vkou

Sure, but it means that they managed to pick third-parties they work with that give a shit. They could have always picked ones that didn't.

When you're buying a pig in a poke (which is always the case when you're a first-time customer), this is a positive signal.

A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.

Those countries were occupied by a foreign empire. You may recall what happened when they attempted regime change - the Soviets would roll in.

As soon as Gorbachev made it clear that he's not going to do that, all of the Warsaw pact states immediately overthrew their governments.

Thank you for providing an example that further supports my thesis. No government can survive very long when a supermajority of the country hates it.

Conscripts policing their own society will almost certainly produce better outcomes than people attracted to power volunteering to do so instead.

Especially if that society is fairly homogenous. (I'm well aware that Singapore is a fusion of cultures, but it's nothing like an empire that can shuffle its conscripts around, so that they always end up policing and brutalizing an ethnic group that's different from theirs.

It's somewhat meaningful. No society can go on for very long when a supermajority of it actively hates the government.

Which insurance firm was this?

Any of them.

They all behave in this exact same fucking way. Every single one has horror stories like this.

Sometimes you get lucky, and they don't fuck your particular case over, sometimes you don't.

I'm a quarter Romanian on my step-mother's side, and I too can confirm that the password was Passw0rd.

Only if you routinely test it, and if that kind of access to the offline backup is low friction enough to be doing that monthly, it might not be enough of a redundancy.

Looking at a 7 mile trip to a random destination in Seattle, right now, I can pay $26.70 for an Uber if I'm willing to wait 20 minutes for a pickup. With a $3/mile fee and a $5 pickup fee, that's exactly equal to that of a taxi.

If I'm not willing to wait 20 minutes, I'll be paying an extra $5 minimum.

These rates also go up during busy times.

Looking at Lyft, that same trip is $29, without a wait.

A trip from downtown to SeaTac is $61. Yellow Cab does that same trip for $40.

Yeah, but that mousetrap keeps working for SV startups, what makes you think it won't work for Chinese ones?

Uber spent a decade undermining taxis, and once it had market share, it stopped giving away rides and raised prices. It now costs more than a regular taxi, with the quality of the ride being... At best proportionate to the premium in price.

Let's look at the thread of discussion.

Assertion that China has brought incredible prosperity to its people.

Complaint that actually, China's economic policies that brought that prosperity are... Structurally robbing its working class.

Observation that America, which, presumably, is the model for the best, most evolved, and un-improvable structure for its economy is also structurally robbing its working class, with no roadmap for course-correction from it. (And it's doing it for purposes that are not exactly developing the nation!)

"That's Whataboutism!"

The complaint in #2 is only relevant as a relative comparison. China's economics structurally rob its working class? Okay, let's all agree that's the case - but rob it compared to what? The unchecked late-stage corporatism that we're practicing? The excesses of the industrial revolution in past centuries? It's bad compared to what, exactly? Some idealized strawman utopia, where no economic planning or monetary policy or deficit spending or consolidation of economic power exists? Do you have a roadmap for getting to that one?

The observation in #3 incredibly relevant. If you're not making a relative comparison of China's economy, you need to make an absolute analysis of it... And on an absolute analysis, it has done an incredible job of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of crushing poverty, and into first-world lifestyles, in only a few decades. All the central planning - control of its exchange rates, its monetary and debt and lending policy, it's focus on exports and fundamentals and R&D and education is exactly what has brought that prosperity about.

Meanwhile, the only thing our central planners, here at home are good at figuring out [1] is how to widen the gap between the haves, and the have-nots.

---

[1] I am being a bit too harsh, the Fed does a good job given its mandate.

government policy is now making Chinese consumers poorer than they otherwise would be

Right, that sort of thing never happens over here. We don't give the rich tax breaks while robbing the middle class (and saddling it with mountains of debt that will be coming due in their future), we don't print money hand over fist to fund idiotic wars and other vanity projects, and we don't do everything in our power to prevent workers from organizing for higher wages and better working conditions.

Congress and the executive is hard at work to make the American consumer richer than they otherwise would be. Everything they do is with that goal solely in their minds. It's all they live for, not for making their backers and friends richer and more untouchable.

Their economy has grown, and continues to grow faster than that of any of their neighbors.

spend the youthful years struggling

This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.

The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched,

Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.

I think OP is a good case in point where people are blaming AI but really the issue here is the human in the loop, the person implementing these abhorrent policies that happen to be powered by AI.

I don't care if the torture nexus itself is not at fault, now that it has been created, it has enabled its owner to do a bunch of novel bad things, and it deserves a large part of the blame.

Are prices going down, as they need to do less work per patient?

Or are the providers just pocketing the difference?

Given that prices are definitely not going down, I'm not sure how this makes my life any better.

Today its a mixed bag of corpo hate, anxiety about the future, inequality and traditional class warfare, combined with the typical technical ignorance.

Are there no actual problems with what it promises/how we're expected to use it at work/how it is used against us by people who use it at work? Is it just anxieties and feelings, that aren't actually grounded in anything? Everything's getting better for everyone, no downsides?

Neither Whatsapp nor my landline is the kind of social network that I'm talking about.

Do you... Have a lot of professional experience with making $100 million-budget movies?

Social networks only destroyed discourse.

This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.

That only poisons the pool for actual kidnappers, not scammers.

After you've had that 30 second vaccination, the second same 30 second vaccination provides next-to-no added benefit, but the physical does.

Most data centers do not use closed loop cooling.

They all have a closed cooling loop, but almost all of them cool the exterior condensers with an open cooling loop.

Which draws from the watermain, sprays water on the hot condensers, the water evaporates, cooling the condensers. This is done to reduce their electric bills, because condensers operate more efficiently when they are cold.

The fully closed-loop data center, with air-cooled condensers is the exception, not the rule. Because it sucks even more electricity than a regular one, due to its less-efficient cooling.

You are spreading falsehoods, while also accusing people who are factually accurate of being foreign propaganda mouthpieces. This is at best, ironic and jingoistic, and at worst...

The vast majority of the pro-datacenter 'externalities don't matter as long as I make money' is also pretty obviously astroturfed.

The difference is that much of the communication on that end happens in backchannels, directly with the regulators, in secret meetings, without any possibility of public scrutiny.

(When that isn't enough, the firehose of paid advertisements gets fired up to convince the public, instead.)

More and more people producing information are moving more and more of their work to the LLM, and are strangling the ones who aren't.

There's nothing dystopian about that.

It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days.

It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.

His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers,

What?

Software development is the poster child for alienation, and LLMs turning your job into one where you manage an incredibly productive idiot turned all of that up to 11.

Forests take hundreds of years to become mature and healthy.

If your magical yet-to-be-invented gene treatment technology works the first time around, you will see results centuries from now.

In that case, isn't the most logical and reasonable way to fight wars would be to immediately use city-killing nuclear weapons?