As a lawyer, I agree. Much of the trope of 'the lawyers always win' has a lot of truth to it, believe it or not. And all of the incentives align in this direction, it keeps the legal profession fat and happy and beholden to monied interests while suppressing access to the non-wealthy. And the rich don't actually care that they're being constantly fleeced, because it's just a cost of doing business that is really pretty finite in comparison to profits that can be made. It's almost like it's a feature of 'the system' (combination of capitalism and common law) and not an unintended side effect.
This is the story that will be told to support austerity which will be used by a small cohort to accumulate even more wealth at the expense of everyone else and cause a generation of misery. What this story misses is that the government controls the money. The US Government can't go "bankrupt," it is the bank. The US Government doesn't have to "live within their means" - it is the means. The US Government can't "overspend money [they] don't have," because it has all the money, and the money printer. Sovereign nation 'debt' doesn't work like any other debt, and it's so incredibly useful on it's own that it makes sense to make a lot of it. This idea that the US Government has to pay back its debt is a fiction that has no utility any more.[1]
I will agree with you that most military spending is inefficient at best, and that we should shift our focus and values to something more productive rather than something literally destructive.
In the 90's the Democratic party abandoned the labor movement because they thought they could get more votes from moderate republicans if they spew the same free market and free trade ideology. And Clinton did that and won, so since then there's been a cohort of political leaders on the left that firmly believe that this is the right and correct path. Literally the same people, they've been in power for 30-40 years. What they miscalculated was that Clinton won the presidency because of his insane charisma and also the Ross Perot spoiler on the right, not the free market stuff. But it was enough cover to dismantle the long-term alliance of the labor movement and the Democratic party.
I dropped Prime for the first time in many years just last month. 2-day shipping is pretty much standard now at Target and Walmart, there was nothing terribly compelling on Prime Video, and I never even used any other services. Why again have I been shoveling ~$12/month in perpetuity to Amazon?
I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's all of the engineers who have to work on the project, the hardware to run all of it, etc. Seems like if it takes months to do and has to be QA'd anyways, it can't be that much more cost effective. Now, if it's completely computer-generated and can be a push-button feature? Sure, that makes sense. I wonder how close they are to that.
And this is why half of the internet is borderline unusable. Page layout jumping around for 5-10 seconds after what appears to be a full page load, buttons simply not functioning, and god forbid you try to use the back button. I know some expert will say none of those things have to happen and has nothing to do with react, but the reality of it is that these things are incredibly common in modern front end development, and I blame all the over-engineered frameworks.
Or just "rent" because that seems pretty close to the reality of the situation. Just have the rental term be long, and have it 'renew' for free. I'd be ok with that.
This is a great solution too. I have a wood 'heatilator' (or fireplace insert) and during the recent cold snap in the Midwest I went through about 1/4 face cord of kiln-dried oak over 3 or 4 days (that's a lot by my standards). It kept the gas furnace mostly idling and the home warm (in the 80's by the fireplace actually, lol). Probably not exactly cost efficient with the cost of wood these days but I like being able to take some of the load off the gas furnace.
But the receiver has to know the encoding to be able to detect it. Maybe the aliens are using a different type of spectrum spreading technique that makes a lot of sense to them but is unknown to us.
At this point 'tech' is more an aesthetic than anything else. Just keep repeating the word 'disruptive' and light a pile of VC money on fire and you're 'tech.' Bonus points if that pile is at least a billion dollars and from some big name foreign entity looking to launder ill-gotten wealth. Whether or not you actually do anything productive or useful is besides the point.
I feel like these are not as common/popular as they were back in the day. Now it's all water cooling with those all-in-one setups. I always thought the Peltier coolers were cool (pun not originally intended, but now it is).
Using lossless audio with AirPods is still preferable. Rather than re-encoding a lossy stream with another lossy codec, you only encode it once. Is it minor? Yeah. Can I actually hear it on AirPods? No. But it's not entirely moot.
I hope they don't do this. It would be so wasteful to have every end user device running an ML model every time a song is played. Just run the model once in the datacenter and then distribute the time stamp metadata.
That's me. Grew up in a very middle to perhaps lower-middle-class area and went to more-or-less middling schools. It definitely wasn't 'the mean streets' or anything but very blue collar. I'm certain there were kids living through very real problems at home and in their personal lives all around me. But I was blissfully unaware and disconnected from all that as I was wrapped in the bubble of band and honors/gifted classes and the associated type of kid. A pretty good childhood overall. One time, one 5-minute instance, I was actively, actually bullied, in a very minor and entirely inconsequential way by the football captain jock kind of kid. Took me by surprise, but rattled my cage enough that I still remember it. He went on to play in the NFL, had a short and pretty much unremarkable career as an athlete best I can tell, and now is a construction worker nearby and I saw a headline once that he got arrested for a DUI. I now live in a much nicer neighborhood in a bigger house than he does, and based on the blurb about the DUI, I drive a better car than he does/did. Point is, I can't imagine what it's like to actually be bullied. One tiny thing happened to me in an entirely impersonal and inconsequential way and here I am decades later googling the guy and feeling smug that I came out on top. I would have been crushed by any amount of real bullying.
You're missing the point of the entire field of "Public Health." It's not to communicate the minutia of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. That's what academics are for. Public health is more like marketing, but with the goal to reduce harm rather than make profit. And that's OK, and a good thing, and to lambast them for trying to convey a simple, straight-forward message is really just not understanding what the role of public health is.
Isn't the consensus that Ivermectin is effective at treating parasitic infection, and treating an active, preexisting parasitic infection can help with COVID indirectly (e.g., the body doesn't have to fight a 'two-front' war against both the viral infection and a parasite at the same time). If you don't have any parasites, however, any benefit vanishes. So by all means, if you think you have worms, go get treated for worms. But if you don't, and most people in first-world countries don't, then it's pointless.
But what about all of the real money that low-information retail 'investors' put into the crypto ecosystem as a result of the social media hype? Im not being facetious, isn't there potential future cash flow in the scam?
That sounds like an interesting challenge with today's technology. It's so impressive that this was accomplished at scale with Cold War era technology levels.
But the unemployment that those workers receive is an externality. Now, the nature of UI does mean that it should wash out in the end, but in the near term laying off thousands of people simultaneously potentially puts a strain on the system.
Agreed. I see the other 'prime' labeled services as a negative value frankly, because I know that the entire intent is to make the process frustrating enough to upsell me to their amazon branded services which are universally inferior to the other options I would have picked in the absence of the 'free' 'prime' offering. I've finally converted enough of my online shopping to target and Walmart that this is the year I'm doing away with amazon prime for good.