It's crazy because while the US is one of the biggest emitters per capita, it's also home of the brightest minds and have by far the most efficient research ad development capacity. So US govt. denial is a huge hit in our already tiny chances to save the planet from hell in the next 50yrs.
Maybe step down from that ultra high horse a bit and smell the proverbial coffee - let say we do a public vote, I would trust say population of Switzerland 100000000x more than US one on any decent vote. Chinese will take over US in those aspects you write, if they already haven't done so.
US population voted trump, lets not forget that. We (rest of the world, >95% of mankind) will never forget that, and the fact that he still has >5% support tells everybody all they need to know about current US and what to expect from it in future. All that says more than any wishful thinking that feels good and fuzzy warm inside.
Considering the open shenanigans they’ve been trying on the voting systems, it’s reasonable to believe they have been doing shenanigans the public hadn’t known about. The machinery of vote suppression is well known to these Jim Crow loving fascists.
For decades the US has managed to be the most powerful economy in the world while taking in tons of these immigrants. Rejecting them is likely to have a negative impact. Xenophobia comes at a cost.
In that same time period we discovered global warming and ocean acidification as well as developed better ways of getting power.
The only downside we've discovered for having an accepting immigration policy is xenophobic backlash.
I don't know what point you're trying to make with that article. Less immigrants is causing hardship for their higher-ed system. How does that make your point?
I already replied to this, but I think it's worth explaining why you can be building more coal plants and yet burning less coal.
Rather than try to guess from our high level data about China I'm going to explain more generally how this works.
Generators always have what's called a "Capacity factor" which tells us how much power is actually produced relative to the naive "nameplate capacity" the specified maximum power output of that generator.
For a nuclear power station maybe you run for 48 days straight at 100% output and then you spend 2 days shutting down, refuelling and spinning it back up, so that's 96% capacity factor. That's very high, only need a few maintenance problems and you would not hit those numbers, real world nukes maybe trend to 90%
Coal needs more maintenance downtime but historically you might expect 80% factor, say you have 1000 400MW coal power stations, that's theoretically 400GW of power but because of 80% capacity factor figure you've got more like 320GW
Renewables are free, so increasingly it makes no sense to run a fuel consuming generator when there's free electricity available. However both PV and wind are intermittent to some degree, it's not sunny at night and sometimes it's just not windy.
So you might build 500 more of those 400MW power stations, at your 80% capacity factor that's 160GW of new electricity supply for a total of 480GW. But actually your plan is to run them just as hard but less often, for 50% capacity factor across the entire fleet, an average of 200 + 100 = 300GW. Over a year your total output from coal generation is down, but your fleet of coal power stations grew enormously, you just don't run them as often.
At midnight with dead calm, those power stations are running pretty hard, belching out far more CO2 than in the past. But on a breezy but clear summer afternoon most of them are idle because there's free electricity from every solar and wind farm. So it averages out as less coal, yet there are more coal power stations, at least for a time.
Cheap storage starts to eat into this. A coal station which runs for an average of 18 hours per day is fine (75% capacity factor), one which runs for six hours per day (25% factor) is an economic encumbrance, six hours per week (<4%) is a reason to mothball the oldest or worst stations and give the others more work.
For the last full year where we have data (2025), China made slightly less electricity from coal than the one before. Unlike Trump, China's authoritarian leadership seem to have their eye on the ball, China is on Earth so if we trash Earth's climate that's China's climate too. But also, more so than the gas which powers so much of Europe and America's electricity generators, coal is obviously poison, even the unburned coal looks like a movie prop to signify "Mysterious evil"
The toxic waste from a gas power plant is a transparent gas that readily mixes with the atmosphere. Does it cause problems? Yes. But compared to "And here's a mountain of radioactive and highly toxic coal ash that's produced by our coal power plant" it's rather subtle.
It's important to remember how radical a change to electricity generation is. Apart from just new plants, you've got to keep the existing grid going, create new distribution infrastructure, reorganise supply chains and labour forces, and you'll also have old infrastructure aging out. It's not ideal, but a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
> a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
In all but some very extreme cases this is unaffordable because the fossil fuel generator is expensive to build and yet is increasingly stranded destroying any further value.
Isn't "creativity" the result of a combination of patterns (usually from different contexts) that casually works? I bet LLMs/agents can do that (we can't know how far that can goes).
For me that creativity is very well expressed by the principle of abduction. With induction, generalise towards rules, or deduction, use rules on data, we have this combination of patterns via different contexts. I think abduction might not be possible via LLMs.
I had a similar experience. My son had pneumonia and was still filling pain after 10 days of antibiotics. Took an X-Ray to three different doctors, and only one got the right diagnosis (pleural effusion). It's really something we should have a central place with top notch professionals looking at it, instead having each doctor to find by themselves.
I once worked on a medical hackathon concept for computer-assisted population screening for cervical cancer in a developing nation. Community health workers take photos. The AI would look at the images, and make a call of "clearly negative" vs "clearly positive" vs "needs (scarce) expert review". But taking good photos is hard, so it's also "photos insufficient" and "worker needs additional mentorship on taking photos". Only by computes reducing all three costs - expert workload, exam success, and quality-control/training - might successful deployment be financially and logistically plausible for that nation.
> As well as being unlikely to be beneficial, full body general health checks in asymptomatic people can potentially be harmful. The main harms are overdiagnosis, detrimental psychological effects, negative effects on health behaviours (for example, failure to quit smoking due to reassurance of good health), complications related to follow-up tests, and unnecessary treatments.
We already have had that for millennia. Moles. Benign cysts. Unusual body shapes. Doctors have learned to say more than “just pretend that’s not there”. They have learned what’s important and what’s not and how to explain such things.
Why can’t learning more about unusual things we can’t see with the naked eye be the same?
“Bury your head in the sand to avoid harm” does not seem to be the right path.
Scans like this will have short term difficulties while we better figure out what’s important and what’s not but will only help long term.
Agreed. I've been on HN for 15 years, and IME maybe 90% of the value has come directly from comments (another 5% from links in commenters' profiles, and 5% from TFAs).
Yes, it went commercial. But Conda is still free. And the community had built conda-forge to maintain packages. Conda + conda-forge can completly replace Anaconda for most people.
So even though they went commercial, they left pretty good things behind for the Open source community.
reply