ceejayoz

Russia can't even take the country next door.

Neither could the Weimar Republic.

With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?

Even 1% of Russia's arsenal being functional would be a problem, and I can imagine someone taking a gamble on "will Germany/France/England want to take a nuke to the face over the Baltics?"

Unless China has some very interesting new anti-drone tech, those look like nice big targets.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/russia-nato-arms-germany-wa...

Germany's defence minister is frank and plain-spoken, but also deliberate with his words and intention. When he talks about Russia, the future of the West and the possibility of another European war, the message however becomes stark: "Our experts say it can happen in 2029."

In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies.

https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-says-europe-...

NATO Chief Mark Rutte urged member countries to do more to prepare for the possibility of large-scale war, warning that Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.

The subject of "Why is everyone preparing for war so hard" would seem to be "everyone", no?

Everything you just said describes the major American AI providers.

Anthropic just settled a $1.5B suit over it!

When both are true at the same time, one might reflect on why "because China" is given as the pat answer.

The Wing of Tomorrow programme is centred around creating longer, lighter, and more slender wings to maximise aerodynamic efficiency and reduce fuel burn. The wing extensions will be assembled at Airbus’ Wing Technology Development Centre in the UK and flight tested in Toulouse.

it has also become an entirely cliché response

To be fair, that's also the case for the link itself we're discussing.

A shitty cam rip of a movie is still punishable as infringement.

That said, it's been done: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%).

Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same.

I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you.

Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state.

None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes.

(More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)

There are lot of assumptions in that statement which may not be scientifically valid.

Uh huh.

Even if, the patient's life should not outweigh the medico's own.

Their desire not to get a minor vaccination should not outweigh the survival of the person under their care.

They could simply ban medical institutions from mandating treatments for staff…

Sorry, but if you want to take care of patients, you don't get to risk their lives unnecesssarily by refusing a flu shot.

We called them Sturmabteilung in the original German.

Is it all going to insurance companies? Nope. The price increases are attributable to hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and so on.

The insurers are buying up the doctors (and paying their doctors more, as a bonus - https://sph.brown.edu/news/2025-11-10/unitedhealthcare-optum...) and the pharmaceutical side (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management) of things.

Maybe not according to your personal definition.

Not according to any common definition.

I, too, can win every argument if I get to make up the definitions.

compulsory collective charity

Compulsory makes it not charity. That's a tax.

government assistance

That's not charity!

I’m not making a point about UK wait times; we’re talking about LLMs as a research tool.

And I'm noting that what and how you ask matter.

(As do the basic factual flubs they make. I use LLMs a lot on code! I don't trust LLMs on code as a result. Useful? Sure. But "I asked Gemini" really adds little to a conversation about something so complex as comparing healthcare between nations.)

So it looks like 50% of mental health issues go untreated in the UK as well. Doesn’t that show the value of using LLMs to pull out facts, instead of reading articles that wraps the facts up in spin?

If you ignore the "common" qualifier in there, sure. Are you comparing apples to oranges?

US healthcare costs are $16k/person/year.

I do not think charity makes up a particularly signficant portion of that cost, no.

We know it has a genetic factor.

We also know that's not the full story, and that people who lose a parent at a young age for any reason are more likely to struggle emotionally.

Committing suicide almost certainly guarantees further suicides within that close family.

Not sure why this is downvoted.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...

"The experience of losing a parent to suicide is a strong and independent risk factor for suicidal behaviour in offspring."

No one is making the claim that the cost of service would be $0. Quite obviously.

I am making the claim that the cost will be prohibitive to handle via charity, especially as a national healthcare strategy, as proposed upthread.

Great example!

I go and ask Gemini about the American equivalent, and get this:

Roughly 40% of the U.S. population resides in federally designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs). The shortfall is severe: the national average wait time for care is 48 days, with over half of all U.S. adults with mental illness going completely untreated.

Is an 18 month wait worse than an infinite wait?

What's the average wait in the UK? Gemini says:

Average Initial Wait: National data shows the average wait for a first appointment is around 3 to 4 weeks (approx. 22 days).

See, if you get satisfied with "UK mental health care sucks" answers, you don't ask the fairly obvious follow-ups and wind up confirming your incorrect priors.

(And to be clear, I don't trust Gemini on this, really. But if you do… why not ask it these questions too?)

I can assure you it wouldn't be $0, or anywhere near close to that.

My kiddos were born the day before the third trimester and spent two months in the hospital. Staff it at minimum wage, cap the costs at just the stuff used, and you're still talking a lot of money.

LLMs are notoriously good at getting even basic facts wrong.

Especially when the information ecosystem around the issue is... adversarial.

So everyone had their healthcare needs addressed in the 1800s?

Which charities have the funding to cover a $1M NICU stay?

I don't consider it a possibility that state of mind would not have been a result of his mistreatment.

Why? There are very well treated people who still get suicidal.

This article makes a good case for the abolition of health insurance.

Yes.

If everybody had to pay for medical care, medical care would need to be affordable to survive.

How would people with zero income afford it?

Why do you trust Gemini to do that?

I mean, I don't agree with the assumption that he was simply irrational and chose this because he wasn't thinking straight.

And I don't agree with the assertions that that's not a possibility.