / tech teacher for supplies, you'll be improving the lives of dozens of kids. You'd be surprised what they can do with a few hundred dollars.

That's certainly one way of describing what happened. Another, more accurate, way would be to point out that the morons at the Archive decided to ignore that whole "one copy at a time" bit "because Covid" and gave the publishers a set of facts for their lawsuit that would not have supported their position any better if they'd been purposefully designed to do so.

It seems it can (although whether it's economical to do it at scale is another question).

AI has invented a new variant of Pokemon Go. Gather points by taking virtual photos of imaginary destinations!

You've got the elements of the answer right in your comment. Workers in Asia mold plastic with machines at the rates of thousands of pieces an hour. Your hypothetical American putz is making widgets by hand.

Manufacturing costs are no longer primarily driven by labor. They're driven by level of automation, where America has fallen far behind.

We can argue until the cows come home as to the effectiveness of an isolationist stance for bringing manufacturing back to the US. The only thing that will drive on-shoring for certain is a sea change in the way US corporations are managed, by de-incentivising short-term gains. There may be some good ideas in that realm, but I haven't heard them yet.

Your romanticizing of "the government only allows so many yellow cabs so the artificial scarcity leads to medallion costs spiraling ever upward" is fucking bizarre.

That's horseshit. People who owned the medallions made money leasing them to people who would work their fingers to the bone to cover the costs of their leases and support their families. You also ignore that most taxi companies weren't running medallion taxies with the right to pick up a hail, but rather "private cars" that had to be dispatched to a pickup location by law. More on those later.

Ignoring that "employee driving a taxi has a million dollars in savings after 15 years" would be the exception and not the rule, that sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme.

Remember those "private car" services I mentioned above? Other than them typically owning the vehicles rather than the drivers, this is exactly how they operated. My mother drove for one in the mid 80s after her brokerage went bankrupt and she was looking for a new firm. My aunt was a dispatcher for another one for years. The drivers got shit pay and no benefits.

Despite your claims, the "ride sharing" (I think we can at least agree that part is total bullshit) companies have not meaningfully enshitified taxi services. They were always shitty.

If the automated coding tool is reliable, you wouldn't need to be skilled. OTOH if the coding tool keeps emitting code that contains bugs or misfeatures, then someone will need to analyze and debug the emitted code, which is a skill. In some cases, that might requires more skill than simply writing the software by hand.

It's surprisingly similar to AI in that respect. Both technologies have been shown to work in principle, but neither of them has been shown to turn an actual profit, yet.

Yes, those are all great. And geothermal is looking really promising too, with microwave drilling technology potentially enabling it in locations where geography previously made it impractical.

Who said anything about waiting? We should be (and, broadly speaking, are) deploying renewable technologies now, and simultaneously developing fusion technology for later. There's no need to do just one or the other, when we can and will do both in parallel.

... is a movie trope where everyone in the world has perished, except for the protagonist, who is now free to roam the world unmolested, help himself to any of the remaining resources available, do whatever he/she wants, etc.

The fantasy part is the idea that the catastrophe will get rid of all the people you don't care about, freeing up their resources for your own use, while sparing you and the people and resources that you do care about.

The people in this article can be blasé about AI killing humanity because at some level they think that they and what's important to them will be spared. Most likely, they think their wealth will save them. If and when they find out that they will suffer and die as well, their acceptance of the idea will evaporate quickly.

What's the end-game there, once there are no activities left that cannot be performed better by a machine? No more jobs for humans, and then everyone retires (in the optimistic scenario) or starves/riots (in the pessimistic scenario)?

Air-delivery can be faster for small items, but land-delivery is much more energy-efficient, since you don't have to support the weight of the robot and the payload for the duration of the trip.

That means that the wheeled bot can have a larger range, carry larger payloads, and needs to be recharged less often. OTOH it has to wait for stoplights, can only go 5-10 miles per hour, etc.

We'll be fine, then. There's lots more gold than Sarah Conner clones.

Precisely.

There are 1500 genes involved. As effects are likely not merely down to specific genes, but gene interactions, you're going to need a model that can handle 2^1500 different permutations. That's simply not something that is classifiable.

As far as gene therapies are concerned, since autism seems to involve combining elements of Neanderthal neurology with homo sapiens neurology, the obvious fix would be to add further Neanderthal genes where combinations are known to produce adverse effects.