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Comment Re: Major potential loss for science (Score 1) 251

Meritocracy is what leading institutions do to achieve world class research, which is one reason why the best research is increasingly NOT happening in the USA. Meritocracy is color blind, and whatever is between one's legs does not enter the calculus of whether an idea is valid or not. Interestingly, they talk about the achievements of this institution what happened in the 50s-90s, not what they've done since 2010.

I will give DEI one thing: what it does, if properly implemented, is bring in people with diverse and varied life experiences. I'm even willing to admit that might be advantageous; oftentimes a different point of view is valuable. However, it also brings in a lot of distractions and people who occupied the bottom rungs of their class scores, and grading curves shifted lower due to underachievement--but the administration will not accept most of the class failing. The optics would be HORRENDOUS.

If I find myself or my family members needing to go under a knife, I do not want my surgeon and anesthesiologist to be diverse. I naturally want them to be the best, the most experienced professional in their field. Recognizing that it's not possible to always get those people, we have to accept that we may get someone with middling competency, who passed at the bottom of their class. Fine, they are called doctor as well. What we should not accept lowering of those standards just to bring in an underrepresented, underperforming doctor. Sorry not sorry.

Same with pilots. I don't care if the pilot of my plane is an albino, trans, polka-dotted moomoo-wearing Eskimo, as long as it doesn't distract they them performing their duty. I want them to be a GOOD, safe, competent pilot, who earned their position because they demonstrated merit, not because they were shoehorned and kept in the job by a DEI cultist in HR despite numerous repeated near-misses.

Comment Re: The Disease of Greed. (Score 1) 183

Except the workforce doesn't become optional in any case. It becomes absolutely redundant, and it will be eliminated.
In a globalized capitalist society without any guardrails, it can be assumed that if there is a way to optimize something to provide greater shareholder value / CEO pay and bonuses, it will be done. Just as if something was cheaper to produce in Asia, virtually all of that work will be done in Asia; if AI does something, anything less expensively than a laborer, that work will be moved to AI. That is not to say that some workers may be kept around as tokens, or objects of abuse--bullying robots just doesn't have the same feel.; they will be like the caucasians employed in Hong Kong. Look at us! We are doing well enough to employ a useless white guy!

In this world, It's a constant race to the bottom, consequences be damned. If AI cuts the legs off the working class, and ultimately the whole economy topples as a result, they will not care, so long as the financial quarter before the collapse was the best, most profitable quarter ever.

Comment But of course! (Score 1) 88

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

Comment Re:Filming people getting CPR (Score 4, Interesting) 154

We need to stop pretending like it's perfectly OK to film strangers in public. Legal? Sure. Should you be doing it? 9 times out of 10, no.

It's long past time we had a real debate about the law, too. Just because something has been the law for a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean it should remain the law as times change. Clearly there is a difference between the implications of casually observing someone as you pass them in a public street, when you probably forget them again a moment later, and the implications of recording someone with a device that will upload the footage to a system run by a global corporation where it can be permanently stored, shared with other parties, analysed including through image and voice recognition that can potentially identify anyone in the footage, where they were, what they were doing, who they were doing it with, and maybe what they were saying and what they had with them, and then combined with other data sources using any or all of those criteria as search keys in order to build a database at the scale of the entire global population over their entire lifetimes to be used by parties unknown for purposes unknown, all without the consent or maybe even the knowledge of the observed people who might be affected as a result.

I don't claim to know a good answer to the question of what we should allow. Privacy is a serious and deep moral issue with far-reaching implications and it needs more than some random guy on Slashdot posting a comment to explore it properly. But I don't think the answer is to say anything goes anywhere in public either just because it's what the law currently says (laws should evolve to follow moral standards, not the other way around) or because someone likes being able to do that to other people and claims their freedoms would be infringed if they couldn't record whatever they wanted and then do whatever they wanted with the footage. With freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to respect the rights and freedoms of others, which some might feel should include more of a right to privacy than the law in some places currently protects.

That all said, people who think it's cool to film other human beings in clear distress or possibly even at the end of their lives just for kicks deserve to spend a long time in a special circle of hell. Losing a friend or family member who was, for example, killed in a car crash is bad enough. Having to relive their final moments over and over because people keep "helpfully" posting the footage they recorded as they drove past is worse. If you're not going to help, just be on your way and let those who are trying to protect a victim or treat a patient get on with it.

Comment Re:Why was he given access to such info? (Score 1) 72

If you believe that russian sources are reliable you also believe that a female NASA astronaut drilled a hole in a Soyuz because she was homesick, that russian soldiers were not offically involved in seizing Crimea, that Zelensky is a Satan worshipping Nazi, that the russian AF has shot down 10 times more Ukranian jets than they have ever had in service, that many russians who crossed Putin died by being crushed from falling out of ground floor windows, that rapists and murderers were transformed into angels by surviving being used as bullet and drone sponges, etc , etc, etc...

"Proof" from untrustworthy sources isn't.

Comment Re:Major privacy concerns (Score 1) 80

The escape of medical information is truly well under way already, independent of AI.

In the UK, most medical information will be classified as sensitive personal data, which means it has significant extra protections under our regular data protection law, in addition to the medical ethics implications of breaching patient confidentiality. Letting it escape is a big deal and potentially a serious threat to the business/career of any medical professional who does it. Fortunately the days of people sending that kind of data around over insecure email are finally giving way to more appropriate methods of communication as the technology improves. It's usually governments seeing pound signs and/or businesses who aren't providing direct care to the patients that are pushing for wider distribution (and also those organisations who act as if impossible claims about sanitising the data effectively before releasing it are true).

Comment Re:Pretend to be a customer for a new Subaru (Score 1) 155

I'm serious. I don't fucking pay for ads. Ever.

Good for you! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, having no car isn't really an option, so the answer to what happens next with your strategy is really that all of those people get an inferior product because there's no effective competition or regulation in the market to prevent that, while people like you don't get any product at all.

What should happen is that governments recognise a failure of the market to maintain adequate standards for customers and introduce regulation to enforce minimum acceptable standards accordingly. Whether that actually happens obviously depends on whether your government is more interested in looking out for the people or the businesses.

Comment Re:Why was he given access to such info? (Score 1) 72

Being a passenger in Falcon/Dragon being allowed to take pictures of export controlled parts of Falcon/Dragon. This isn't rocket science and you should be able to understand that.

Photographic memory doesn't include being able to determine the dimensions or other many other aspects of objects that pictures can nor does it imply being able to produce an accurate drawing from memory.

Comment Re: One silly law causes problems (Score 1) 64

Depends on the property value, I suppose. If the value is high enough that people are occupying 6 story apartments next door, it's probably close to being more effective than having 50ksqf of ground level parking, enabling other more fulfilling (profitable) uses.
I'm not suggesting parking decks. Think a modular pallet, perhaps with the charging equipment built in with a 480v bus connection at one end, with a cooling duct loop. Everything being modular makes it easy to maintain, and swap out bad parts for good without impairing operation. A glorified robotic forklift picks the whole thing up, car and all, and slots it into a heavy duty rack. Presto-chargo. It could be designed to fit in with other commercial buildings.

Would it be expensive? Probably, but Everything is relative, and some places real-estate is more valuable than the building that sits on it.

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