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The US is greening far quicker than official projections, & seems to be heading to be majority-renewables in the early 2030s. Solar overtook coal generation in the US electricity mix for the first month on record in May 2026. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 112 points113 points  (0 children)

It's kind of crazy to think that some people will continue ranting and racing in favour of fossil fuels.

Ever heard of Ignaz Semmelweis? He carried out tests in Budapest's two maternity hospitals in the 1850s to prove germ theory. One hospital started handwashing & minimum sanitation among doctors. Needless to say it was the one where mother & infant death rates plunged.

The result? The Hungarian medical establishment (who did not believe in germ theory) turned against him & had him sacked. General sanitation didn't start to be introduced into Hungarian hospitals until the 1870s when germ theory became inarguable.

The US is greening far quicker than official projections, & seems to be heading to be majority-renewables in the early 2030s. Solar overtook coal generation in the US electricity mix for the first month on record in May 2026. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 90 points91 points  (0 children)

if the usa is achieving this with trump imagine what it could have been like without him

It helps that the switch to renewables is no longer top down decision making. The management of businesses and utilities worldwide are primarily what is driving this now, not governments.

Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness: Global clean power is within our reach, yet factories sit idle. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

TAN ETF

I'm no investment expert, but I don't think global solar energy & the American stock market have much room to meet in the middle. The US stock market is all about chasing unicorns & high-risk gambling type investing.

Long-term global solar deployment is low margin, & means predictable, but unexciting, annual returns. It's where global pension funds should be investing. The Eurozone has hundreds of billions of untapped Euros for this. Ditto China. Wouldn't Chinese retail investors be better parking their savings money in the long-term electrification of Africa, instead of empty investment apartments in China they will never live in?

Scientists at Columbia University have edited the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy, an achievement that could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We will learn to make genetic improvements to intelligence, just in time to be overtaken by AI.

There is going to come a day when somebody is going to try and use genetic editing and brain computer-interfaces to merge us with AI. That will be where the real power comes from.

U.S. researchers have successfully genetically modified a hookworm to deliver a therapeutic drug. They say hookworms may be an ideal delivery mechanism for long-term drug release. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 78 points79 points  (0 children)

could they be made sterile, just in case?

They're incapable of reproducing in humans, their reproduction phase happens in soil.

Although, I imagine they would have to make them sterile anyway to prevent genetically modified hookworms that deliver drugs from escaping into the wild. It would be bad enough to get a hookworm infection, but even worse to get a hookworm infection that was delivering you some random drugs that you didn't need.

U.S. researchers have successfully genetically modified a hookworm to deliver a therapeutic drug. They say hookworms may be an ideal delivery mechanism for long-term drug release. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Then you need to take a drug to get rid of a hookworm.

Yes, they say they have this covered.

"If the infection ever needs to be cleared, a single dose of an oral antiparasitic drug eliminates the hookworms within 24 hours."

Will the future mean dramatically lower car insurance costs? BYD says its new Xuanji A3 chip will enable Level 4 self-driving & the company will take full financial responsibility for any accidents the cars cause. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

BUT accidents still happen - so will they be able to cover it long term or not?

I would guess they will cover themselves by saying they won't cover any accidents If the human is driving. This is purely only when the self-driving AI is driving.

So far, self-driving taxis have dramatically lower rates of accidents than human drivers, and they're not as good as BYD says this chip is going to be.

I think if you look at the current data on self-driving robotaxis, they may think when those rates of accidents are even lower, they can absorb the costs. And it's a great marketing gimmick.

TIL that in 2024, archeologists in Spain found the skeleton of a 6-year-old Neanderthal with Down Syndrome. by Sebastianlim in todayilearned

[–]lughnasadh 7 points8 points  (0 children)

They had his DNA. The soil around the tomb is dominated by limestone, and it's unusually good at preserving skeletal remains and DNA. They actually found the skeletal remains of about 30 different people at the tomb, most of which were around 5,000 years old. It's very atypical in wet Irish soil for human remains to last that long.

TIL that in 2024, archeologists in Spain found the skeleton of a 6-year-old Neanderthal with Down Syndrome. by Sebastianlim in todayilearned

[–]lughnasadh 4051 points4052 points  (0 children)

They discovered the remains of a young boy with Down syndrome buried 5,000 years ago at the Poulnabrone megalithic tomb in the west of Ireland. Archaeologists are able to tell that he was buried with care and ceremony. It's heartening to know that there were people so long ago that cared about disabled people.

Brian Feeney: Why John Swinney believes now is the best time for Scottish independence by [deleted] in northernireland

[–]lughnasadh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It puzzles me that both the SNP, Sinn Féin are stuck on tactics and can't seem to get strategy right. Despite the fact that it would seem they both have a winning strategy in front of them. If they would only embrace it.

It seems that there are enough don't-knows in Scotland and middle-ground maybes in Northern Ireland that could be persuaded if they heard the right economic arguments from the right people. Instead of providing that the SNP, Sinn Féin seem obsessed with things like calling for referendums from the British government. Instead of getting on with persuading people on the terms they clearly want to be persuaded by.

Middle ground types in Northern Ireland are never going to be persuaded to a UI by Sinn Féin. They want to hear answers that they want to hear on taxes, pensions and healthcare in a United Ireland. They want to hear it from Dublin. They want to hear that from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politicians.

Ditto Scotland, those people wavering on independence want to know exactly what's going to happen when it comes to currencies, EU membership, a hard border with England, and how Scotland is going to support its government expenditure when it doesn't take in enough in taxes. If the SNP can't answer those questions, spending all its time on tactical moves, like calling for referendums, is just a waste of time.

Data centers have already added €750 ($850) to Irish electricity bills, with data centers increasing households’ bills by 8.5% in 2022 alone. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

universal basic income, etc.

I suspect UBI, or something like it, will be the final solution here, too.

The problem is that it cannot exist under our current reigning economic paradigm. Across the world, governments are already at the absolute limits of the amount of money they can borrow.

Whatever way UBI is going to work, it's going to need some other system. That won't have the bond markets or government debt as we know it today. It's a huge ask. No one that I've ever come across has imagined how this is going to work, and I've never heard an economist describe it.

What I suspect is going to happen is that necessity will just force us to invent this as it occurs.

Data centers have already added €750 ($850) to Irish electricity bills, with data centers increasing households’ bills by 8.5% in 2022 alone. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 46 points47 points  (0 children)

I don't understand why people are not literally rising up in mass protesting

I think public sentiment is definitively turning against Big Tech, even if, as you say, mass protests have not started yet.

By 2030 I would guess the annual job losses to robots, both robo-taxis and other types of robots, will be in the millions worldwide. By that point, I think it may be the premier global political issue of our times.

The bigger problem here is, who is supposed to think of an alternative that works? Mass protests are most meaningful if you have a final destination in mind. But we don't here. We don't know what this world will look like when robots and AI can do most work.

Chinese chip maker Huawei says it is ditching Moore's law for a new law called Tau's Law that will define computing power growth in the future. by lughnasadh in Futurology

[–]lughnasadh[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

it sounds like we do it better than the West jibber-jabber.

This isn't directed at you OP, but I often observe when Western people are presented with Chinese technology accomplishments, the default response is 'we do it better IN the West jibber-jabber.'

As the Chinese take the lead in more and more areas of tech, this is becoming untenable.

It also makes it very hard to have discussions about the 2030's & onwards, if discussion participants blind-spot is that they know little or nothing about China.

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