It has been brewing for a long time, if someone declared to be Napoleon, he would have been assessed for schizophrenia. Today when a man declares he is a woman, he is be offered a way to transition (mutilate himself) and his experience is glamorized and presented to children as a heroic act of self discovery that should be admired and followed. It is not only that we don't treat mental disease, we celebrate it. What else can one expect from society that promotes body positivity as a way to justify unhealthy behavior? If someone is obese, a doctor should suggest that it is not healthy and propose a treatment plan, society should help, not goad the person into showing it off in a weird and sick exhibitionist parade.

Neither the USA or Israel is a signatory to the ICC, therefore the ICC has no jurisdiction in the case and they are being sanctioned by the USA for what they see as judicial overreach. The claim that the "Palestinans" are signatories is a reach given they are not a recognized state.

It is not so much that Bibi should be immune from criminal charges but that the USA has from both sides of the aisle, had long standing issues with the ICC and overreach.

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

I feel you need to elaborate a little further on that. The book lays out sources, equations and testable hypothesis. Interestingly it rarely suggests actual policy. Page 5 of the Motivations sections also laws out why - it is as scathing of campaigners as it is of incumbents.

That aspects are outdated 17 years after its last update does not surprise me. That it is fundamentally incorrect however...given the sources and calculations, I think you'll need a to provide a little more reasoning than "you should fee bad" (sic.).

As someone who has had a strong interest in this area for a while now, not professionally - just following along, it's been fascinating to watch almost every single prediction from the 1990s UK government advisor come true. These recommendations were, in 2015 this was put up as a web site - Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. This is not a political book, the "without the hot air" bit alludes to that. This is a quantitative book with the maths to back up all assumptions and recommendations.

In it, David McKay makes comments about future energy mix. If you look at the full PDF, the idea of a cable from northern Africa to elsewhere is explored starting page 178. Bear in mind this book was written late 90s/early 2000s with the last revision being 2008 (the author has sadly passed). Generating from Morocco appears on page 181.

Thoroughly good read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the mechanics and figures behind energy transitions. Clearly some will now be outdated...but it's surprising how little. A lot of what he suggested is now unfolding.

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

But what I'm saying is that's all vocational. Computer science is basic information theory, patterns, HCI...all of that kind of thing. I'm a graduate of Comp. Sci myself, though in the UK from 1992. During that time we were taught a programming language as an abstract for various concepts (I was taught ADA, for instance) but it was assumed you would go and teach yourself any language you were interested in. I self-taught myself C for instance.

What you seem to be looking for isn't Computer Science grads, it's programmers. From your description I don't think you'd care if they new Huffman's Information Theory or deep graph theory, but would care if they didn't know Javascript. And this is what I mean - that's not a Computer Science thing, that's vocational

I think that's an industry fault rather than yours for instance. I think pushing Computer Science as the name but turning out average programming people is an educational failure.

Right, Bernie will have you believe that this means that the men loading trucks by hand became more productive, yet they are the ones who will not be working at all once their jobs are automated. It is always the company that becomes more productive, the people who own the company invest in new tools and by doing it they reduce their future expenses and improve throughput, this makes *them* more productive, not the people who used to do the work that is about to be automated. The company spends its capital, becomes more efficient. For whatever reason Bernie says that now, that the company is more productive, he will take the productivity gains away from the people who risked their capital to achieve it.

When the society discourages productivity, it loses productivity, this is why Americans lost their manufacturing sector.

When the society discourages capital formation, it loses capital, that is what America will find out as well.

Oh, my goodness, so many excuses. Everyone I know, who runs their own business did it *against* odds, not because they had something given to them, like 5 day pay for 4 days of work. I know people who mortgaged their own houses, sold their cars to start their business. I know people who run multiple properties and they are doing all of the work themselves, cleaning, renovating. I know people who ran a successful business, sold it, started another business and again, it was a success. They complain about things, but they do them and nothing can stop them short of death.

I hate to be blunt, but what has any of that got to do with Computer Science? This is the problem. To quote Dijkstra - "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes".

People wanting vocational programming degrees or courses should get them. Computer science is not about teaching Angular. And from my own observation over the years, I can clearly remember the first time I interviewed a programmer who clearly had no idea how a computer worked, or any of the theory behind one. They just knew syntax to type in - that was all. Came as a shock to me at the time, but it's decades ago now and I'm more used to it sadly.

Lets say you start a company and you use AI to build a bunch of code and help you to devise processes that deal with client lead generation and new client onboarding, client retention and such. You do it all by yourself, lets say it brings you 100,000USD a month (you think it's impossible? I think it's very possible today, for example you can do that with a youtube channel). Does this mean that you do not deserve something and a lid should be put on something, so that what? So that a guy from the street, who doesn't have anything to do with you can get a cut of money you generate? Why?

But that's not what most businesses are like, most businesses are people starting something on their own, eventually hiring a few more people and maybe scaling up a little bit. A few shawarma shops, a few laundromats, a few properties, maybe a delivery business, maybe a few convenience stores, that's what most people would do and that's if they are successful at running at least one of them first.

If they find a way to use AI for example to make themselves more productive by automating their phone lines, by doing some marketing with AI that they have never had a budget for anyway, Bernie thinks now they have to do what, cut the hours of all of their stuff by 4 days a week? OK, who is going to be manning the stations the 5th day, the 6th day, in some cases the 7th day? (yeah, I think it's really great if a business is open 7 days a week, over 300 days a year hopefully, very useful).

The question of 'deserve' is funny, what does it mean, who deserves what? Are you an IG girl, who dates older guys so that they would pay for her traveling and expensive shopping habits? If you talk to those girls, that have it down - they *know* they 'deserve' this and that and the other thing, they always know it. It's because it's easy for them, 'if you're done with your ex, move onto the next', etc.

Unless you are in this much of a demand, you can't have this type of a world outlook, thinking that you 'deserve' something, it's nonsense. You take what you can make, what you can get, that's the reality. If you can put up another shop and make another 5K or whatever a month, good for you, that's why you are going to be a millionaire and not a bum. There is no such thing as 'collecting money', by the way. The moment I have a few spare dollars I either buy something for myself (rare) or I put it to work, I start another project, I buy more parts, I invest into more development or marketing or think of a way to use it to lower future expenses, whatever. Money is a *tool*, it is not a thing that people collect for itself. It is a tool that allows one to build more income streams. Who taught you economics, Marx?

Somehow Bernie thinks that businesses owe to hire people and pay them for the sake of hiring people and paying them. Businesses are started to make the money for the people who start them, wow, a huge revelation. Have you ever started a business, tried running anything, a proverbial lemonade stand? If you have, have you hired people to sit there and do nothing? What if you started a lemonade stand, made some money, bought a juicer, used that to make more money, started another stand, hired a person. Would you pay them above the market rate? What is a market rate, you may ask? It is the rate that people in the area would be willing to show up for and to interview for your new lemonade stand position. You would have a few different people, mostly without any experience, you probably wouldn't have to pay much to man your point of sale. Would you pay them the same for being at work for 4 days as for 5 days?

Bernie can point out whatever he likes, you cannot escape a simple fact - if running a lemonade stand brought in money, there would be competition and people would be willing to find ways to automate as much as possible and to reduce prices in order to gain market share. Keeping prices low enough for people actually to buy your product while paying people for 5 days of work while they are only working 4 days is an incompatibilities in goals, you can do it until competition comes in and shows you what true efficiencies may look like. Ideas like that of Bernie is what moved production out of the Western world (USA in this case) and to places like China (and now Vietnam and others). Trying to put a lid on this development at this point is not going to work.

Years ago on this very site I noted that a country that loses manufacturing due to its socialist policies will inevitably lose engineering and will then lose education system as well. America is about half way there, there is still engineering, but it sure lost manufacturing. Try to go down the road and find a company that can make a tool that you need to make tools that you need to make products that you want. Even if you find some old guy somewhere, making dies and casts, the prices are still not going to be anywhere near close. AI is nothing without manufacturing.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

You need to actually look at the data here. Much of US healthcare is non-profit, at least on the provider side, and the for-profit provider institutions don't make that much money. People naturally then assume it's the insurance companies that are making out like bandits, except they're all publicly-traded so we can see exactly what their profit margins are and they don't remotely explain the high cost of healthcare. At worst, the for-profit model adds 5%, and there's no real reason to expect it to add even that. In most industries, for-profit is more efficient than non-profit, because it turns out that the competitive drive for profits drives costs down.

Again, look at actual numbers. What you'll find is that this explains basically nothing. Yeah, they have high salaries; take those and spread them across the patient base and you're talking about maybe 0.001% of healthcare costs -- and then only if you assume that these high salaries represent a pure loss, that an administrator getting paid a tiny fraction of that would the job just as well. If you assume that at least part of those high salaries are payment for services rendered, then the CEO salary overhead is even smaller.

Again, the pharmaceuticals are publicly-traded and they break out what they spend on advertising. Is is a lot in absolute terms? Yes. Is it a lot relative to the total amount of money we're talking about? No.

I'll stop here, but the same applies to everything else you mention. Yes, there is some waste due to the for-profit model, but it actually isn't that big. Our drug costs are high because we fund most of the research, because we can afford to. If we found a way to stop doing that, a lot of drug research would stop. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is something you have to decide. Personally, I think we get a lot of value for that money.

It feels like you should be able to point to just one thing and say "That's why healthcare is expensive in the US!" but you can't, really. The root cause is actually a lot of different things, and most of them have their roots in regulation (and, specifically, the way in which we regulate), rather than in a for-profit model.

If you want to make US healthcare both very cheap and very good, but only for those who can afford it, you should do the hard-eyed libertarian thing and go full-on for-profit, including removing the legal requirements that doctors treat people who can't pay, and eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and all of the complexity and cost they add. Also, make competition nationwide -- make provider and insurer licensing federal so states can't impose different requirements, and set up nationwide medical and nursing licensure processes that eliminate the ability of the AMA to artificially restrict supply. Quality would go up and competition would drive cost down for probably 70% of Americans. The other 30%, however, would be screwed, hard. Well, maybe 20%, or 15%, because prices would come down, making healthcare more affordable for everyone but free for no one.

But because we as a society will not leave the poor completely without care (not even free ER visits), the libertarian pure-market approach won't work. So, instead, we should go the other way and offer a national single payer option. This would not make healthcare cheaper by itself, but it would enable regulatory pressure to begin chipping away at all of the many sources of high prices. It wouldn't ultimately make healthcare as efficient, cheap or good as a pure market-based approach, and likely wouldn't make it as cheap as what other countries pay, but it's the best we're likely to actually achieve.