It makes a lot of people dumber -- they doom scroll, gossip, play childrens games, and on the high end post cat memes.
But it's a tool like any other and the results depend on the user.
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear it is (was) the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge of the world unfiltered without gate keeper trolls deciding what you can see and learn.
Getting on the internet in 1993 completely changed my life. Linux changed my life and without the internet there is no Linux. Before Linux you could not get a UNIX distro for less than $1000 USD which was a lot of money for me back then.
Before Linux and Internet all that was available to consumers outside of big institutions was Windoze and Apple was already on life support. The internet and Linux opened an entire world to me and I never looked back. Everyone at the time said I was wasting my time and should be doing an MCSE LOL but those are people in the 90%... they will NEVER get it.
Fast forward 4 years later I'm working in startups and leading dev teams and that was almost 30 years ago.
I can imagine what my life would have been without the internet and I prefer how things worked out.
So it did not make me dumber... but the filtered nannied corporate approved internet of 2026 -- that probably just makes anyone dumber.
The peak of human civilization, for me, was downloading Shrike and actually having it work "out of the box". If an absolute moron like me could get that to boot up with next to no involvement or fudging through the user manual, I knew then that the tide had turned.
The Internet doesn't make people dumber any more than video games, rock music, picaresque novels, the printing press, or writing did. These kinds of arguments come around with every new technology and have always been fatuous.
Imagine thinking there is an option but to kiss the ring and still be allowed to play or that there are even two sides.
Imaging thinking it even matters what Tim cook or Trump do. Imagine thinking Tim Cook is anything but a stand in book keeper and stock promoter. Imagine thinking Trump is anything but a heel turn pro wrestler. Trump is bunkem for the masses and Tim Cook is irrelevant and a follower.
Steve was a an idea guy. Tim was a seeker of efficiencies and consensus -- boring and common.
I didn't buy one apple product during Tim's tenure but I still have my IIe and several old Macs converted to Linux.
Genius is often regarded as brutish or mean by lesser people. Your feelings on it do not matter.
Just like MCP is for Desktop users and useless otherwise -- GUIs are a solution to a created problem.. of users not being able to read and write very well because they don't practice.
Terminal, coding, and even prompt writing skills are language skills.
If you cannot use a terminal properly you are basically an appliance user. Like a toaster operator.
Said the grumpy grandpa, shaking his hand at the cloudy sky.
I dont know what value that comment contributed, funding research is always a long shot. And often times it fails, but that is kinda its purpose, we dont know what we dont know.
It's largely fans of Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel, where some years ago sadly she shifted into just being a grifter selling conspiracy theories about the funding of particle physics.
The audience here tends to vastly overweight contrarian near conspiracy theory style stuff, so this sort of comment shows up on literally every damn post about physics research.
Dont be too harsh on the first comment, I'm Sure he's a good guy.
Interesting to see that hossenfelder thing, I was'nt aware of it.
Her videos got recommended to me but title+thumb always felt like an over the top commentary with more drama than actual problem to be aware of.
So I never clicked and at some point youtube stopped.
You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research.
With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along the way. On the other hand, the FCC is mainly a shot in the dark: they aren't validating a widely-accepted theory, they are just hoping that if you spend enough money on a bigger collider something interesting will fall out.
Most research gives you at least some insight. With the FCC there is a very real possibility that the insight will be "our $20B collider found absolutely nothing, now give us $1T to build an even bigger one". Sure, funding research is a long shot, but at a certain point you're just setting money on fire.
I see your point, but thats a really bad comparison. We are pretty certain that there is no giant dinosaur in a lake, but in terms of fundamental research there is a lot we cannot really explain a great many things. We dont even know if we are "looking" correctly, with the right concept in mind.
I agree that money spending must be carefully considered, but for this research there really is no replacement. You can shuffle public spending around, but an Experiment not dont will explain no part of the Universe. If the countries and Supranationals that are able to dont fund them we will be stuck with what we know now until they do.
It is a lot of money, but it is also the only way. Does that meaningfully stop the EU and all others from doing their thing? I would argue no. We can still afford it and so we should.
It's not necessarily a "waste of money," but it's certainly highly deceptive. For example, China has built a large number of unprofitable infrastructure projects and abandoned projects over the past two decades. Even though they lost money, the waste during construction still made China the world's second-largest economy and aroused envy among some ignorant right-wingers. However, this cost has overdrawn the resources for the next few decades. It has caused China's fertility rate to fall below 1, meaning there won't be enough population to repay this debt in the future, let alone enough money for maintenance (even though many of these facilities were never economically viable to begin with). China's bankruptcy is only a matter of time. Moreover, China owes not only economic debt, but also significant "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt." The Chinese government and society's attempt to raise money through illegal means and extortion by issuing "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt" will undoubtedly result in another collapse.
In Canada the police are pretty lazy and it's mostly due to who they hire, and also a LOT of political garbage as it's a federal police force throughout the country in most cases -- run from Ottawa.
Not much real police work happening any more unless you criticize the government or do something they can use as a reason to grow their budgets or otherwise further political agendas.
If there is a video of a crime they do like that...easy! Also they can show it to media for props.
Lazy cops just love centralized 'social' media and the fools who post their lives on it for them to snoop through.
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