tripper_27

Several EU cities have experimented with making public transport free, and people seem to really enjoy it.

Also, as you so eloquently put it, it isn't clear that the cost for issuing and checking tickets is covered by the income from the tickets, and there are reasons why MTA tickets cannot be priced at the actual cost to cover the ticket compliance infrastructure -- with a nice analogy to the cost of parking vs value of parking real estate. What justifies the subsidy for on-street parking?

Seconding Uvix's question.

I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies. Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and had to leave in early 2024.

At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10 application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies before I found my current role. The market is much tougher now than it was a few years ago.

I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to hire. Those were good years for job seekers.

Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.

Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).

I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.

Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.

So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.

cost and outcomes. In aggregate, Americans pay much more and get worse outcomes

Define "smart". And explain how "smart"=="conscious"

I can agree that there is no genetic benefit to being able to move at the speed animals move, because that's not how plants obtain food or avoid being eaten. Thus no need for nerves or a CNS to coordinate movement.

Alternative hypothesis: Given that plants do not have a central nervous system, it is reasonable to expect they have a distributed consciousness.

Recall that most plants avoid building single-purpose organs, as the odds that 70-80% of the plant gets eaten are high. Plants have evolved to survive massive loss of body parts.

I've read some studies on plant consciousness which shows that plant awareness can be turned off with anesthetics

Hey, will say your right about "seems similar to human", but behavior such as moms taking care of their babies is found in many plant species, as is loyalty. Probably happiness and longing as well.

Ask yourself how many of these feelings arise from the rational thinking part of your brain vs how they seem to be full body sensations, and realize that the central nervous system might allow such signals/awareness to propagate at mammal speed, but why would a plant need that speed?

There really is no reason why a CNS is needed for these emotions to be active, just a way to distribute hormones/chemical signals throughout the body.

If we define hallucinations as falsehoods introduced between the training data and LLM output,

Yes, if.

Or we could realize that the LLMs output is a random draw from a distribution learned from the training data, i.e. ALL of its outputs are a hallucination. It has no concept of truth or falsehoods.

It's also much faster to get in front of a NP than a doctor.

hey, I hear you. Modern America is full of voices demanding you give them care/attention.

Every.

Single.

Thing.

It is overwhelming. See following comments on the need for slack/margin in capacity. Well, we also need it in emotional demands. Yet every commercially-moderated interaction in our society seems to be optimizing for making us care more about it, because that increases their revenue.

if you'll forgive my prior snark, some people successfully involve the children in the cooking. When this is done, the children seem to prefer the home-cooked because they are part of the cooking and they are part of the feeding/providing to others.

Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.

Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love.

Let me fix that for you:

Children notoriously prefer heavily marketed food in attractive packaging which is designed/optimized for addictiveness and immediate gratification.

Not too hard to build your own. Lots of tutorials based on i.e. ESP32 chips, various blinky light options. Google "Adafruit clock" to get started.

Wow! So a visual effect similar to some psychadelic hallucinations is associated with brain cleaning!

Also, I've been at concerts where the light show guy seems to have reverse-engineered the filters our brains use to process raw signal into "images", and could use the lights to create just the raw primitives.

A few hours of that and it was like I was learning to see all over again, a tune-up/calibration of my visual system.