If you're in the USA and you have enough money, yes, you can haz politician.

Awww... poor baby. You couldn't find a spelling error to nitpick, so you had to go for an even dumber attempt to distract from the conversation and failed.

Nope. The fact that you even think that demonstrates that you have no clue how Congress works.

The Speaker of the House (literally one guy; Mike Johnson) has blocked the vote on bills that would have provided support to the Ukraine. There's a name for a government where one guy gets to dictate things and it's not "representative".

The most recent vote was 49-50 where Republicans voted against the bipartisan bill that they themselves introduced because they changed their mind and decided that they wanted more money thrown at border security than they originally asked for. That's not representative; that's moving the goalposts to ensure that nothing gets passed (and this has been the Republican party's standard operating procedure since Obama was elected and they vowed that nothing would get passed).

As for the MAGA side, if Trump gave a speech tomorrow and said we should fund the Ukraine, every last one of them would immediately start demanding we fund the Ukraine. They literally can't be represented because they mindlessly regurgitate whatever Trump tells them they should believe. It's not even a dictatorship with them; it's a cult.

Can we stop asking if we're trapped in anything remotely like The Matrix?

It was a fun little mind exercise 25 years ago. Now it's trite.

But, then again, this is a Wall Street Journal article. Trite is probably the best/least-offensive thing they can accomplish.

It's easy to catch more cancers than doctors do if you crank up the settings and flag everything that even remotely looks like cancer.

I found what appears to be the study and Mia flagged 13.0% of the scans vs a human flagging just 5.4%. That's a lot of false positives that had to be examined by humans to find 11 real positives.

Mia might be a useful tool someday, but the press on this is putting way too positive a spin on the results.

Vernor Vinge coined the term to describe the idea, so it is a thing in that sense. Has it happened yet? No, but he was writing science fiction and essays that imagined what may happen in the future.

If you read the essay linked at the end of the summary, you'll find a remarkably insightful and scholarly work that examines many possibilities and outcomes related to the development of artificial general intelligence.

Wrong leveeerrrrrrrrrr...

Why do we even have that lever?

Imagine not being a slave to overtime and actually having three days off every week.

This is the problem with most older Americans' mindset; if we have extra hours off, we imagine working more rather than doing anything to care for ourselves, our families and our friends.

46% of workers don't take all their paid time off in the US. Taking sick leave is seen as being lazy and many businesses require you to pay for a doctor's visit to get a note that says you're sick, making it expensive and difficult to even try. Even with doctors' notes every time, taking too many sick days will get you fired from some jobs.

This mindset that we should suffer and constantly work harder and put in overtime because it will put a few extra dollars in our pockets has been hammered into us from birth. It's very profitable for corporations when all their workers share that mindset and those profits are almost entirely transferred back to the wealthy C-suite and investors (and don't kid yourself about your 401k; less than 10% of stocks are owned by 401ks).

You say that as if companies aren't already trying to automate away as many positions as possible every time there's an opportunity to do so.

If you're old enough, you might remember when self-serve gas pumps didn't exist and a gas station would have a few employees to handle pumps. Now self-serve is the norm in all but a couple of places in the country.

Retail businesses keep attempting to move to self-checkout only, even people hate them and they allow more theft to occur.

We have a whole raft of employers eliminating workers and trying to replace them with ChatGPT.

There's a reason stock prices go up every time a company announces a major layoff of their workforce and it's got nothing to do with the quality of life for the remaining workers.

Corporate profits have been soaring, but none of those profits is going into paying for workers or reducing their hours. Instead, we see employers laying off employees and pushing for longer hours from fewer employees. Virtually all profits go to the already wealthy C-suite and stock owners (and don't kid yourself about 401k programs, those hold less than 10% of the available stock; the rest is owned by the wealthy).

Tell us you only get your news from the right wing media without telling us you only get your news from the right wing media.

That ignores the possibility that Ted may be the best programmer in the company, but he's but about critiquing other people's code.

Or maybe Ted microwaves fish on Fridays.

Or maybe Ted keeps telling the other male coders to knock it off when they make sexist remarks about the few women coders.

Or maybe Ted is a recovering alcoholic who doesn't go out for drinks with the group to celebrate projects, so he gets painted as antisocial.

When you turn popularity into a job qualification, what you get is what we have in politics today; shitty people who will say the right things to keep the job while the good people get squeezed out.

Nice of you to let us know just how uninformed and out of touch you are. Retail chains are scaling back self checkout and eliminating it in some places. Not small retailers, either; Walmart, Dollar General, ShopRight, Five Below, Target, etc.

Kroger isn't named in the article, but they experimented with a self-checkout only store and have put human cashiers back in place after an overwhelming number of problems and complaints. They're reducing the number of self-checkout lanes in other stores too.

So no. Don't expect any of the things you predicted. Not any time soon, at least (though I really do wish we had vending machines on the scale that Japan does).

Okay. Please provide an alternate explanation for how and why I wake up ten to fifteen minutes before my alarm actually goes off every day regardless of whether I've had enough sleep or not.

And don't forget to cite your sources. If you're going to state something as a fact, you need evidence to support that.

Except it does matter. There have been numerous studies that showed a wide range of positive results that correlated with a later school starting time.

You, personally, may have been fine with getting up early and going to school in the dark but a lot of kids suffer from it.

Lead-Acid batteries give off both hydrogen and oxygen. They can, in fact, go "foom" as many car mechanics can attest. No vigorous flames like the various lithium batteries; just a loud pop and acid flying everywhere.