Castillo de San Marcos - Built at Sea Level in 1672.

Castillo de San Marcos - Still at Sea Level in 2025.

Creating public debate

Ok, then, let's give them what they want.

I'll start. I am an admittedly selfish American. Fuck everyone else. Fuck everyone who isn't me. From that premise, what are the advantages of renaming the gulf? Sure, it's causing some seemingly-unnecessary expense, but that's balanced by ..

...

..uh, sorry, I'm drawing a blank. How can the gulf rename give me an advantage? What is the upside to doing this? If I come out ahead at someone else's expense, that's great. I want to do that. I hope someone else loses and their life gets worse, as long as my life gets better, even if just a tiny bit. But how does my life get better from this? I'm fine if a thousand children are raped and murdered as collateral damage, as long as I get a penny. So where the fuck is my penny?!

Surely, someone has an answer to this.

I'm pro-automation for all jobs, and IRS workers are no exception. If you can automate these jobs, that's great. But whoever is in charge of this is either unintelligent or inexperienced.

In the past when a customer and I automated a job, we did things in a special order that I think would surprise the hell out of Bessent. My big trade secret (should I be leaking this?!) is this:

First, you think about how to do the job. Then you think about what the code should do. Then you write the code, test it, and then have a little trial in production, and see how it goes. Eventually you gain confidence and then finally .. how about that, my customer just removed those positions.

Notice how the word "think" appeared a lot at the beginning of the above schedule, and getting rid of the humans who made sure the job was getting done, came at the very end? My proprietary ordering of these operations is how I got a big advantage. (Yeah, I probably shouldn't be leaking this.)

It turns out that aiming after you fire instead of before, results in a much lower percentage of your shots hitting the target. I wonder if Bissent is traveling backwards in time. That would explain how they got rid of the workers first and now they're nebulously speculating on how they might, some day about a decade from now, create automation to replace the workers they got rid of way back in 2025.

Actually, the healthcare in most of those countries has far better outcomes than the US. They also spend far less of their GDP doing so.

While I'm pro free market, I see that in this particular case - health care - it doesn't work. It's better to pay 10% of GDP in taxes for better healthcare than 15% of GDP through a mix of taxes (elderly), insurance, and out of pocket for worse outcomes.

Reasons for this might include that the buyers aren't rational (doh), that there are monopolies (patents, location, urgency), and that the costs are such that the large majority of the population needs insurance of some kind. The specifics of the market also means there are a lot of very bad incentives for the insurance companies to use pre-existing conditions or trying to deny coverage after the fact, and very strange and weird price/discount structures.

I can imagine.

steal millions of dollars of financial aid

Why are you giving them any money at all, before you even know who they are?

I don't know. In what city should human taxi drivers stop driving because of snow?

If the humans say yes and then kill some of their passengers, and Waymo says no and doesn't kill anyone, then I think Waymo wins some bragging rights. Or at least their liability lawyers would look pretty smug.

Just Say No is an underused strategy, and I'm really just trying to say that as a service, Waymo can use it when they think it's the right one for the moment, whereas someone like Tesla would have a much harder time. Humans drivers have access to that strategy too, but we're usually too stupid to remember, or too stupid to be willing to "puss out." I know, because I am one of those stupid humans, though I haven't killed anyone yet.

Under those conditions, the people are already in a bad situation, whether Waymo exists or not.

Why would anyone care whether the driver who says "No" is a robot or a human? No means it matters even less than if they had said yes.

One of the things that makes automated driving as a service (as opposed to a product) such a great idea, is that if the current weather makes the job too hard, then it can simply decide to not take the job. "Stupid storm. I'm not driving in this. [click click] Shit, Waymo doesn't want to drive in this either."

Same goes for other oddball situations that you might run into in places like Rome: just don't serve Rome, if you really think the place itself is too hard (e.g. narrow streets).

They aren't selling a general-purpose driving computer (though obviously they'd like to gradually/eventually create one). They're just offering "I can do this job."

To be fair, having merit in the US is easy when the best the US can offer - the brightest minds, sharpest intellects, and most honest of people - are Trump, Kennedy,Hegseth, and Greene.

I can understand people bitching about PGP, and I don't even object to people calling it "terrible" and "clunky." But I'm surprised that you'd say it has been "surpassed." Surpassed by what? I've never heard of any serious attempts to replace it, except .. maybe .. oh no, you don't mean X.509, do you?

I mean Jesus fucking Christ the state of Texas just sued toothpaste manufacturers over fluoride.

What are people supposed to do? Just sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids?!

Low or not, it's the bar.

I just use my :CueCat to scan everyone's faces. Hold still.

This is Biden inflation caused by the Biden import taxes, no doubt due to Democrats' love of taxes. Good Comrade Trump had to clean that up by replacing the business-hostile Biden import taxes with business-friendly tariffs, and the tariffs are at a much higher rate, showing they're much more serious and important. Nobody has micromanaged an economy as well as Good Comrade Trump, and furthermore, Trump's Central Committee recently approved people purchasing two video game consoles, which is plenty. You don't need thirty of them like some running dog capitalists do.