That was a nice term report by a precocious 5th grader or, more likely, an AI generated article.

In that case we’re going to need a bigger Death Star.

as a consumer accepting that

That’s the special condition we get in the US, though - there is little or no effective choice across the spectrum. Without regulation, corporations will become asymptotic to maximum financial extraction techniques. There are few real choices at the consumer level and the barriers to entry are such that a single consumer - or even an uncoordinated (read: without a national, staffed organization) - cannot circumvent the system.

Maybe in somewhere free like the EU or SEA. In the US, most phones bought from a carrier (and most sales are that way, some exclusively so) are locked so that no other SIM (e or physical) can be used.

Okay - how about corporate data; deep dives into intimate corporate workings and connections by financial wonks.

This isn’t “shady companies mining data in secret” - these are registered, for profit corporations who’s stated goal is to collect, sort, and mine trillions of bytes of information and provide output of any cross section in any sort order to anyone with a big check book. Koch brothers. Disney. Russia. Anyone. The problem isn’t that the NSA is doing its job with budgeted funds, it’s that we allow this service to exist.

At the risk of playing devils advocate, are they not allowed to subscribe to newspapers without a warrant? This is publicly purchasable information bought by a (checks notes) agency with the expressed mission if gathering as much data as possible.

If Rep Wyden wants to prevent this, the first - and most important - legislative action is to prevent its collection and sale, not some anti-TLA circle jerk about the NSA buying it on the open market.

These should, instead, be implemented by NFC. You tap their “reader” with your phone, never surrendering it, and they get your ID number just like a merchant gets your CC info for a charge. Their backend pulls up your record just as if they’d scanned the qr code on the back of your physical card. Or you can locally transmit a facsimile image to a promiscuous reader (airdrop/nearby share) you approve.

I’m going to start out with the obvious- that most of these arguments are copypasta from a decade and a half ago when smartphones got cameras. Distracting. What about the gym? Easy for bad actors to abuse (OMGWTFBBQ!)

The glare from headlights comment was weird. Do the lenses not include an AR coating, or perhaps the author doesn’t normally wear glasses? I decided to check on that last one and was surprised that there was no by line, just a generic nyt link - not even to the article. Of course Brian X Chen appears to be a real NYT journalist, but in no other online pictures does he wear glasses, so I presume he doesn’t wear corrective lenses or he wears contacts. Not too surprising then that the glasses - and a big, black, fat-rimmed resin model at that - would be distracting, even outside of the decisions to record or not.

Which brings up the last bit - to record you have to initiate it. I presume this is for battery life, as powering the sensor, processing, and transmission to a storage device all take non-trivial amounts of power for a device that small. For the panicky fear of constant surveillance the article has I expected it was an always-on live-stream to the Meta servers that was occurring. Color me unimpressed.

removing/reducing

The kids still have exposure, but the total load is reduced allowing the body to see and react to the infectious elements without being overwhelmed. All of the “but it’s nature” fanatics should remember that the million years of evolution we have survived with exposure was done without enclosed, poorly ventilated boxes. And within the historical record, the some of the greatest failures of our “natural” immune system prior to vaccines and antibiotics have generally occurred when we enclosed people into poorly ventilated, densely packed communities. (though many failures come from drinking our own poo…usually due to densely packed populations with unregulated water standards/supplies)

We have been hopelessly, almost maliciously, misled by popular science fiction about the adaptability of humans to space travel and living on planets which are not exactly like Earth.

While this is certainly an interesting thing to know, there was no quantitative data provided about the discoveries. While a bunch of rare earth metals wandering around the atmosphere is certainly not a common occurrence, knowing whether we’re talking about parts per billion or parts or parts per undecillion is a substantial difference (if Google didn’t just lie to me, there are around one quattuordecillion molecules in our atmosphere, probably give or take a couple orders of magnitude).

I guarantee I can “drop” more than 120g after a cup of morning coffee. Checkmate scientists.

That’s probably the most uplifting part about the award - such amazing persistence.

Quick point of clarification - concrete is about 40% sand. PortlandPortland cement is one of the other parts of concrete - it’s what actually holds concrete together. Other pozzolons, like fly ash, can make up 25-50% of the cementitious material.

FWIW, Cement is wildly energy intensive to create and produces a huge amount of CO2. We don’t have a lot of replacement options for cement (or concrete generally) because of its unique durability.

Story time: My daughter got it near the end of finals week at university, and my wife and I drove her home - 5 hours is a closed up car - on what was probably her first symptomatic day. None of us were masked because none of us knew. She coughed once or twice, but mostly slept on the way home (as she usually does after a week of exams). I almost joked with her after one cough that she’d caught the 'vid. Next morning she woke up with a fever and tested, not actually expecting…positive. She quarantined in her room for 5 days, and all three of us pretty much didn’t go out for 10 days and we delayed holiday celebrations with the grandparents for two weeks. Neither my wife nor I were ever symptomatic. We used the two remaining tests we had on day 3 after the car ride and both tested negative, but decided the full quarantine was still safest.

Thinking back to the early New York outbreak, I remember reading an article in (April? May?) that semi-random population testing (I say semi because it was voluntary) for serum antibodies that covered multiple counties showed that around half of the people who tested positive for past Covid exposure had indicated that they had not suffered any symptoms of illness in the prior 3 months. The supposition was that up to 50% of the population had experienced an infection asymptomatically. While odd, it possibly explained why the spread was so rapid - people who were asymptomatic may have simply been vectors to infect many others as they didn’t quarantine (or, likely, mask since masks were in very short supply at the time). Regardless, I’m getting an XBB.1.5 vaccine when it’s released. Whether I got it or it magically missed me the first time, I have no desire to join the symptomatic club.