I largely don't find that surprising. Industry and mechanical activity (cars) cause direct warming - see "urban heat islands", "weekend temperature effect", and as a bonus the "weekend ozone effect". The latter two aren't necessarily as consistent as the former.
But what I do find surprising is
>A separate study by an international team of researchers found that data centers outside urban centers raised the surrounding area’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius on average and, in some cases, by up to 9 degrees Celsius.
9 degrees F would be already be wild, but 9 C sounds crazy! I wish I could figure out what source they were talking about, but I haven't been able to.
The first time I built a freestanding bookshelf, I put a lot of effort into making the feet level and the back straight and at a right angle to the feet. Once I put it up against the wall I'd built it for, I realized I'd solved completely different problem than the problem I really had. I needed crooked bookshelf, since the wall was totally tilted.
In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
Thanks for that hilarious history tidbit. The actual record makes it even better. From the wiki page for Taejong of Joseon:
The king himself rode a horse and shot arrows at a deer. However, the horse stumbled, causing him to fall off, but he was not injured. Looking around, he said, "Do not let the historians know about this."
I think that's also consistent with the idea behind a hot shower. The shower doesn't help by increasing your body temperature, in fact it does the opposite. The hot shower induces the body to try to cool down, so near-skin blood vessels swell, and that dumps heat into the cold air, which reduces your core temperature, and a reduced core temperature helps you fall asleep.
I think where I read about this was Why We Sleep from Matthew Walker. But he suggests just washing your face with warm water, as opposed to a shower.
I think these studies aren't meaningless at all, but the fact that "AI" is a loosely used term means that many people might view even more simple ML methods with skepticism, as opposed to just, say, chat-like LLM tools.
It doesn't seem like a silly argument to me, and certainly not moralizing. Rather "I wonder..." seems to be an indirectly phrased request for information, an open invitation for somebody who has seen the numbers to provide a link.
But I do think I get your point - the subsidies are there so we should compare the costs as they are.
>They could make huge improvements in safety by actively preventing the use of illegally modified e-bikes that travel too fast.
Or by regulating bicycle food delivery services so thatheir employees' continued employment and wage magnitude doesn't hinge quite so thoroughly on how rapidly they deliver.
In Germany we have rules, and one of those rules is that pedestrians on the sidewalk who are in the cyclepath (usually a too-subtle red stone) do, in fact, have to get out of the way for cyclists.
I imagine there's also a rule about directing airhorns against law abiding cyclists.
Or else they'll eventually alienate a majority of their patron state's voting population, and finally get hemmed in / risk losing your military (and other) funding that their state is dependent on.
I don't watch a movie a day, but I'm at my friendly local indie theater at least once a month. It's got a more comftorable audience, more consistently interesting films, and it costs less than the big theater. If I went just a bit more often, I'd for sure get a subscription. There's already so many good films, and so many good indie films being made, I just don't need the big cinemas.
Just one more example here, which I think is a big one for some people - chat apps. Without Whatsapp, Telegram, and Signal, I can't really use my phone as telecommunications tool with friends and colleagues, because everyone is on them. The group chats are where a lot of discussion happens, so I can't just switch to SMS/calls.
But what I do find surprising is
>A separate study by an international team of researchers found that data centers outside urban centers raised the surrounding area’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius on average and, in some cases, by up to 9 degrees Celsius.
9 degrees F would be already be wild, but 9 C sounds crazy! I wish I could figure out what source they were talking about, but I haven't been able to.