Shockingly, scientists do not receive a blank check and then only provide the word yes or no as the result of their study.

The problem with this attitude is that it presupposes that scientific discovery is linear, predictable, and evaluable without context or scientific knowledge, from an armchair.

For all we know, a study like this could accidentally reveal something about gut health in cats, which later is confirmed to be true about humans, which later is combined with other knowledge to treat bowel cancer.

When you devalue “dumb” science because you judge it at face value, you devalue all science. Republicans are very fond of doing this also and it’s helped create more scientific ignorance in the public and it has made less funds available for science.

There’s nothing more worthy of having money spent on it than science. You’re obviously not a scientist, and even if you were, you cannot predict the future or know what you don’t know. Scientific knowledge is like a giant puzzle and we don’t know what all the pieces are ahead of time or how they fit together.

Lol that’s horrible. The author of this article says that dogs are prolific farters but I’ve had two dogs and neither farted super often. Definitely not denying it’s happened but it’s not something I’ve noticed that much and especially not to the degree you just described!

Not all knowledge needs to be profound to be worth studying. This idea that science wastes so much money needs to die.

I use a RPI 5 for this purpose but it’s hard to recommend it at this point. Some videos play just fine but others struggle and drop frames. Seems totally random at times. I can promise though that 4k will not play watchably. 1080p is the max you can do and like I said, even that can be iffy. It was mostly a fun project to setup but also annoying at times due to concerns with ARM compatibility, but I really wish the performance was better. If I could smoothly watch 4k without being tracked all of it would’ve been worth it and then some.

Edit: if anyone has a good recc for a power efficient and budget friendly mini pc, I’d love that myself.