It’s not actually ridiculous in principle.

Let’s say I start out owning a bank with ten billion in assets, and the bank’s value comes entirely from its assets so it’s worth ten billion.

The bank loans its ten billion to you, and you pay me those ten billion for the bank. Now I have ten billion in cash instead of a bank that was worth ten billion, and you have a bank worth ten billion to which you owe ten billion. No one’s net worth has changed.

You default on your loan to your own bank. Now the bank is worthless (its worth came entirely from the loan) and you have no debt, so your net worth still hasn’t changed. Effectively nothing has happened.

I didn’t say that Israel is not on the offensive right now - it is. My point is that if the Iron Dome system is indeed compromised, that’s going to put pressure on Israel to stay on the offensive rather than to back down.

Let’s hope they keep this up and force Israel to back the fuck off.

I don’t see the same connection here that you do. A failure of Israel’s defensive weapons would require them to go on the offensive. The status quo from before the October 7 attacks was tolerable to Israel because they could shoot down incoming threats but if they no longer can, they must neutralize the ability of their enemies to launch those threats.

A life form perfectly adapted for hitting below the belt.

Why? English isn’t my first language but I can’t think of a single time that knowing my native language (not Spanish) was necessary to accomplish something useful in the USA (other than talking to my family, which isn’t relevant for the children learning a foreign language in school). I can’t think of a single time that not knowing Spanish prevented me from accomplishing something useful, either.

It’s a type of marble cheese, specifically Colby-Jack.

(like wet wipes)

Someone flushes a wet wipe into your septic tank? Justifiable homicide.

Nothing wrong with eating cheese for dinner.

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The companies that won’t do well in that scenario are the ones that sell products to the sorts of people who will lose their jobs to AI. But not all companies do that.

(In the extreme case, there might be an economy no longer oriented primarily around what humans want.)

Serve and obey? No. Treat well? Maybe. Meanwhile I’m excited about the possibility of good futures for superhuman AIs themselves, not just for humans.

While I agree with your general sentiment, I think you have chosen a metaphor that is almost maximally unpersuasive to your target audience.

Very occasionally I run into something that used to be doable without a smartphone but requires a smartphone now, but that’s quite rare. Not having a smartphone now would be very inconvenient, but generally not more inconvenient than living without a smartphone was before they existed. I expect the same with this technology, if it ever arrives.

I’m not sure why the tone is so negative in this article given that the plan being discussed is to make the technology so useful that most people want it despite the disadvantages. That’s not coercion.

I don’t think it’s something dogs are physiologically capable of doing, and even if it were, I think it’s unlikely that dogs would be trained to do it on command.

The claims about dogs seem quite implausible and call into questions the reliability of the rest of the the article, but I’m not sure how Israel actually plans to go from that to reaching the rather high threshold for providing libel in the USA.

You don’t need calculus to do this. Neither one is accelerating, so “5 seconds after they started moving” is irrelevant. Just calculate the velocity of one in the reference frame of the other by subtracting the vectors: from the point of view of the boy, the girl’s velocity vector has orthogonal components of -5 ft/sec north and 1 ft/sec east, so the magnitude is 26^0.5 ft/sec.

I worked somewhere once where we were literally locked out of a system - the door control computer stopped responding and we couldn’t get into the room it was in to reboot it, because of course it controlled that door.

No, generally not. It’s possible to lack the knowledge or the intellectual sophistication to disprove an argument that is, in fact, false. So if your life experience or your intuition has caused you to come to believe something, you shouldn’t abandon that belief just because you can’t disprove an argument against it, or you will become vulnerable to various scams and deceptions.

The more reliable approach is to accept the existence of an argument that you can’t disprove as evidence that you might be wrong. Enough evidence should change your mind, even if one piece doesn’t.