Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.

While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is.

How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it’s the teacher’s responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?

The average teacher does not have the luxury of choosing their audience. Ideally you’d only teach students who want to learn, but in reality teachers are given a class of students and ordered to teach them. If enough students fail their exams, or if the teacher gives up on the ones who don’t care, the teacher is assumed to be at fault and gets fired.

You can theoretically change your exams so that chatbot-dependent students will fail, or lower your bar because chatbots are “good enough” for everyday life. But thanks to standardized testing, most teachers do not have the power to change their success metrics in either direction.

This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point. Even if it were, cancelling your technical writing class to replace it with an AI-wrangling class is not a curriculum modification but an abdication. Doing that can get your program canceled, and could even get a tenured professor fired.

The author was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. Re-evaluating the systemic circumstances that incentivize cheating is crucially important – on that we absolutely agree – but it’s a responsibility that should be directed at those with actual power over that system.

[Edit: taking the tone down a notch.]

It’s more about the how and why.

How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.