30 August 2024

AnandTech has shut down. I never visited them regularly, but I have heard of them. I just wonder if this is the start of a new trend – the shutting down of tech news websites much as we saw after the dotcom boom ended.  This has been so typical of the Biden-Harris era: no growth or expansion of nice things. Only shortages and shutdowns.

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Trying to control speech. Now radiologists are being told what words to use and not to use when reading ultrasounds, so as not to trigger people. So Orwellian, but it's happening so often, like censorship, that it's being done with ease, and only a few push back.

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UK Royal Society comes to the conclusion that even solving the battery problem isn't going to solve the green energy problem. When the wind stops blowing and there isn't enough sunshine for solar power, there will still be a substantial energy shortage. And they discover that hydrogen isn't the answer either, despite all the greenies suggesting it be used instead because you can burn it in air without creating carbon dioxide. But –
Hydrogen is also hard to move around. To get the gas to move through pipes, it has to be compressed and pushed along using compressors. This process requires energy: the losses in moving hydrogen through pipes are ten times greater for hydrogen than for methane; up to 30%. In other words you need to use up almost a third of your gas just moving it from A to B.
The infrastructure for hydrogen does not exist, neither for the most part do the production facilities and they will cost billions to build. Then the underlying cost of storing hydrogen is probably at least four times that of storing methane. Huge amounts of energy are lost in each stage of the process due to the fundamental properties of hydrogen.
Current technology does not have anything ready to substitute for petroleum-based fuels.

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In 2022, the federal government reported that, in samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, average levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive compound in weed that makes you feel high—had more than tripled compared with 25 years earlier, from 5 to 16 percent. That may understate how strong weed has gotten. Walk into any dispensary in the country, legal or not, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single product advertising such a low THC level. Most strains claim to be at least 20 to 30 percent THC by weight; concentrated weed products designed for vaping can be labeled as up to 90 percent.
In the past few years, reports have swelled of people, especially teens, experiencing short- and long-term “marijuana-induced psychosis,” with consequences including hospitalizations for chronic vomiting and auditory hallucinations of talking birds. Multiple studies have drawn a link between heavy use of high-potency marijuana, in particular, and the development of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia...
“It’s entirely possible that this new kind of cannabis—very strong, used in these very intensive patterns—could do permanent brain damage to teenagers because that’s when the brain is developing a lot..."
You don't say....

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You won't have to take the bar exam to be a lawyer in Washington state, just like Oregon. Because the DEI progressives in charge, rather than trying to improve educational quality, instead remove qualifications put in place to ensure that we have quality practitioners. Don't they know that having bad attorneys is just going to lead to the need for more trials to remedy bad law? Yes, bad law begets more work for attorneys, and doesn't help the public.

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