The list of 6 speed manual cars sold in the USA is very, very short. If you drop the ones sold by Porsche you cut that list in half. If you then drop the ones from VW (yes I know Porsche is a part of the VW corporate empire but we'll acknowledge them separately here) after that you end up with about 3 vehicles, and you find that even those only offer manual transmissions in very specific configurations.

The bigger news is that this isn't really news, as the manual transmission has been dying a gradual death for decades here. People don't learn it, and they don't want to drive it. On the plus side it makes it a theft deterrent technology for those who do drive it.

The trade imbalance is a political football. One team blames it on the other if they need something different to use to paint their opponents in an unflattering light. Then the next month they won't care about it.

I’ve seen this from personal experience. Pure coding jobs are evaporating; the only way to make a living is by building new products or shifting into sales and marketing related work.

Many employers made a switch years ago to having only a vanishingly small fraction of applications read by humans; instead opting to have applications screened at the first level by algorithms that people don't understand or know how to adjust.

Now we see the next "logical" step in that process, having AI do even more of the process.

We can see where this is going, but we can also see what it is supposed to do. If this actually worked correctly, it would ensure that every applicant was actually given a fair shake, and evaluated without bias. Unfortunately no system that I've seen actually accomplishes that; and generally the most effective way to get from applicant to interviewee is to reach out directly to a human who can help you bypass the automation.

It does make me feel bad for Gen Z as they finish schooling and attempt to enter the labor force; they are being pushed into the fight with one hand tied behind their back.

Why is this even news? Everyone has credentials that have leaked. It’s frustrating, but that’s the risk of using any service these days.

NIH had originally proposed making this mandatory years ago. The date got pushed back (possibly more than once). The first "open access" mandate was over a decade ago but exceptions were carved out, and there were also some very long grants that were already funded that were exempt from new regulations. This is just the latest - and hopefully last - step.

The foot dragging came more from the journals than anything. It wouldn't be that hard for Nature, Science, Cell, and the rest of the most prestigious journals to just make all the new articles available for all; they still make plenty of money on review charges, page fees, subscription fees, and fees charged to people who don't reside in the USA. They just kept finding excuses and their prestige kept people from fighting back harder.

I have never met a scientist who earned a nickel off of journal paper royalties; I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure no such thing exists. I've worked with people who have published in Nature and Science and they never mentioned ever getting money back for their papers; I was a co-author on a paper in PNAS and neither I nor anyone else on the paper received any money from that either.

The big journals exist primarily because they have existed for so long. As I mentioned elsewhere, the academic journals aren't much different from health insurance companies; nobody likes them but they are so entrenched in our system that it's impossible to exist without them. Similarly both are parasites and neither are that different from many Ponzi schemes.

I will concede the journals do have some costs - just not anywhere near what they take in. They do need to store digital information - in some cases papers can have many gigs of data that needs to be stored for quite some time - and the archives of some of these journals now goes back well over 100 years. Arguably though the real racket to the whole system is in the review process itself; the reviewers are all volunteers and some of the editors are as well. The journals have almost no expense until the final article is accepted, and yet the scientists are paying money to them up front without a guarantee of publication.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic there or not, but publication charges are significant for the most prestigious journals. Even the journals that don't have print editions charge hundred of dollars (or more) for publication fees - and many of the print journals are also supported by advertising.

Academic publishing is similar to health insurance. Nobody likes it - except for the people making money off of it - but there is no other option so we put up with it.

I spent a lot of time in academia. I did undergrad and post-undergrad research. I was a grad student for far too long working on my PhD. I was a post-doc for several years after that, and a research associate after that. I know how the sausage is made.

You'll be hard pressed to find a researcher who favors paywalls. The problem is many of the most prestigious journals use them. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem for researchers, as they either get their best work in the paywalled journals - where it gets read by more people - or they put it into less prestigious journals that are not paywalled. For years there was no choice; it was paywalled or less read.

The new regulation says that the previously paywalled journals have to make an open access option available for NIH funded research. This is a great thing. The publishers will still get publication fees, but they can't force readers to pay additional fees. Whether journals should be so expensive to publish in - and subscribe to - is another question, but at least readers will have access to more published work at no direct cost.

But make no mistake about it. The paywalls existed to generate revenue for the journals, the scientists themselves never favored them. As someone who spent quite a bit of time at a smaller research university (with fewer journal subscriptions available through our library) I know the frustration of not being able to get some journal articles due to paywalls.

You should look up "basic science", which I presume is not the acronym you were after with "BS". There is a lot of important basic science research that is funded by the NIH that gets spun - intentionally or otherwise - into things that it isn't. There is a lot that we don't know about fundamental molecular biology that we are funding research on that will pay dividends later but might seem obtuse right now.

Another great example is transgenomic - not transgendered - animal models. Whether the Trump Administration made that misstatement intentionally or just ignorantly is open to discussion, but the value of the work is not. We learn a lot by doing genomic work in mice; work that leads to better understanding and treatment for human diseases.

You couldn't be more wrong on that if you tried. If scientists had work they didn't want people to know about why would they publish it at all? To get a publication in anywhere it has to go through peer review, which means more people read it and know about it. If you had awful results that you didn't want to tell anyone about then wouldn't you just not even submit it to a journal at all?

Reforestation is a thing, at least in North America. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has planted millions of acres of new forest (see United Nations FAO and USDA Forest Service for data). The U.S. currently is planting about 60,000 acres of trees annually, plus another 130,000 acres of regeneration.

The people overseeing this work are forestry experts, so one can assume they are planting the correct trees for a locale, in the right concentrations and groupings.

The real problem is that Brazilians are chopping down millions of acres of forest every year (albeit, decreasing). This is insanity. Also, because of food shortages and famines, some Africans have been stripping bark from trees, as well as harvesting the wood. Deforestation of that continent not only removes habitat for fauna (chimps, birds, etc.) but also leads to expansion of desert. Africa's just a total disaster.

the posting software eliminated the subscripts; that should read CO2 and O2 above. :D

About a million tons of plastics are being dumped into the oceans every year, and this material is suspected of damaging the ecosystem. Algae absorb CO and emit O quite efficiently; 60% to 70% of the Earth's oxygen is made this way. Another 10% to 20% or so comes from several huge rain forests, notably the Amazon.

We should focus on eliminating plastic and other potentially damaging substances from the ocean, and secondarily perhaps limit over-fishing that distorts the food chain.

Also, plant more trees. There's no better, or cheaper, way to de-carbon-ify the atmosphere than trees, especially during their major growth years.

This seawater-filtering scheme sounds expensive and strange, and probably would create more problems than it solves.

It's just a small test project, funded by the UK government, a proof of concept. How exactly it will prove the concept, though, is left as an exercise to the reader.

Maybe the ballot was different in your state, but here "Cheaper groceries" were not running for POTUS. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were running for POTUS. There were a few third party candidates on our ballot as well but none were called "Cheaper groceries"; hence nearly everyone who cast a ballot voted for Trump or Harris.

To give credit to the folks who always yell about the need for a third party, I know I certainly don't agree with Trump or Harris 100% of the time. One I agree with far more than the other, but neither I agree with every time. I can say the same about every other office I voted for last November. I had to choose the candidate who was closest to aligning with my values.