Just make sure the mugs weren't washed with Jet Dry...
Avoiding toxic and questionable substances really does get exhausting after awhile. It's everywhere. I'm able to draw a reasonable line (for me) without getting too nuts about it. Hoping AI ends up helping with this.
what would AI do that human intelligence couldn't? Is it not a linear cause-and-effect relationship? more plastics cause more illness? (yes | no). If plastics are toxic, wouldn't we see for ourselves (thus NOT requiring AI) a proportionate increase in sickness in samples (people or animals) with higher plastic in their bodies? Why is the message more profound if AI tells you versus a human team of college researchers?
"What would seeing information on a computer screen do for you that a book couldn't?"
Reducing friction of access to information, friend. That's what. Taking a label in a supermarket and immediately seeing what's good and bad about it. Increasing competitive pressure on companies who still use toxic ingredients. I could go on here but it seems like you just take issue with "AI" as a concept because it is trivial to come up with many ways in which AI would help here.
if humans cant figure out a causal link between microplastics and health issues, they shouldn't be working in that field. they already publish enough false information as-is, for those sweet juicy government "research" bucks. Last thing we need is a legion of retarded AI parrots saying "MuH AI aLgO sAiD sO!!!" without having the slightest clue what they are talking about.
> If plastics are toxic, wouldn't we see for ourselves (thus NOT requiring AI) a proportionate increase in sickness in samples (people or animals) with higher plastic in their bodies?
Yeah man I notice microplastics in tissue samples from my sick friends all the time. Haven’t you?
Can you find any website or document that validates that these "random audits" are done? By whom and on what cadence? I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on.
If you don't trust risk-limitjng audits, you're never gonna trust any voting system. Someone has to administer the system, do the counting, sum up the totals, etc.
> I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on.
(Taking a bit more pointed tone than I usually would, because of the amount of misinformation around this general topic and because of annoyance at people putting less effort in than election workers, from secretaries of state down to volunteers, and casting shade from the laziness of their armchair. Thank you to all the people spending their time trying to secure elections!)
Did you try searching for "colorado voting audit"?
You're pooh-poohing this idea a bit to harshly IMO. I almost wonder if your knowledge here may be out of date. You're aware that there's now evidence of the Americas' being populated over 20,000 years ago, right? Footprints in White Sands and now sloth bone carvings in Brazil. Far earlier than the Norse you mention.
AlotOfReading pointed out that 'This theory is based on the hypothesis that humans pre-1500 didn't have any contact with one another.' is not correct by giving examples of how humans pre-1500 did have contact with one another.
That there were people and civilizations in the Americas before then is far from the point.
I'm aware of them (as any archaeologist remotely interested in the early Americas should be), but they're not completely established parts of the chronology, particularly Santa Elina. People tend to be extremely conservative on this subject because there's such a long history of scams, pseudoscience, and unintentionally misleading results that ended up being false. That results in an extremely high standard of evidence sites have to meet.
However, that's a wildly different topic than what the grandparent comment is talking about. I'm interpreting their comment in a charitable light because interpreting it more broadly quickly gets into hyperdiffusionism territory.
The people from over 20,000 years ago came from the northern ice bridge, however. My suggestion is that these people got civilization ideas from the Islanders at around 1500BC. They didn't get a full line of communication with the old world but enough ideas were taken to kick start a civilization.
What "civilization ideas"? How did they get these ideas from an uninhabited island? Easter Island wasn't settled by Polynesians by at least 300 AD.
There is evidence of contact between Polynesian and South America. Like Polynesians having sweet potato. But not enough for visible changes of either one.
Civilization doesn't seem to spread by short contact, only close contact. Civilization is complex so a few ideas aren't enough to spread it. And it is hard for culture to accept that much change.
Rapa nui (and other Eastern Pacific Islands) hadn't been settled yet at that point, while indigenous Americans were already building monumental structures (e.g. Norte Chico) and working metal (old copper complex). The latter predates most metalworking in the old world too.
Their settling is irrelevant as long as they were able to get there. It's possible that they brought the ideas to Norte Chico where a civilization developed before them settling down.
Interesting. Maybe part of the solution is better predicting and controlling the motion inside the human body. I could imagine using a method to guarantee a particular organ be at a certain place at a certain moment: perhaps by accelerating the body a certain way to shove the organ into a position for a moment. Or maybe by injecting microscopic machines to surround and hold an area still. Someone will figure it out.
It sounds like it might've helped prevent even more infections. Stopping a bad practices doesn't change the past, but it can help influence the future.
It’s true investing in the airline industry has been a good way to lose money for a long time.
But citing early post pandemic years to make that point feels misleading.
It’s like saying someone drives badly and instead of pointing to their speeding tickets, it’s like pointing out their car is in the shop with body damage… from a falling tree branch.
All travel was shut down for a while and when it opened up business travel was nonexistent. It’s still down and expected to never return to prepandemic. It’s amazing they made any profit in 2023.
Yes, airlines are not highly profitable but pandemic years are a terrible example due to being a weird black swan event.
There are a ton of executives too, which might be an issue.
As for the workers (including pilots), the should abolutely get paid. I'm just pointing out that "profits" does not show the big picture.
Companies have a duty to their employees & customers; as well as their owners (shareholders). Low profit is heralded when it's Amazon, reinvesting in the company. Airlines are also investing back in the company.
Profit margin does show the picture for how profitable a business is. Employees’ pay, including executive, is irrelevant. They are still employees.
Unless you are claiming malfeasance and that shareholders are being fleeced.
An entire industry with low single digit profit margins amongst multiple of competitors indicates a very optimized business. It means the only way you can reduce prices for customers is to come up with a novel way to execute the business, such as new technology.
Profit margin at businesses that have high barriers to entry and low costs to scale are much higher. See software, real estate, pharmaceuticals, finance, etc. And again, the executive pay is irrelevant since publicly listed businesses have shareholders paying attention to that kind of waste (for the most part).
Discussing nominal profits when comparing various businesses' "profitability" is almost never productive.
Any business needs a certain amount of cushion to counter volatility, and to earn a return for shareholders. If you had a business with $1M of revenue and $20k of profit, surely you would not expect $20k of profit when you hit $2M of revenue (because 2% profit margin is objectively very low. I have yet to see of successful businesses operate year after year on less than that, and at 0% they become a charity).
Hence profit margin is almost always the relevant figure, especially when you get down to the low single digit percentages.
You need to add "to me" at the end of your sentence here, because you're making it sound like you think their post sounds a certain way objectively, when that's actually subjective and didn't sound that way at all to me.
As a counterpoint, your recommendation could be similarly received as a command because you omitted the qualifiers indicating it was just your opinion.
In my opinion such qualifiers aren't necessary as there's an implicit understanding that others are sharing their opinions, and are generally explicit in the event that they're not.
"There are far more of these tablets in existence than I could have imagined. In fact, between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000–100,000 have been read or published."
And those are just the tablets we've found. It's quite likely there are millions of other tablets just sitting in caves and and old, buried cellars waiting to be excavated. There are nowhere near enough Assyriologists in the world to even think about handling how many tablets we have access to, let alone the new ones we will find in the future, so machine translation will be a huge boon to the field, even if the translations are a little bit iffy.
Right now, Assyriologists will prioritize - if the tablets come from, say, someone's old garage, they are unlikely to be translated. If it comes from a palace or a temple, then the odds are better. But imagine the situation where someone ended up with a copy of the Declaration of Independence in their garage.
I feel like this must be a really rewarding time to be alive for diligent archivists and demotivated researchers alike. I hope the revelation that proper cataloging could mean that it's (once again?) possible for single researchers or small teams to make discoveries and then immediately see their findings reverberate in a virtual instant throughout their field (as updated data sets are used to re-calibrate models) could serve as an incentive for better data collection and management too.
Avoiding toxic and questionable substances really does get exhausting after awhile. It's everywhere. I'm able to draw a reasonable line (for me) without getting too nuts about it. Hoping AI ends up helping with this.