HN user
Considering we started our search for extra terrestrial intelligence 67 years ago, and we likely didn't go extinct in 2009, 50 years seems a rather pessimistic estimate.
This is false. Earth's magnetic field does not significantly impact atmospheric loss. For comparison, Venus is closer to the sun and has no magnetic field, but has a substantially thicker atmosphere than earth.
There is an important subtlety which is that engineers are not responsible for which technical challenges get solved, they are responsible for how those technical challenges are solved. An engineer's ethical obligation is not to avoid working on something that could be used in a harmful way, it is to prevent incidental harm from its deliberate usage. There's nothing unethical about working on a fuel additive to prevent engine knock; knowingly using a poisonous compound which is going to create immense public health problems to solve the problem was the sin.
They are not different phrases. "Annoy to no end" is the American English version while "annoy no end" is the British. Both are acceptable and mean the same thing.
Except the paramedics are actually making mcdonalds wages.
Replying to myself as a followup:
https://digitechcomputer.com/costs-of-ems-readiness/
Looks like of the $1954 they estimate for a transport (already quite a bit below TFAs $2673), $1582 is salary. Given that we established the crew in the ambulance are taking home about $140 per transport between them, this seems bonkers. Capital, medical supplies, and fleet maintenance are a whopping 6% of the "cost".
Which would increase the cost to $325, though I was deliberately excluding overhead.
Insurance is included.
Medical supply costs for transport are very small. The labor overhead costs are overhead. Insurance is included in the estimate.
A plumber charges you $200 to come to your house, it costs the plumber $20 to come to your house. The latter value is what we're discussing here.
The 12k per year includes medical liability insurance.
I didn't forget the cost of insurance.
The average ambulance transport costs $2,673 to provide
I think this ignores the 400 pound gorilla in the room. Why does an ambulance transport cost thousands for the operator? This is a short trip in an automobile, essentially a fancy uber ride. At first one might say that's flippant - obviously ambulances are specialized vehicles, and you have paramedics, and they need to get to locations quickly, and so forth, but let's consider those costs.
A new, fully equipped ambulance is about $150k. Of course this is more than a regular car, but by a factor of 5, not 50. Let's be generous and presume the ambulance fully depreciates in 2 years. Typically an ems crew will be two paramedics. Average paramedic wage is about $23/hr. Again, not orders of magnitude more expensive. Then you have liability, both for the vehicle and for the medical treatment; that's about $12k per year. Throw in money for gas and wear and tear, which should be quite comparable to other automobiles, and it costs about $1600 to own and operate an ambulance for 24 hours.
Now the other side of the equation is utilization. Taking the arbitrary example of Philadelphia Fire Department, they have 60 ambulances that handle on average 700 ems calls per day, and approximately 70% of ems calls lead to transport, so that's about 8 transports per ambulance per day. So distributing this all out, the actual cost to the ambulance operator, ignoring overhead, ought to be somewhere around $200.
I'm sure there are some additional costs I haven't included in this back of the envelope calculation, and maybe some of the numbers I pulled off google are off a bit, this should be taken as a very rough estimate. But even if you significantly increase the cost, the medicare payment amount seems quite reasonable to cover the expenses with a healthy profit margin. Unless you want to claim that operating an ambulance is less than 10% of the cost of ambulance transport, and that the estimators with Medicare are absurdly out of touch with reality, whence cometh $2,673?
It is not the Auditor's job to determine that the rules are optimal, it is only to determine whether they are being followed. Presumably when the rule was instated someone had good reason to believe it would be beneficial; and if someone makes a compelling argument that following the rule is not beneficial, it should be repealed, not ignored.
I don't see how it undercuts their argument. At best it means the DOE was following the spirit of their standards and the mission need statement was simply created later in the process than it should have been. It's still questionable though whether that prior planning actually considered and evaluated options as open-mindedly as if it had been done by the appropriate process.
When was the last time you broke up a single instance of sex into a dozen or so blocks over the course of a week? It doesn't matter that they don't need to be consecutive hours, it still takes hours, which means it can't be done nearly as frequently as something that takes seconds.
Extremely weak argument. Basically it's just asserting "AI can't make enterprise sales" which both is both a questionable claim on its own merits, and not relevant for many business models. If anything I am now much more certain of the inevitability of a solo unicorn than I was before I read it.
Yes, but do you only do things for pleasure if they're done quickly? Is your sex always over in a minute?
You do things for pleasure more often if they're done quickly. When was the last time you had a lovemaking session so long you could have read a book in the time?
This is an excellent example of how to communicate investigation findings. The summary is clear and succinct, there are illustrative examples readily understood by a layman, the recommendations are actionable and unambiguous, and the potential impact is quantified without promising some stupidly precise estimate. I've got some customers whose quality auditors could learn a lot from this.
Seems a lot easier to learn "it's accurate when it's about 8 inches from my face; it's this much off when it is 12 inches away" than to project out a virtual FOV from the camera at an arbitrary position onto the world.
It's the wielding of power which is intoxicating, the monetary amount just illustrates how many decisions he could personally influence.
That was always a bit of a myth. Walls are not meant to stop things from getting destroyed, they are to prevent easy entry. Even in antiquity the ability to lob something over a wall existed, but if you were in range to do so, the defenders on the walls were in range to lob things at you, structures within the walls could be hardened to resist damage from things lobbed at them, and ultimately lobbing things over walls simply didn't win conflicts. Even the strategic bombing of WW2 wasn't sufficient to bring any side to its knees - only boots on the ground or the imminent threat thereof actually got the job done.
Further, the disappearance of walls does not coincide well with developments in weapons technology. Walls adapted to the introduction of gunpowder and explosives, with fortresses being key parts of strategy well into the 20th century. Even medieval fortifications with minimal upgrades still proved reasonably effective in modern conflicts. Walls are very good for their intended purpose.
The disappearance of city walls was not due to technological but rather social progress. The early modern period saw the development of strong central states able to field large armies. These states did not want a lot of fortified cities that could close themselves off easily from either a foreign invader or from their own government. Instead the national army would defend cities as needed, operating from fortresses in strategic locations and setting up temporary fortifications as needed. Cities were redesigned to make it easy to march an army into them. At the same time, population growth and changing economic systems meant cities rapidly grew, far outstripping the limited space available within medieval walls. Again, detached networks of mutually-supporting forts were simply more economical than contiguous walls. Finally, the changing world meant that you were simply no longer worried about wandering war bands pillaging settlements. Most of what walls were needed for could be done more economically with fences and legal markers.
Specifically for patent law, the distinction should be whether the entity is capable of genuine innovation, ie that it's not simply pulling existing information from its training set and passing things through some RNGs. It's not a matter of how advanced the AI is, it's a matter of the architecture.
But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...
The patent office also gets fees from applications it rejects. Reducing the examination costs could significantly increase profitability even if fewer patents are issued.
While I am unfamiliar with Japanese patent law, this would certainly be sound under the American system. Two requirements for patentability are novelty and non-obviousness, meaning the idea does not already exist nor is it such a trivial modification of an existing idea that anyone knowledgeable in the subject could come up with it. Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set. They might be a useful tool for an inventor, but the creative spark which patents protect can not come from them.
The 20-24 year olds seem to be at roughly the same point as since the great recession. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300036
Worth noting this is people who have a job, it includes the under-employed.
It's likely not even people retiring early, just demographics shifting up the ages. The youngest baby boomers are 61. The percentage of Americans over the age of 60 increased from 22.8% in 2020 to 25% in 2025. Also the younger cohorts moving into the labor force are smaller as well.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
In other news, June worst full month since May.
They need fewer people to build and to maintain than older ones did. Further the jobs from building the factory are temporary.
Or perhaps the standards of evidence established for a pre-industrial society when eye-witness testimony was the best that could reasonably be achieved is not necessarily the optimal system for a digital society where everyone carries a high definition video camera in their pocket at all times.