throw_pm23

The top ten countries by air pollution listed in another comment hardly produce anything the developed world uses, they mostly export natural resources.

Yeah, I call the company Facebook, I don't care enough to follow their terminology, and I don't keep track of their products.

And Facebook instead of Meta, although if I think of it, I'd rather not say any of those in any context.

Even if there were no reliable studies, the precautionary principle would suggest to limit food that is highly processed and somehow of a novel form, very different from what was consumed in the past.

Anticipating a critical misreading, this does not mean that everything that was consumed in the past is automatically good.

I loved the typo "parking your cat" -- that would indeed be the height of decadence.

More likely, by a huge margin, since it takes only checking a box in some software system, whereas the alternatives you mention need a lot of messy work to achieve.

Sorry if my question appears ignorant, but how quickly is quantum really coming? If your prior belief is "nothing practical is ever likely to come out of quantum computing", then so far there is nothing that would seriously suggest you to reconsider it.

I do not say this lightly, having followed the academic side of QC for more than a decade.

Yes, I guess in most of Europe the 200-250 years between Rembrandt and van Gogh is exactly when family names solidified from a simple description "the one from village X" or "son of Y" or "the one with a red hair" to become a hereditary name essentially detached from its meaning.

Typst may have its pros and momentum (I haven't tried it myself yet), but I find this attitude and language used by its proponents very offputting.

I've only heard Knuth and Lamport speak respectfully about the technologies that came before tex and latex.

There is a trivial alternative that military strategists have been suggesting for decades. For a nation of 20+ M, having a reservist army of 1M would be feasible and make the island impossible to invade even if the rest of Earth would join forces to do that.

That's an interesting perspective, that could be used as an argument by both camps. You say more social democracy, someone else might say, more social cohesion due to shared cultural background and low immigration.

I think the midwit meme captures this best, where at both ends of the IQ bell curve the characters say "I hate technology", and the guy in the middle loves it.

So why isn't the charitable interpretation that the system works well, there is even correction built into it, since they backtrack when necessary?