You actually make a reasonably convincing argument for the idea that the republican party does have principles; they just overlap pretty weakly with the ones they pretend at.

The most striking break with history is the bit where Nixon-level criminality used to be politically problematic.

A government that's dedicated solely to extracting as much money from the U.S. economy and awarding it as gifts to loyalist oligarchs couldn't screw up a corporation worse than it already is? Ye of little faith.

You probably don't have to imagine 25% tax; that's right around the "government revenue (% of GDP)" value for the US; though it does seem kind of wild to see something as regressive as what's basically a sales tax cranked that high unless the product in question is specifically being discouraged; which is clearly not the intent here or we wouldn't be commenting on this article.

People that consider themselves vital, but then have to take steps to create artificial vitality - their own actions are proving them wrong.

If you were truly vital, your simple absence would be a disaster all by itself. If you have to engineer that condition, you're NOT vital. This is just an arrogant, self-important narcissist behaving badly and getting what they've got coming, at the cost of others.

I don't think there are enough stories like this in the news. It's pretty easy to find accounts BY such individuals that created kill switches and caused chaos when they were dismissed. It's good to see one of them get hat they deserve. Jokers like this give the rest of us a bad name.

All these constant "updates," adding and removing features and changing UI elements, are all part of trying to convince customers that the operating system, itself, "needs" to be SaaS.

You'd be hard-pressed to find me in favor of just about any of the current administration's policies; but it's worth noting that the big deal with demographic crunches is the extent to which they don't play by the normal rules of what having savings or having debts means

There's already a lot of wiggly behavior with sovereign debt vs. household; since you get into what currency the debt is denominated in and all kinds of hairy macroeconomics rather than a nice, simple, "assume that the economy is more more or less arbitrarily large vs. your net worth and what you'll be buying; your ability to buy stuff varies directly with your assets or available credit"; but a problem with labor supply more directly hoses the supply of goods and services that are actually available.

It's still not unlikely that people who have cash in hand will be ahead in line vs. people who are offering IOUs; but the fundamental problem is that there are now more wrinkly asses to wipe and fewer geriatrics specialists to wipe them; rather than just you not being able to afford a nursing home because you've got debt. With that sort of supply constraint having money is still probably a betters strategy than not having it; but, since there's a genuine supply constraint, having more money mostly makes the price go up; rather than increasing the amount you can buy.

Provided they know at least some basics about the thing in question.

As with pretty much all tools: They are most effective in the hands of a professional, and might be dangerous in the hands of a novice.

AI can replace a lot of intro-level workers. Honestly, most of the stuff I get out of AI is intern-level, be it code or text.

BUT - how then, do people move up from intro-level ?

And that's the kicker. For a couple decades now, companies have essentially gone "nah, we don't train people, we hired them once someone else has trained them". Well, good luck with that when the last few places where people can gain experience fall away.

The focus on quarterly results will be the downfall of western civilization. We will be eclipsed by countries like China who have decades-long plans, even when much of the rest of their system is shit. Nobody wants to live in a dictatorship. But even fewer people want to live in a completely ruined economy.

I had a friend whose job at Oracle was to gin up fake demos of products that didn't exist. When the customer saw the demo and decided they wanted it, the second-tier sales staff would drag out pricing negotiations until the product was actually built. If the customer ever got anything for their trouble, it was an alpha at best.

But was "without ads" an explicit part of their sales pitch?

Plenty of magazines put out different editions. It would've been possible. Not today anymore, print does not have enough wiggle room left, but before the web took over, I don't see why not.

I realize that 'mainframe' is supposed to imply 'old, busted, and overpriced' in this analogy; but it seems perhaps unintentionally honest to describe how your spit, chewing gum, and apparent upfront savings solution will be replacing the Just Works solution that people keep coming back to when reliability and predictability are what counts.

Yes, but they never deceived me into thinking I would get one without the other.

If you find a magazine that originally advertised itself as being without ads and then changed that promise without changing the cover price, and then bringing out a more expensive "special edition" without ads - then that would be comparable.

I don't know if they will succeed; but that's why I suspect that one major entry attempt will be the "empower paraprofessionals" line; and specifically avoiding being construed as a 'medical device'.

Obviously medical device vendors aren't going to just ignore the possibilities; there's already a fair amount of signal processing going on in some areas and if 'AI' is either trendy enough to merit a rebrand of what they are doing already or promising enough to be an addition to the processing pipeline they'll certainly do it; but getting tagged as dealing in medical devices has significant regulatory implications that medical device outfits are familiar with but bot generalists are not; and, realistically, a lot of tech 'innovation' is really a mix of enough tech to make it look like 'tech' along with enough regulatory end-run to provide a cost advantage vs. the incumbent.

Ideally(from the perspective of the vendor) you'd essentially pull an Uber or an AirBnB and, when the medical device regulators are in earshot, be selling a product that is merely a humble, and useful, personalized reference and self guided continuing education aid that should be regulated like a pile of flash card(not at all); while, when the haggling over what nursing home stuff you need a nurse for and what you can do with a nurse assistant or patient care technician is being done have a bunch of plucky, heartwarming, paraprofessionals advocating for their right to do more to drive patient outcomes thanks to the glorious future of advanced personalized learning. The less lucrative; but probably softest, target would be the various nurse-staffed telephone and video link telehealth services that do first-line medical questions and 'is it probably fine/should you really get it looked at' type questions; which can presumably be legally replaced with generic call center bots if you strike all references to 'nurse' and put enough disclaimers; but would see greater consumer acceptance if you could still market them as 'nurse' or something that sounds similar.

I assume that some companies will be at least indirectly involved in both; but I suspect that you are really looking at two fairly distinct product 'tracks', so to speak:

People aren't going to ignore medical devices and well formalized specialties like radiology; those are the ones where you'll actually need to put in the work and deal with medical device certifications and ongoing scrutiny of your system's machine vision behavior vs. radiologist readings; but there's absolutely enough money on the table(along with potentially just-plain-unavailable capabilities with keyhole surgery tentacle robots or whatnot); but that is too obviously a 'medical device' to really play fast and loose.

Trying to chip away at nurses vs. paraprofessionals, though, seems like more fruitful ground for what's ultimately a savings-oriented regulatory end run with enough tech to not be too blatantly visible as such.

Not all of them are; but "Devin the AI software engineer" has had me in a weirdly stubborn torrent of ad spend, so I know at least someone is doing it(and the place is rotten with "AI SOC Analysts", including ones that basically just seem to be the same EDR heuristics the company was selling last year dumping text into an LLM that has been told to apply an executive summary tone); and you can't swing a stick without hitting someone describing a service account as a 'virtual employee' in a thought-leadership-for-morons thinkpiece. Definitely some of it going on.

My impression has been that the ones trying to sell to individuals either primarily or as the first move to create demand for business sales the the vocabulary of tools; but the ones trying to skip directly to c-levels looking for a crash project are much more likely to ascribe job descriptions to their bots.

We started a phishing training program this year. The email that kicked off the campaign, inviting us to our first online lesson, looked like a phishing attempt. It was laughable. I reached out to the head of IT to point that out, and he had to send around a mass email reassuring us all that the message from a company weâ(TM)d never heard of was, in fact, legit.