It's really easy: races are more than skin deep. An african albino has african facial features and we can tell he's not an european.

As a neurologist, I usually look at CT scans, even before meeting the patient. Spanish (europeans) and hispanic (american native or mestizo) people share names that the latter inherited from the former. Still, I was able to know whether the scan of a certain Maria Pérez or Juan Fernández belonged to a hispanic or to a spanish person just by the shape of their skull. Spanish, as most europeans, are meso to dolichocephalic (skull elongated front to back), while hispanics, being long lost relatives to asians, are brachiocephalic (round skull). Africans have the most elongated skull, and between europeans, russians have the most round ones.

Of course that's a simple, one guy's observation from a limited dataset. With a huge dataset it should be easy for a deep learning mechanism to find other variations.

That also tells us that even though race doesn't exist as a genetic category, it's there and it can be calculated.

I'm a doctor in Spain. During my residency I was on call for general medicine and had to see a patient that was out of the speciality I was preparing for.
The guy had been admitted for an infection. He was getting the right antibiotics, his vitals were normal. They called me because he had thrown up (as he had a few times earlier that day). The tests were normal.
Five hours later the guy went very quickly into septic shock and died in a matter of minutes. I never knew about that because another doctor took the call.

Almost FIVE YEARS AFTER that, I was notified. I was already working as a specialist in my field. I had a good job and a family. They asked for half a million euro, 4 years of jail and the cancellation of my medical license.

The lawyer from the hospital's insurance company told me there was nothing to worry about, the case would be dropped before getting to court.

It didn't.

Year after year I got notifications. I would set up a claim and it would get rejected. The accusation's expert's report was a mix of inconsistencies, but it would take a proper trial to determine that.

5 years after the first notification, 10 years after the episode, I went to trial. In the meanwhile I had delayed life decisions. I met other doctors that had seen the case and we decided that if the case dropped we would counter sue for falsity.

Lo and behold, the lawyer calls me to the side and tells me: "The public prosecution has inadvertently left out the hospital's attorney, all the paperwork has to roll back a few steps and that will set us back some 3-4 years". Then she said: "We have an offer from the plaintiff: you agree to having missed something and they get a sum of the insurance money, you will only pay a small fine (a few hundred euro) and that won't go against your record."

I wasn't willing to suffer for many more years waiting for a trial that had a chance of declaring me guilty (and the remaining years of appeals), so I accepted.

It's a matter of risk and the time spent paralysed. In this case the lawyer told me she usually did that from day one, but this accusation was so feeble that she decided to fight it.

I think Apple has little to no interest in upgrading their laptops as long as the vast majority of PC laptops keep having the same crappy displays with narrow viewing angles and low contrast. It doesn't matter if they're 2x as powerful for half the price if I can't trust them for even adjusting the brightness and contrast of photos on the road.
The only laptops with decent displays cost not much less than a MacBook. And without Mac OS, which is still more appealing than Windows.

Same thing happens to me. I'm hearing my tinnitus right now and it reminds me of back when I was a child and noticed there was a TV on in the house.

I'm 41 now and I cannot hear the high pitched tone at the end of The Beatles' "A day in the life". I hadn't noticed till my kids asked me what was that noise. I heard nothing, then I remembered, then I felt really old.

Offsite, offline BACKUPS

Before someone beats me to it: It's "payroll and..." not "payroll ant..."

It happened to me in Spain. Foreigners get IDs that start with an X, while natives' IDs start with a 0. There was this system to get the payroll ant it wouldn't accept an ID if it didn't start with a 0. The IT zombies tried to convince me once and again that I was inserting my password incorrectly as the illiterate "sudaka" I obviously was. It wasn't till I used technical jargon and told them to log on using the VNC that they took me seriously and fixed it.

It's a shame e-reader development suffered death by tablet. Paperback sized ones are extremely cheap but seldom work as readers for anything else. I got myself a a Samsung Galaxy Pro 8 inch in order to read technical and medical books, but I know an e-ink version would be lighter, with more battery time and easier on the eyes.

So, these "western liberals" want at the same time a lesser government but a bigger government???

It's funny how many people push so much for an all-powerful government but only if it agrees with their ideas, then complain when the tide shifts.

Still a lot isn't automated. I'm talking about self-replicating robots building and installing solar panels in the Sahara, doing the mining for the raw materials, doing the whole farm labor on their own instead of having africans picking olives in Spain and spaniards picking strawberries in France. Robots cleaning the streets, the toilets, building houses starting from the quarry and iron mines, transporting goods and people, making our food, clothing, appliances, etc. That's what I mean by "harvesting the resources".
As long as one person is essential in each of those processes, we'll have to think about work: How we manage it and how we pay the ones that do it.

Most of these poeples' wealth is not a salary per se, but a fraction of the enterprise's worth that they are in charge of making bigger.

Society has to take work out of the equation. Right now it's both a right and an obligation. Most of us must work every day to keep ourselves and our offspring alive, without time or energy left to pursue our goals during our half a century of really usable lifespan. In a few decades the machines will harvest the resources and produce what's needed to keep everyone on earth alive. And perhaps AI will stampede in, solving most of our ideological differences with the most efficient strategies. The military robots will be able to neautralize every human on earth if needed.

The question is: WHO WILL BE IN CHARGE? Will the current richest people enforce their property rights, will it be the governments by wiping away all of them (property rights)?
Will it be Star Trek or Elysium?

Does this have something to do with string theory?

I work at two places. One of them has only 4 buses a day and it's a 35-min drive which I always do. The other one means taking the car to the train station (5-7 min), riding an hourly train for an hour and walking 15 min afterwards. It takes me 20 minutes more than by car, costs half and lets me rest and read. The only problem is: On some months the trains come less often and there's been days when I've finished at 13h and arrived home at 16h. Nevertheless, I take the train for this one as often as possible.

I get credit card reports for a guy in South America. The return address is a non-read account and the only way to contact the company is by making a phone call there. So I just delete the emails.