America is going in the opposite direction with instant food delivery. Your $11 meal is delivered to your house within 30 minutes. But, there's a service fee of $5, a delivery fee of $6, and a 20% gratuity.
There’s something very weird in the US, it’s like we intentionally set things up to accelerate convergence to obviously dumb local optima and then don’t explore any options to get over those barriers.
I think we just lack the ability for self-critique as a country. If you try, you get a bunch of loud morons yelling at you for being un-American or some other nonsense.
Kohler makes a touchless faucet. You wave your hand under the faucet and it turns on and off. I've had one for years, and it's great in the kitchen. Most commercial lavatories have the same technology.
I got it and absolutely love it. Takes a bit of getting used to of course, but after being in my kitchen I expect all taps to work like this.
The biggest downside is that visitors will be confused why the water doesn’t run (the physical tap is always left open but there is a “virtual” tap controlled by the sensor is not.
I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself. If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for the aircraft to resume course and land.
To further clarify, this is the research (from August 2025) which is cited in the CNN story which is the basis of the Dagens AI copypasta. "Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections".
The paper I cite is for sea level rise. IPCC models from 1990 and 2011 have made forecasts on sea level rise. When we compare those to what actually happened up to 2025, we see that we are slightly worse right now than their highest sea level prediction that was made.
We're worse than their worst case scenario, so their models were significantly too optimistic.
In the same paper, they also note that for temperature, the models have been accurate.
> When we compare those to what actually happened up to 2025, we see that we are slightly worse right now than their highest sea level prediction that was made.
No. The paper does not show that. Figure 3 shows that recent sea level rise, accounting for measurement uncertainty, is in line with projections of any of the models (around 2mm per year). In any case, they call out explicitly that the recent data is of insufficient duration to make the comparison you’re trying to make.
Temperature data in figure one is more or less exactly in the uncertainty window of the models (not shocking, considering that they’re calibrated to reproduce recent data).
I'm sorry, but I double checked and I do think you have it wrong. Figure 3 is for "sea level rise _rate_", and that one is indeed high but not significantly so.
Quoting "The satellite-based linear trend 1993–2011 is 3.2±
0.5 mm yr−1
, which is 60% faster than the best IPCC estimate
of 2.0 mm yr−1
for the same interval"
But, as the authors point out, the worst case forecasts that were within-data, are so for the wrong reasons. Quote "The model(s) defining the upper 95-percentile might
not get the right answer for the right reasons, but possibly by
overestimating past temperature rise."
My previous comment is regarding Figure 2, i.e. "Sea Level". I would invite you to read the whole paper. It is only 3 pages and written without jargon.
Sea level rise rate is what matters (we cannot measure “sea level” absolutely, and therefore must work in terms of relative rates of change). The authors explicitly tell you that the data is not sufficient to conclude what they’re alluding:
> this period is too short to determine meaningful changes in the rate of rise
Now, you note that the authors openly acknowledge that the rate of rise is measured in low-single-digit units of millimeters per year. So, why is the y-axis of Figure 2 measured in centimeters?
Hint: it’s because every point on that plot is a wild extrapolation.
This paper is not good, btw. The fact that it’s “only three pages” should be a blinking red sign telling you that it is not serious. Just read the more recent IPCC reports, because they deal with the question of updates from prior reports.
The plot you're citing is an imaginary projection 100 years into the future given what was known up to the year on the x-axis. That is why the units are 100x larger.
The uncertainty on the rate of change is quite large (relatively), therefore, any 100 year projection has huge, compounded uncertainty. Figure 2 is not useful for determining anything about the present.
No you can't. That study is comparing past estimates of the past and present to the lived in past and present not past estimates of the future to current estimates of the future.
Okay, but why then do the IPCC reports of the past present vastly different historical data than the present ones? History cannot change, but people can "reinterpret" it for political purposes.
Humans didn't exist since the beginning of time, and we only started to properly record temperatures in the last few centuries. That means we have to determine historical data through the effects it had on our planet. The methods to find this historical data from the effects keep changing and evolving, so it makes complete sense to me that historical data has changed throughout the reports.
Unfortunately you didn't specify where one can find this "vastly different historical data", so I can't get more specific than this.
They seem to be giving the word unlikely a range from 0-33%. I'm not sure how to reason about that 0% given that they also used the phrase "not impossible."
AFAIK the IPCC are generally quite conservative on these matters. Newer research shows possible collapse occurring much sooner (Sometime between 2025-2095).
He is a economist who served as the Secretary of Treasury, as the president of Harvard University, and as director of the National Economic Council. Seems like he would be able to give them some good advice.
Pretty helpful person to have on your board if you are aiming (as Sarah Friar, OpenAI CFO, mentioned) to get the government to guarantee $100B - $1T in infrastructure loans.
He was terrible at 2 out of three of those jobs. He ruined many people's lives. He was corrupt as hell. He shouldn't be welcome in polite society.. well I guess Epstein's inner circle isn't exactly polite society.
I was referring to his stints as treasury secretary and on the NEC, during which he championed a worldview that saw economics as being science, with immutable laws, that inevitably led to policy outcomes that caused the explosion in income inequality that we've seen since 2008 especially. The U.S. would be in a better place if he was never in the Obama or Clinton admins.
But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
In general he was not a fan of regulating banks, although he walked back some of his beliefs after 2008. Although iirc he still supports combining investment and commercial banks. Various shenanigans involving privatization of Russian industry. Pushing for tax cuts at the expense of infrastructure spending. He didn't like that the US capped exec pay at banks that received bailouts (banks that gave him millions in speaking fees, which seems a lil bit sketch)
All of them lol. Summers pushed aggressively for the free trade agreements (including allowing China into the WTO) that, in practice, shuttered American manufacturing, he pushed for cuts to capital gains tax, he lobbied aggressively against regulating derivatives and in favor of repealing glass-stegall, both of which directly led to the 2008 crisis, and then after the crisis he caused, he architected a recovery package that prioritized bailing out banks (but not enough to dig the economy out of recession quickly). He's one of the most damaging American figures of all time, he basically got us Trump if you ask me.
I'm an American living outside the US. While this is true it feels a bit like how pedestrians have the right-of-way at road crossings: you're legally protected, but is right now the time to test how much people are going to respect that?
I crossed the US-Canada land border with a non-US friend to go to a birthday party a while back; they sent us to secondary so my friend could get their passport stamped (their previous visa had run out). CBP took the opportunity to search our car and tried to convince us they found weed before letting us go (neither of us use it).
Another time my wife and I (both citizens) were crossing and the border agent gave us a hard time for having different last names.
I can't imagine what it's like for people with less privilege than I, but I'm already to the point where I stress about crossing the border. I bring a spare phone, wiped of anything interesting, I let my partners know when I'm at the crossing in case something happens; Paranoid? Possibly. But the potentiality of something going horribly wrong is through the roof, and there's increasingly little recourse. Yes, citizens especially should be insulated from this, but we're seeing egregious violations on so many fronts I don't want to trust that to hold.
And, yet, the CBP can cause you any number of headaches and subject you to intimidation and humiliation prior to your actually being waved through -- especially if they deem you "difficult".
Similar to lots of the other comments in this thread, I'm subjected to additional screenings every time I come back into the country. I'm a completely average middle-aged white guy and I have no idea why this happens. Is it because I'm anxious? I have a somewhat common name; perhaps they've confused me with someone else? Was it because I was at Schipol the same time as The Underwear Bomber or because I went to Turkey on vacation? I will (probably) never know why but it's so unpleasant that I've stopped leaving the country for fun (something I used to love) and has had a real, negative effect on my relationship with my spouse.
Thanks for the reminder. I had forgotten all about that. Is yet another point as to why effectively the USA does not even actually exist anymore more is the Constitution valid.
Some may be confused by reading that or even scoff at it, but it’s really not any different than any other kind of fraud by deception where, e.g., you think you have a certain amount of assets with Bernie Madoff that make you rich, but in reality it’s all just fake and does not actually exist at all.
It’s just that Americans haven’t realized that their country has being defrauded out from under them, much like how the EU just snuck in and went from standardizing trade to co-opting democratic self-determination and just swiping national sovereignty out from under the people of Europe because the ruling class said “no take backs” and that’s just how it’s going to be now.
Given what's happening in the US (and especially with the supreme court), I don't have much faith that any law the government finds inconvenient or objectionable will be adhered to.
Reducing 9 regional offices to 5, laying off 10% of employees, and cutting the budget by 34%, is "dismantling"? The article fails to mention the U.S. Forest Service's budget has doubled in the last 6 years from $4.7 billion in 2018 to $9.3 billion in 2024.
I live in a large suburban home. I spend $1,000/mo on landscaping services and $1,000/mo on maid services. If I could buy a $10,000 robot that could do those things, as well as have apps for doing dinner dishes, laundry, making the bed, and feeding the pets, I would do it in a second.
At $250/visit, that's just weekly landscaping and housecleaning. More than I pay for myself (we have a housecleaner that comes monthly), but not unreasonable, especially for a well-paid dual-income household.
The person said $1,000 a month for landscaping and $1,000 a month for house cleaning. Thats like 1/3 of my take home. Is that really normal for people?
Regarding salary, Looking at my area, unless im in FAANG seems like im making around what the site says. I feel like that expense would be too much but maybe I just didnt get into stocks or crypto as much as others have done here.
Yeah $1,000 a month would be $250 a week, which is 2-3 person hours of a housecleaner or landscaper's time, so like a 2 person crew for an hour or 90 minutes.
If you and your spouse each make $150k (so $300k household income), paying 8% of your income ($24k/year) to have 6 extra hours a week to spend with your kids seems like a fair trade.
Two people working in tech could easily be making more like a $5-600k household income though, at which point $24k is only 4-5%.
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