ElevenLathe

Because Congress allocated this money for one but not the other.

This is is exactly how I've been using AI for writing features: I write a spec. AI writes a test. I inspect/edit/give notes on the test until it's what I want and make sure it's red (to validate that my/the AI's assumptions are more or less correct). Then the AI edits the code only to make the tests pass. Then I do a sanity check on things and tidy them up to my liking. Cut a commit, work on next test.

TBH I feel like a dinosaur working this way, reading about others' more autonomous workflows. One merit it has is that it is a very cheap way to use AI, at least on the apps I work on, because Kimi K2.6 is more than adequate to give good results with this workflow.

"unitary executive" is just Modern Standard American for "Führerprinzip": all authority flows directly from Dear Leader down, all the way from the White House to the schoolteacher and the cop.

What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"? Do they mean gigawatt-hour? (sidenote: how scary that the DoE is the one making this error?)

I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.

It would take a LOT of house cleaning in the DoD, making the current Hegseth purge look cute by comparison.

While there is arguably still some influence from democratic pressure on some areas of US Federal policy, foreign policy and warmaking (including financial warfare like this) are not among them. These have been insulated from public opinion since approximately the the 1940s. It took a massive organization against the draft to (arguably, possibly, maybe -- we'll never really know) shorten the Vietnam war (which, incidentally, was never declared a War by the democratically elected Congress), and that was the high water mark of democratic influence on the security state since WW2.

In short, the opinion of Americans is just not relevant to America's foreign policy decisions. Even a 100% anti-Zionist Congress would be unable to stop supporting the genocide.

Not sure I understand the confrontational tone. I agree with everything you've posted. By calling the uninsured poor, I just mean that the system is so bad for uninsured people that anybody who possibly has the means to get even the worst health insurance is likely to do so. There are exceptions I'm sure, but I've never met anyone who walked into a period of being uninsured without exhausting every possible resource available to them first.

For the most part, to be uninsured in the US is to be impoverished.

I think its surprising how short the memory can be for this stuff. Look how long passed between the British invading America and burning down our capital (1812) and us fighting on the same side in the Great War (1917): not even 4 generations. There are obviously counterexamples, but it's not a slam dunk that 10-ish years of Trumpism will sour the European memory on America forever. Maybe it will, maybe it wont. I would think material facts we don't know yet will be the biggest determining factor here, rather than the other way around.

I think the main mechanism is that uninsured patients will just never pay because:

1) they're poor and have no money

2) medical debts are easier to ignore than other debts that these people also have (because they're poor)

3) they're going to die much sooner than insured people

...and the hospital knows this. So the hospital charges some large multiple of what they charge insured patients so that, when they ultimately sell the debt to the debt collectors at a deep discount, they come out approximately even. If somebody is somehow enough of a sucker to pay the sticker amount, it's just a nice surprise. The other victims of this debt will either just die and never pay, negotiate with the hospital to pay much less, or negotiate with the debt collector for much less.

Would this all be simpler and better if the prices were the same for insured and uninsured people? Yes.

GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!

I have similar fears. I honestly think that this may be the mechanism by which the global capital order falls into a version of late-Soviet decay and collapse -- a major boon to the oligarchs, just as it was in Russia.

Just as the production and service bureaucracy of the USSR ceased to care about the value of their work (so long as they technically fulfilled their plan), we are possibly headed for a world where all the "real economy" workers (in manufacturing, logistics, etc.) will be guided by the output knowledge workers and managers driving AI, who are being judged by yet more management using AI, who are ultimately judged by investors using AI and the whole thing gets disconnected from any actual ground truth -- just as planning did in the Soviet case.

When the whole thing collapses, somebody will be around to pick up the pieces (and valuable capital equipment, land, etc.) for pennies on the dollar. I suspect the kernel of whatever comes next will come from China, but also suspect it will bear more than a passing resemblance to Putin's Russia -- a small clique of rentier-gangster kingpins semi-legally seizing everything in sight and cobbling together an autocratic oligarchy that creaks along without meaningful challenge.

Any standard that claims the entire city of Chicago to be a border zone is an absurd standard, just laughably overreaching if it were ever put in front of a fair court.

> Be mad at the people/entities who created the legal loopholes and laws.

We are. It is their class that is in charge of the legal system. The loopholes exist for them because they are rich and rich people own the government. To pretend that there is a meaningful distinction between Mark Zuckerberg and Chuch Schumer just because one is "in government" and the other is a "private citizen" is absurd and naive. Chuck Schumer and the rest of the legislature work for Zuckerberg, et. al.

It's like saying "you can be mad at OJ's lawyer, but not OJ". OJ hired the lawyer, his actions are for OJ's benefit.

TBH this whole left-right thing is pretty new in the US. The political science term is "ideological alignment" (we didn't really have it for a long time due to our weird party system) if you want to read about it. This is changing now to an extent, but there was also a taboo for a long time against identifying as being a leftist, what with McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, etc.

At a typical US high school, not very many of the students are actually playing. For most of them, it's mainly a social event, something to take a date to, or a time to hang out in the bleachers with peers.

Even if you have one child playing (or on the bench, or in the band, or cheerleading) and have come to watch, your other similar-age children will likely not be interested in sitting with you. They will want to sit with their friends, and rightfully so!

As an American, EU politics is such a fascinating bizarro world. Imagine the right wingers being a bulwark against unhinged expansion of executive authority on grounds of national security! It would be like statehouse Republicans blocking the Patriot Act. Unthinkable.

Right, how could they? It's just one tube.

Was this at all related to standard tubes using octal sockets? I can't think of any reason this would be personally, but I could be missing something.

"Probably any one of the boys from the Palace Flophouse could have made the truck run, for they were all competent practical mechanics, but Gay was an inspired mechanic. There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works. Indeed there are men near whom a car runs better. And such a one was Gay"

^one of my favorite excerpts from my one of my favorite novels, Steinbeck's /Cannery Row/

> Also love: scientists get to pay Anthropic to work within their special science harness to do science. That's exactly what I dreamed of doing when I pursued physics in undergrad, one or two companies holding the keys to "progress" for a monthly subscription price.

I get this anxiety, and am largely an AI skeptic, but at one point there were only a handful of computers in the world too (same for batteries, or engines, or crucibles, or stills -- it goes way back), and the organizations that had them had a stranglehold on progress in the field, as did the small number of companies who knew how to make them. It got better as they got cheaper and more plentiful.

I guess my point is that there are more important anxieties to feed when it comes to LLMs and the current state of the world.

For other speakers of Generic American, it apparently means fanny pack.

What is a "banana bag"? I only know it from the medical usage, and don't seem to be able to find anything about the phrase otherwise.

Oh no! Our PeaceSat went haywire and bumped into your WarSat! Sorry dude, let's swap insurance.

The point is that what we think is valuable (and I agree, most corporate busywork is IMO a waste of everyone's precious time on this planet) doesn't matter under a system where labor and resources are ordered about by the people with the most money. Those jobs exist because our rulers (the ones in charge of the money) want them to, and that is the only definition of "valuable" that matters. Likewise, all the low-paid and unpleasant labor like digging up minerals with no safety equipment, sewing shoes for 17 hours a day, wiping asses in nursing homes, etc. is low-paid and unpleasant because our rulers want it that way.

It's 2026. They can stream it.

I honestly don't understand what supposedly pro-social purpose is served by reporting on what the appointed head propagandist says from the official propaganda room in the presidential palace. A self respecting reporter should be ashamed to let anyone see their White House press credentials.

Aren't we, the reading public, better served by reporters developing sources, investigating things, and maybe reporting on something the government doesn't want to be in the news?

What could you possibly mean by this?

One might surmise, given these facts, that there is some force other than democracy in control of the levers of power.

One way to get workers to care about the quality of the product they are being paid to build (for someone else's profit) is for the management to show some loyalty and build trust over the course of a decades-long career by treating them fairly and avoiding layoffs.