On the rare occasion they do something right - like blocking this merger - you can bet there's an ulterior motive. Now that the toll has been paid, they reveal they never actually cared about markets or competition, by letting the merger proceed.

I'm assuming a bribe has been paid, because they didn't extract any pledges to eliminate DEI, which the company pushes heavily. I have a hard time seeing the current CEO Neri announcing any kind of DEI rollback. I believe that's why he's being pushed out by big capital, a project that started concurrently with DOJ blocking the merger.

I get the impression the US military is already less effective than many believe. Nothing quite as drastic as when Putin ordered to roll the tanks and the armor turned out to be egg cartons. But corruption has definitely been sucking something out. And there's no denying the manpower shortage as well.

At one time I thought about joining the military. I'm also in favor of some level of compulsory service. But that's all contingent on sticking to the mission, that oath they take. For anyone considering enlisting today, they have to consider the likelihood of being ordered to do something like turn their guns on starving people lining for bread, or on US citizens. I would not consider joining today.

They weren't already?

I'm guessing the advertisers paid less per viewer than the $100 Prime subscription.

I sure hope nobody's paying that just to watch some videos...

I went way out of my way to provision and set up a torrent VPS - at cost - just to avoid having to pay Amazon for anything to watch Borat 2 and The Grand Tour. (The latter wasn't even that great.) I hadn't pirated in years.

I'll buy Sacha and Clarkson a hot meal instead, if they ever want to take me up on the offer. Definitely nothing cold. We'll avoid the salad bar.

The Firefly line (G8-G11 is what I have experience with) has good construction quality, I'd say slightly better than the EliteBook.

They do seem to have some weird Thunderbolt firmware bugs. Certain features like video output will stop working, and sometimes the entire port. BIOS/FW updates don't seem to fix this, but a hard reset (holding power button for ~60 seconds, possibly several times) usually will.

Certainly less issues than my low-end Dell laptop, but I'd still get a warranty.

I think Best Buy is still around? They probably even do delivery now if that's your obsession.

As far as online retailers, I used to be partial to NewEgg but somewhere around 10 years ago they went way downhill.

I had to give that up on my last round of searches in 2023. It was a strategy I'd stuck to for my whole life until then. After a few months of not finding anything but temp jobs, I expanded my search in both the upward and downward directions: things I didn't really want to do, and things I wasn't quite qualified for but probably could pick up on the job.

Over 6 months, I had put in about 400 applications and done at least a dozen interviews. I had one recruiter comment on the amount of AI slop he was receiving. So it was already beginning then.

The job I eventually landed ended up being one I was qualified for. But I had know way of knowing that would work out during the 6-week hiring process or the half-year job search. I was really starting to think of changing my line of work.

Yeah, I would absolutely not trust it more than Google Translate.

Generally I wouldn't trust it for anything I can't do myself, because then I can't verify the output.

This seems to be a limitation, the limitation, for LLMs overall. You can't use them to do anything you couldn't already do. (At least, not if being correct matters. For some AI applications, like the IDF identifying "terrorists" in Gaza, being correct doesn't matter, and so it's quite suited to such things, i.e. the generation of massive amounts of plausible-looking bullshit.)

I was going to use my state's program as an example, but then I realized, I don't even know exactly what they call it here. And I know people who have been on it. I know there's some kind of county-run service they call "Gold card" which is some kind of access to county medical facilities, but I don't think they provide full hospital care. This is only for one county, so it's separate from whatever my state renamed Medicaid - I think.

From my short time working in public health, I can tell you that the city and county governments both provide some of the same services to the same geographical area in a duplicated/inefficient way. In addition to what the state government provides separately, and then private industry. Even with all these groups involved - they aren't coordinating with each other, and individually they're either starved for cash or impeded by a profit motive. The worst of both worlds.

I'm not sure why people inside the US think it's acceptable to have to work so hard just to figure out how and where to get medical care - never mind paying for it.

I'm not sure people outside the US really comprehend how complex it is.

I wonder what sort of legal framework (if any) exists to address this. Drugs are formally and rigorously studied before being loosed on the general population. Doctors are formally and rigorously trained.

Perhaps the AI could be subjected to trials as a "medical device"?

But even if they perform well in the trials, I'm not sure the conclusion implied here (less doctors needed) is correct. Someone's got to write the journals for the AI to train on. All the people who wrote the original journals will die at some point, and then there must be someone new to avant the garde. Hell, even just to maintain/evaluate whether existing AIs continue to perform properly.

You can be sure the elements of the US government that love social control are salivating over the capabilities China has. What's new this year is that they might finally get done some of these wishlist things that were previously too radical.

But the idea of a government money card is so tainted in the US that they'll implement it on the back-end instead. A system will be set up that all banks, bank-apps, and other assorted money-changers operating in the US must subscribe to. It will have a very boring, financial-sounding name. Nobody on the news or social media will talk about it. They'll just one day gain the ability to designate you a "terrorist" and seize the funds.

I'm sure they already have such a mechanism, it's just going to have the holes plugged and any "obstacles" like oversight or accountability removed.

Your link says that there was a low-level FEMA employee who was terminated for suggesting that houses be skipped.

I'd say that's not at all similar to the leader of FEMA actually witholding disaster aid for petty reasons, which is what we are barreling into.

That must have been back in the 50s. I worked as a cashier in 2009-2010, high volumes at a dollar store, and the most interesting coins I got were wheat pennies, a couple of Canadian dimes.

Because that way of conducting business has been normalized for generations.

Makes you wish the guys in 1800 would have pushed harder when these kind of tie-ins started. Anyone trying to do business like this should have been instantly flagged as dishonest and stonewalled until the end of their term, whereupon an engaged electorate would surely vote them out of office.

Accountability didn't happen, so now they all act like that. Oops.

Interesting that you asked "Does anyone you know use Medicaid...", I think a lot of people don't know what they are using. Each state's Medicaid program is called something different, something other than "Medicaid", after the funds disburse from the federal to the state level. Generally the states name the programs after themselves. I think California calls it Cal-Care or something.

It reminds me of the decision to name private insurance for old people "Medicaid Advantage". It's designed to get people to blame their shitty private insurance on "government healthcare".