I don't believe you that anyone bitched about the loss of the floppy drive.

Too young maybe? Releasing an iMac without a floppy drive had much the same impact as releasing an iPhone without a 3.5" headphone jack. A lot of the old articles have disappeared, and apparently the Slashdot comments, but e.g.

https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

There were a LOT of articles written about it. Tech journalist careers were made.

Sure. Lots of people use DB-9 serial ports and even some parallel ports too. There's apparently even some Firewire stuff still around.

Doesn't mean we need them on every laptop.

There are different kinds of surveys. Established government survey programs in general, and the US Current Employment Statistics survey specifically, aren't usually just a random phone call. The CES is something a business agrees to do once a month for a period of time. For small businesses that seems to be about 3 years, and for large ones it's more indefinite.

It is voluntary, but the alternative is to make it compulsory. The montly CES is voluntary but quarterly reporting is not. Censuses and some census related surveys are usually compulsory but more frequent surveys are usually voluntary.

Somone quite possibly made a living bitching about the loss of the 3.5" headphone jack, and possibly DB9, parallel, floppy drives, optical drives, firewire, PS2 keyboard and mouse ports, micro USB, VGA, s-video, composite, RJ14, S/PDIF and PCMCIA.

It's always good fodder for an article or a Slashdot story.

Yes, airline pilots associations are well known for not caring much about safety, it's true. Also, have you heard the one about the pizza parlour basement?

Cows... have testicles.

No they don't.

You mean like exactly what happened decades ago since Americans long since stopped wanting to do this low paying work? Oh, it turns out machines don't just magically invent themselves when needed.

Lettuce harvesting machines did in fact get invented when the need and the economic justification arose.

Better? Or are you going to claim that you literally meant "invent themselves" so you're still technically not wrong?

Ah yes, just what the world needs. Another dick measuring who-can-plant-their-flag-first race. Except this time without innovation!

I don't think the airline pilot's union cares much about a few cloud seeding pilot jobs.

They do care a lot about stuff flying around, especially high up though. Airline pilots really dislike uncontrolled air traffic, not without good reason.

The health effects of perfluorooctanoic acid were discovered when herds of cows started getting sick and dying around a DuPont plant that released it into their effluent wanter. They're well studied now. Increased cancer risk is one of the effects, and one of those cancers is testicular.

There are, in fact, lettuce harvesting machines:

https://www.agriexpo.online/ag...

Whether or not your local farm uses them or human labour probably depends on the kind of lettuce, the market it's going to and the cost and availability of labour. Mostly that last one.

There's generally lots (and lots) of oversight for the training part. Many universities and health research centres have even set up review commitees to approve AI projects before they can be submitted to the regular ethics review.

I think the idea here is that once the mdoel is trained you can use it to produce data that's better anonymized. Many different kinds of medical data are re-identifiable in theory. Patterns of vessels in your MRI, a panel of a hundred blood protein levels, DNA, whatever, so that data always has to be treated with special care. The synthetic stuff the model pops out is not actually from any paticular person so it (supposedly) doesn't carry that risk.

On the other hand, there is the risk that it doesn't faithfully represent reality anymore.

Socialism with American Characteristics

Iowa's rolling farm fields of coffee

China has had private ownership since Mao died. It's something like 60% of GDP, whch is similar to Denmark.

Note that ~40% GDP in the US is public spending.