For everyone's information, Kushner is bankrolling the Paramount hostile takeover deal via his private equity firm Affinity Partners, as well as additional investment and backings from David Ellison's dad, Larry Ellison, as well as the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Warner Brothers Discovery has a lot of powerful media subsidiaries, most notably CNN and HBO.

I wonder if Kushner's father-in-law might have some vested interest in controlling CNN and HBO?

"Ellison said he’s had “great conversations” with Trump about Paramount’s plan for its proposed news business". Yup, no conflicts of interest there.

If there ever was an economic time to justify the a Mission to Mars, it was the early 80's. National Debt to GDP ratio was at an all-time low, space program was at its peak, and the Space Shuttle program had just begun.

Instead, Reagan decided to cut taxes for the rich.

Now, with a national debt of $38 trillion dollars and China taking over the world, the penultimate thing America can afford right now is a Mission to Mars. (I would have said "the last thing...", but honestly, the last thing America can afford right now is more tax cuts for the rich.)

Just search for "Axis Network Dome Camera" on eBay. There's tons of cheap IP cameras for sale there that'll do exactly what you need them to do, no cloud necessary.

The medical industry already profits greatly from medical testing. Testing earns the industry lots of money; then, patients with positive results receive follow-up treatments, which nets the industry even more money.

Everyone screens for cancer now. Breast cancer. Colorectal cancer. Prostate cancer. The list goes on. (I'm even a cancer survivor myself.) And yet, to this day, studies question whether more testing results in longer life spans. Generally, it does not. Meanwhile, all the testing and treatments and post-surgery therapies reduces one's quality of life, especially the older one gets.

The cited article says it best: "How could it be that many cancer screenings don’t have an impact on overall lifespan? While screenings prevent some deaths from cancer, they don’t prevent all...At the same time, cancer screenings have associated harms such as false positive results, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment (not to mention the financial cost of all these cascade events). It could be that the benefits of screening that some people receive get washed out by the harms that others experience when looking at screening on a population level."

We are already pricing ourselves out of paradise when it comes to medical care, and full-body MRIs are only going to make it worse.

Fair point. How about: "few people understood that getting inked was as dangerous as we now believe it to be."

It's a hell of a lot cheaper too. I was spending about $10 / week over a decade ago on new releases at Blockbuster. Now it's about $0 at the library.

Except nobody thought getting inked was dangerous. Now we know it is. The response isn't "sit at home with your two masks and helmet and panic"; the response is "don't get inked".

Tell them, "I got an invention that'll eliminate half of all the jobs in the world, then my investors get to keep all the money we used to pay them!"

Based on that logic, I'd love to see ChatGPT try to explain to Uncle Sam why they're not responsible if an assassin got instructions for how to successfully kill the president on ChatGPT.

AI = "Amalgamation of Information"

AI just uses probability calculations to amalgamate together an "average" of information on the subject. It's not smart. It doesn't think. It's not self-aware. It just is a digital hamburger grinder that churns out a paste of what gets put into its hopper.

You know this isn't about geothermal...Trump is trying to forge the ring of power.

It does argue against comment, though, in which you described the U.S. education system as "horrible". One difference is that in other countries those kids who can't do math just...wouldn't go to college.

U.S. was doing very well on the reading exam prior to COVID. Math was still in the toilet then, as now.

Kinda feel like "reading" (and comprehension) requires rational thought too.

Just FYI, on the 2022 PISA assessment, U.S. students outperformed their peers in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia, UK, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Norway, France and the Netherlands on the reading exam. On the science exam, the U.S. outperformed Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Norway and Italy. Ont he math exam, the U.S. was more or less last among wealthy countries. It's really only math where the U.S. system fails miserably.