It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.

Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.

People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.

So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.

That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.

No true Scotsman would ever lie about Chinese spy technology.

Reuters is citing “two people familiar with the matter” and people in the US federal government not even speaking through an official announcement. While I trust Reuters not to have made up those people’s words, this does mean that so far the only source is semi-random US government employees.

So it literally is just the word of people working for Trump we’re going on.

And for context, it is quite common for reputable news agencies to misreport things, or to take the word of a government employee as final when they really shouldn’t. I personally saw a video of a car running into a climate action protest¹, only for the ‘reputable’ Dutch state news agency (NOS) simply going by the police spokesperson’s statement that the climate activists had scratched the car before it hit them². But the NOS just said the spokesperson said it, so reputation-wise they were in the clear.

Now I’m not saying the genocidal dictatorship known as the People’s Republic of China is not putting spyware on devices shipped to the west. I’m just saying that we need more than an unofficial statement by an employee working under Trump, even if that statement is being signal boosted by Reuters. Skepticism is warranted.

¹: At 48:50 in this livestream, in the left part of the splitscreen. Luckily it was at walking pace so nobody was injured as far as I know.

²: This article, in Dutch.

Sorry, I was trying to make a reference to an image macro. What I was trying to express is that I didn’t understand the explanation.

Hydrogen still produces water vapor which is only barely better for the environment than the carbon dioxide from gasoline emissions

This is completely incorrect. Even if we directed our entire industrial efforts to making water vapor, it would pale in comparison to a single hurricane. Anthropogenic water vapor is insignificant compared to evaporation from the oceans - which is incidentally why we need permaculture instead of industrially supplied water to fight desertification.

Water vapor in the atmosphere is part of how the greenhouse effect works, but not because humans put the water vapor there. As global temperature rises, the atmosphere can physically contain more water vapor per cubic meter without it turning into clouds or rain, and that causes there to be more water vapor.

Ah yes, the C bugs in the kernel libraries. We’ve all seen them.