Really? How many Electoral College votes did Russia's clumsy attempt at manipulation actually change? Please quantify that for us based on hard evidence.
Well the closed-source EHR applications that use NoSQL databases such as MUMPS (InterSystems Caché) probably don't have many SQL injection vulnerabilities.
The US military has deployed fully autonomous weapons since at least 1979, and potential adversaries are now doing the same. For better or worse that ship has sailed.
Look, a dumb bomb is a fully autonomous weapon once it's launched. Let's be real: an LLM making decisions on who to target and when and where to launch munitions represents a meaningful change in our concept of autonomous weapons.
So we are wrong to express any opposition or desire to maybe raise the bar here? Aren’t we supposed to be “the good guys”? Or should we just accept a role as the menace of the world, wildly throwing its weight around whenever we have an unscrupulous president?
Those questions are moot. There are situations where it's simply impossible to have a human in the loop because reaction time is too slow or the environment is too dangerous or communication links are unreliable. Russia is deploying fully autonomous weapons to attack Ukraine today and they will be selling those weapons (or licensing the technology) to their allies. There is no option to stop. And let's please not have any nonsense suggestions that we can somehow convince Russia / China / Iran / North Korea to sign a binding, enforceable treaty banning such weapons: that's never going to happen.
There's always an option to stop. We can choose civility over barbarity, stop trying to kill people over 1000+ year old dick waving contests, and stop threatening each other with doomsday weapons because your grandpa shot my grandpa. Just because our leaders are too stupid and cowardly doesn't mean there's no option.
I wasn't aware that the US was throwing away its moral compass for the just cause of frustrating Putin's expansionism. The new story seems to be Putin gets to do what he wants, and so do we.
If you think there's something wrong with giving our warfighters the most effective weapons to carry out their assigned missions with minimum casualties then your moral compass is completely broken. Personally I favor a less interventionist foreign policy but that has to be addressed through the political process. Not by unaccountable individual defense contractor employees making arbitrary policy decisions.
You should know that every single veteran I know ruthlessly mocks Hegseth for trying to use this term non-comedically. It’s a synonym for someone who takes their service way too seriously/makes it their whole identity. It’s almost exclusively used to mock people.
Not sure you're aware, but the joke may be on you. It's apparently Putin who's convinced Trump and the Mullahs (not the band) to choose civility over babarity by allowing a superyacht of one of his cronies to pass through the Hormuz.[0]
Russian trolling at its finest, truly. This timeline keeps raising the bar on the absurdity quotient.
We aren’t Russian and Putin is not our leader. We can choose how we behave and operate. This is like saying we should use chemical weapons if someone else deploys one. You’re speaking as if it’s all so binary. “Do what they do or you lose.”
It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences. Chemical weapons have seen minimal use after WWI largely because they're not very militarily effective. Autonomous kinetic weapons actually work. Right now Ukrainians are building autonomous weapons to defend themselves against Russian autonomous weapons. For Ukrainians it is binary: do what they do or you lose. Would you prefer that they lose? And don't presume to tell us that the Russians can be persuaded to stop by non-violent means, that would be completely delusional.
>It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences.
This is a deeply flawed argument that has an obvious application back at you, but either way if you’re going to stoop to personal attacks I think we’re done here.
Simple game theory doesn't work in the real world. In the short term most OPEC+ members other than Saudi Arabia have very limited technical ability to significantly increase or decrease production. It's not like they have a big valve that they can open or close at will. For many oil wells, restricting flow would actually damage the geologic substrate. And drilling new wells (including all of the supporting infrastructure) can take years.
CAFE standards were always a stupid idea. If we want to reduce fuel usage then increase the tax on fuel instead of punishing manufacturers for selling vehicles that consumers want to buy.
This is, respectfully, corporate propaganda. Consumers buy the vehicles that are available and advertised. It's in the best interest of manufacturers to convince/compel consumers to buy larger, more expensive vehicles with higher margins, and that's exactly what they're doing.
How many CAFE compliant “light trucks” do you see around?
CAFE is a great example of a well-meaning regulation failing because the people who developed and approved it didn’t think through the obvious consequences.
How can that be if they all offer extensive lines of small and efficient cars that a good number of people drive? Besides, collusion doesn't seem likely given the amount of foreign competition. The majority of Americans have made it clear that they want bigger autos, at least with the usual gas prices. Sorry if that's corp propaganda.
Separately I've heard emissions laws blamed for large sedans losing to small SUVs and trucks due to double standards, but I doubt it would've made a difference, even though I personally prefer large sedans.
If gasoline is more expensive, customers will demand more efficient vehicles.
We aren't mindless zombies buying whatever we see on TV. I'm old enough to remember when Japanese small cars practically took over the market in the 70s and 80s due to gas price shocks. It can happen again.
If gasoline is expensive because of carbon taxes, people will vote for a party that tells them that climate change is not a problem, and that, if they win, gasoline will be cheap again.
They probably won't buy Honda Civics, but they (or their children, more realistically) might buy the electric equivalent of an F150 if the market produces one that can fulfill what they perceive their needs to be.
I just bought a (small, hybrid) truck because I need to do some truck stuff. I 100% would have bought an electric if the market produced one with comparable capability and competitive price, but we're not there yet, and I don't have Rivian money (yet! lol maybe someday).
My point being: there is still a huge demand for trucks from both a capability and culture standpoint, and very little supply of a cost-comparable product that doesn't take gas or diesel. Rivian is around double what most people want to pay, and the F150 Lightning was marketed poorly and had bad towing/hauling range compared to gas/diesel equivalents.
I'm not here to defend "truck culture" but I do believe that if you offer people a better product, they will figure it out and buy it. An electric truck with 400+ miles of towing range, an onboard 2kW+ inverter, 500 ft-lbs of torque, and fast charging for the same price as a comparable gas F150 will sell. Unfortunately the battery energy density and EV supply chain economies of scale aren't there yet in North America.
Whatever your standard is for an "efficient" vehicle, more efficient things than those 15-20mpg trucks or SUVs do exist in the US. Every automaker sells a serious car that gets at least 30mpg combined if gas-only, or like 50mpg if hybrid.
> We aren't mindless zombies buying whatever we see on TV.
But we are. I don't want to turn this into a political slap fight but it became apparent to me the extent in which people are swayed by advertising when I read an article that talked about how one party in the US was concerned that the other was going to win an important seat becase the other party had done a recent spending surge on ads in last few days before election day and they were concerned that they couldn't match it.
That article right there forever changed my view of the average person on the street. In a highly polarized campaign and political environment with months to years of knowing who the candidates and policies are and they can still be swayed by millions in TV and radio ads? Like it sounds like these people could literally be on their way to vote for a candidate and then switch their mind at the last second because they hear an ad on the radio as they're pulling into the polling station.
That's absurd -- but it's real.
People are completely enthralled by advertisements to the point where they'll buy a stupid truck that they can't fit anywhere, that they need a ladder to climb into, that has terrible sight lines, simply because advertising tells them to.
Nah, it's not real. Your claim isn't supported by the data. Political advertising can help a bit at the margins but in the 2016 Presidential election the losing campaign spent about twice as much on advertising as the winner. Very few voters were swayed by last second radio ads.
(I would support a Constitutional amendment to restrict campaign contributions and effectively overturn the Citizens United v. FEC decision.)
Again, I don't want to get into a political slap fight here, I want to keep this on the subject of advertising.
It sounds to me like you're confusing the magnitude of advertising spending with effectiveness of advertising techniques.
Some people have found more effective ways to advertise to people, we know all this, it isn't uncharted conversation territory. We all know about micro-targetting based on personalized data, dominating certain niche mediums like AM radio to target people when they're driving and coordinated pushes with people in industry.
The point is that advertising works. It works disconcertingly well.
This is why people buy stupidly impractical automobiles that they don't need.
If you don't want to make this about politics, use a product advertising example instead of politics which is not even comparable.
Advertised products will sell more, but only to a certain point. Like someone who wants an SUV and knows nothing else might buy the one from Chevy instead of Mitsubishi because of advertising.
People want car insurance because it's a law, low-flow showerheads if water is expensive, and electric appliances if gas is expensive or outlawed. And some want fuel-inefficient vehicles because they like them and gasoline isn't very expensive, while plenty of other people opt for MPG.
Bullshit. There are many competing auto manufacturers. No one is compelled to buy larger, more expensive vehicles. There are smaller, cheap vehicles available to those who want them. If I want a little penalty box like a Hyundai Elantra or Nissan Sentra the local dealers have base models in stock and ready to sell today.
Larger vehicles are more comfortable, safe, and practical (for anyone who doesn't need to worry about parking issues). It doesn't take advertising to convince consumers about that, it's just reality.
A Hyundai Elantra of today is significantly bigger than it was ten years ago. It also used to be the second-tier model above the Accent, which was discontinued.
Large vehicles are safer for the occupants of the vehicle, however they do increase danger for pedestrians and drivers of other vehicles in a collision. There is a reasonable argument that reducing vehicle size would save lives overall
> This is a myth. Larger vehicles are not safer for their occupants; they merely feel that way.
I'm pretty sure it's not, because physics. A tank is safer than a bike for the poilot, when there is a collision. This data is a little muddled, but follows common sense.
Large SUVs and Pickups: These vehicles have the lowest occupant fatality rates, averaging 14 deaths per million registered vehicles for SUVs compared to 48 per million for sedans. Large luxury SUVs often register statistically zero deaths in specific three-year studies.
Nope, not a myth. While the data is noisy and there are some confounding factors, the IIHS driver death rates show a clear correlation between larger size and fewer deaths.
Domestic manufacturers used to build & sell compact pickup trucks. Nowadays, the only pickups on the market are huge fatmobiles. The profit margin in trucks is much higher than the profit margin on passenger cars.
Compare the Maverick to a Japanese kei trucks, they so impressed the current president that he signed an executive order allowing them, if they're manufactured in the US.
Good example of what they have in Japan right now.
The Maverick is quite sizable compared to the original Ford Ranger too, which was still bigger than the regular Japanese trucks that were all over the US after oil skyrocketed the first time:
Pedestrian deaths, including children, have risen in lockstep with light truck adoption in the United States, while they have fallen in countries without this phenomenon.
Vehicle emission and fuel efficiency standards are a great idea. The stupidity was allowing a "light truck" exception at all. It made the manufacturers turn to manufacturing and promoting what should be work vehicles to rich idiots who need nothing larger than a regular car (but can easily be upsold on something they don't need)
America is already fucked, given how awful its urban sprawl is. Trucks used for commuting and not haulage just makes it double fucked.
We shouldn't prohibit dumping toxic waste in the river, we should just tax it!
I am familiar with the EU situation. The carbon tax you would have needed to achieve the effect of fleet emission standards would have been political suicide.
And that is not just psychological. People who buy used cars and drive their cars until they fall apart are well correlated with people who can't afford high carbon tax. Buyers of new cars are the people who can. Carbon Tax would mean massive redistribution of the money raised. Yet another political mine field.
Not sure if you're facetious but there are plenty of examples of rising cigarettes' prices leading to reduction in smoking, or similarly a sugary soda tax reducing consumption of sugary soda (UK is a prime example).
By mid century, worldwide fossil fuel usage will be higher than it is today. Solar will take over some of the electricity production including transportation but in the overall energy mix it will largely be a supplement, not a replacement. Total per capita energy use from all sources will continue to increase at a rapid rate.
> By mid century, worldwide fossil fuel usage will be higher than it is today.
Even if this turns out to be true, it would be irrelevant. The reason that oil occupies the geopolitical role it does today is because of its potential to rapidly bring the entire developed world to a halt. Oil will always be in demand because of its many useful applications (and this demand may even grow in absolute terms despite declining per-capita consumption, because the global human population is projected to continue increasing well into the latter half of the century), but as an energy source, by 2050 it will have so many highly-available complements that an oil cartel will be as relevant as a potato cartel.
OPEC doesn't adjust production. They set production targets, and then most of the members cheat. For geological reasons it's not even really possible to significantly reducing production on many oil wells without damaging them. Saudi Arabia generally has more freedom to throttle production up or down than other OPEC members.
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