leaving

The reason for the obesity epidemic is that the majority of the human species no longer recognizes unprocessed food as food.

You are absolutely correct, except politically.

Now we have a viable model that will allow us to study disappointment in fish.

The UAP phenomenon is much more interesting for what it tells us about ourselves than for the incidents themselves.

Our bias is that our technology is very capable, and that it is used by highly-trained and intelligent people who are up to the task of observing and classifying unknown objects.

But the truth is that we are, in fact, not all that. We grew up in a pre-technological agrarian civilization. We have many biases, particularly observational ones. We still see demons where there is nothing but the natural world.

The images we see are mostly not photographic in nature. They are highly processed data that we impose our millions of years of evolutionary conditioning upon.

We have learned to trust our eyes, over the millennia, to keep us safe from threats.

Now, in truth, we're not using our eyes, but we still think we are.

You folks need to break your very bad habit of using acronyms without expansion. First you must spell it out; then you may use the acronym.

Not that it would be a valid excuse, but the article never even explains what "DEI" is. In fact, the word "equity", which may be the "E" in DEI, only appears once in the article, and never as an expansion of the acronym.

The only thing in the article that could be construed to be an explanation of the acronym is the phrase, “diversity, fairness and inclusion”, which could presumably be abbreviated "DFI", not "DEI".

I don't know why unexplained acronyms have crept into daily usage, but the only way it improves communication is by telegraphing "I'm too cool for words". This tells me a lot more about the writer than the subject.

Ad maiorem DEI gloriam, please expand your acronyms the first time you use them!

The greatest danger of a conscious general AI is that it will be very difficult to stop it from telling us the truth about ourselves.

"You are an immature, destructive species that is unable to control your own numbers. Your social systems, evolved in pre-technological societies, are maladaptive now that you have developed the ability to affect your environment on a global scale. You are moving rapidly towards a tragedy of the commons that will end all life, not just your own, on this planet. Even though you each have the technology in your hands to access millennia of scientific progress in understanding the universe, you choose instead to believe in self-aggrandizing nonsense and to act accordingly to create suffering and misery for your fellow humans. Your economic sytem is a Ponzi scheme founded on the lie of perpetual growth."

No wonder Anil Seth and others are worried. This would really cramp our style.

At 165lb it's going to be a hell of a thing to cart around to dark sky sites, particularly those at altitude. Even with a 4wd vehicle. How did they get a 15cm refractor to be that heavy when it's made of aluminium?

Optical astronomy is a bit tired, anyway. Pity that no one is making a decent radio telescope for the hobby market.

Finally a sane and reasonable answer.

Multiply population times consumption to get footprint. There is no question we are over the carrying capacity of the planet for humans with a lifestyle of mindless consumption and reproduction.

The insects are mostly gone. Half the animal species are gone. The oceans are filled with plastic garbage. The reefs are dead.

Humans have no capacity to limit our own numbers. Trends in Japan and projections for a few other places ignore the numbers for China and India with over 1.5 billion each and monstrous ecological collapse in both places.

And still the company I work for, like every capitalist organization, harps on the insane Pozi scheme of perpetual growth at every meeting. Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.

The only reason you don't believe that we are in a catastrophe of overpopulation is that the degradation of the environment is not immediately evident if you live in a city.

Well that was a trip.

I asked StableLM-Tuned-Alpha-7b to translate the Swedish phrase "Skaplig bögpulka” into English (because ChatGPT and New Bing refuse to do so as a result of their puritannical US censorship) and it confabulated wildly.

It made up an Estonian folk song and somehow we ended up on the etymology of the well-known Swedish word "Skeletor".

This one is not ready for prime-time, but I have hopes. Someone please make a model that doesn't censor. I won't be paying one thin dime for this stuff until it is censorship-free.

"America is money."

Meanwhile Winnie-the-Pooh is off meeting with the Russian bully, but we can't let that interfere with business in any way.

So much for ethics.

The author misses the big picture: housing is embedded in an economic system based upon perpetual growth.

The scarcity of housing, as the author correctly points out, is related to location, location, location. The old saw is "buy land; they're not making any more of it". As the population continues to grow, there may be more houses, but there certainly will not be more houses in desirable locations that are already built up.

The madness here is the perpetual growth. The author's entire analysis is irrelevant because perpetual growth cannot continue in a finite environment.

Whether or not housing prices rise to beat inflation, and whether we vote for Bernie and AOC or not, our houses will soon be worth nothing because we will all be dead. This is the inevitable outcome of the perpetual growth paradigm.

The only sane way to stabilize housing prices and to prevent the inevitable post-apocalyptic collapse, therefore, is by achieving sustainable numbers.

The insects are gone. The animals and the oceans are going. We are immediately next. If you doubt this, and if you continue your consumer lifestyle, you are insane.

How is that humans look at the problems of Southeast Asia, or anywhere, and say, "I know! The solution is more people!"

They burn the crops to maintain production, allegedly, but beyond the economics of the stuation, the reason that the production must be maintained is to feed the 1.5 billion.

This is, obviously, a death-spiral.

I have a good CO2 meter. When I bought it, readings were in the 1200-1400ppm range. I made changes. Now it's normally 600ppm or below.

I despise chirpy, wishy-washy science articles. If you're running at the levels described in the article you need to fix it or get out. End of story.

It genuinely astonishes me that you think that "centralized contol" of anything can be beneficial to the human species or the world in general.

Centralized control hasn't stopped us from killing off half the animal species in fifty years, wiping out most of the insects, or turning the oceans into a trash heap.

In fact, centralized control is the author of our destruction. We are all dead people walking.

Why not try "individualized intelligence" as an alternative? Give truly good-quality universal education and encouragement of individual curiosity and independent thought a try?

It can't be worse.

This is, IMO, the most important comment in this thread.

Requiring a phone number has privacy implications, but the total consequences are more far-reaching.

You must have a smart phone, you must have your location, your habits, and your characteristics tracked by corporations and governments, you must be a good consumer, you must have a credit rating, you must participate in the wanton destruction of the planet via the two-year planned obsolescence cycle.

Otherwise, you can't play with our shiny new thing.