Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

Actually in China significantly more students choose to pursue degrees in technology, engineering,or business than in the US â" degrees which qualify them for specific jobs after graduation. So the process of college education becoming more vocationally oriented and less about training intellectual skills has advanced even more advanced in China than it is here.

China grants very few liberal arts degrees and its vocational degree programs have minimal or no liberal arts content. In the US an engineering or business degree program requires substantial liberal arts content to be degree accredited. So an engineering student graduating from a US program has had many semesters of training in critical reading and thinking, challenging claims with original sources, and crafting persuasive arguments in areas where opinions differ.

These are skills the Chinese government is not eager to put in the hands of its citizens, so we really ought to question just how âoeuselessâ those non-vocational intellectual skills really are. There are clearly people here whose priorities for education are more aligned with Chinaâ(TM)s â" inculcating respect for authority, obedience to tradition as described by authority, and job skills useful to authorities. In other words for them education isnâ(TM)t about empowering the students, itâ(TM)s about forming a class of compliant worker bees.

Providing 1.3 million round trip airfares between Houston and Washington DC for Texans who want to see the shuttle.

Or ... issue the citation to the passenger who called the ride, and let him negotiation reimbursement for the fine and insurance costs with Waymo. I guarantee Waymo would fix the bug or perhaps even *ask* to be regulated rather than rely on this loophole.

Why burden the taxpayer with finding a solution to the consequences of early adopting a new technology? If you *choose* to summon a robotaxi, then you're responsble for the consequences of that choice. If you don't like it, then demand the company sort those out before you use them.

This is so unnecessary, I wonder whether this is some kind of social engineering operation being sold as a "service" to landlords.

Supercars this fast have tires that last less than fifteen minutes, perhaps eighty miles traveled on the track of you're lucky. And since the wear isn't linear, if you go just a little bit faster, you might only get a minute or two at the speeds this car goes before you have to change all the tires, which will set you back $40,000.

The point of such a thing is the same as one of those suborbital tourist space flights. The point is to *have had* the experience, which is too brief to be practically useful.

Wait ... isn't selling consumers on features that will be available real-soon-now-trust-us-on-that the way American electric car companies sell *their* vehicles?

Once again, Chinese companies are stealing American (ish) ideas.

I agree they are not socialist, in any kind of a strict sense. But any attempts to learn from those countries is inevitably branded as "socialism". If that's how we're using the word now, then we have to call them something silly like "market socialist".

If you give any tool to any large group of people, some of them will use it in harmful ways. The knife slips and cuts the user, the chainsaw kicks back, the LLM hallucinates superficially credible gibberish.

Once people get over the shock of how impressive LLMs are, they'll see how far we still are from AGI. Because we don't have an artificial *general* intelligence yet, we can't *generally* replace humans. But we can replace them in many labor intensive tasks that don't require common sense, experience with the real world, and advanced thinking skills.

Take copy editing -- a common and labor intensive task in any kind of publishing, public affairs, content management, and corporate communications. Today you can hand a terrible mess of prose to an LLM and it will tidy it up, correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes like subject verb agreement and confusing homophones like "they're" and "their' and "there". The output will be superficially perfect, but you still need a human to judge whether it does the job needed; someone with actual experience and understanding of the human audience.

I think this will be the story of AI between now and the day that we finally achieve AGI, if we ever do: the need for humans with advanced cognitive skills will actually increase as the jobs for people with fundamental cognitive skills like copy editing will decline. Those two things happening together is a big problem. If we don't do something about education in advanced cognitive skills, we will find ourselves in a pickle, because basic cognitive labor is the pipeline that produces people who can perform advanced cognitive tasks.

Weirdly, there's some skill involved in crafting prompts that give you what you want. The things are trained on all the code that's ever been posted anywhere on the Internet, and unless you can prompt them in a way that eliminates that bad code, that van be a bad thing.

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.