Has been pushing hard for decades to get those religious lunatics into a fervor right? The Republican party actively encourages religious extremism so that they can Farm those people for votes.

It's always about the same thing. Taking all the money and leaving voters with nothing. If you're going to rob somebody blind and do it year in year out like the Republican party does you have to keep offering them something in exchange for all the economic security you are stealing.

It needs to be something intangible since the Republicans are taking all the tangible stuff like money and property and food and medicine and healthcare and education.

And that's why you will see religious freedom bills that give people the right to leave their children unvaccinated risking the lives of everybody else.

They get all the money and you get to skip your vaccines or teach your kids the Earth is 6,000 years old or whatever lunatic nonsense that isn't real you insist is real.

Before 2000 the government paid for 70% of college tuition. By 2003 after several rounds of cuts it was 20%.

Meanwhile here's Donald Trump telling us we need more immigration and h-1bs because Americans are just too dumb. Seriously Google it. That's what he said.

I wish my country would stop proving him right...

The risk of creating a viable competitor is too big so they will do pretty much anything a government wants in order to avoid being kicked out of the country.

It's not about the profit they can make in the country it's about making sure that there is never a viable competitor that could enter into any of your other markets.

Ultimately there really isn't a lot these companies do that's special. The most we survived because they're the ones who when the market was developing survived via survivorship bias. When you're talking infrastructure including internet infrastructure you are generally going to end up with some form of Monopoly forming. At least if you're not extremely careful to enforce competition. And I don't think there's a country on planet Earth that does that

Searched internet, found info:

China, long-haul + shot-haul: ~70%
USA, long-haul + shot-haul: ~72%

China, rail transport: 20-22%
USA, rail transport: ~28%

Even with the long-haul and short-haul numbers combined, it's fairly clear that China is as reliant on long-haul trucking as the USA is. However, given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government, those numbers could shift.

...over 143 years, 46 of which were before the discovery of the first antibiotic.

over six years, all but about one of which were post-vaccine. These two diseases are not really comparable in any meaningful way.

About 1.23 million people die from TB in a typical year, which is not that far off from the worldwide COVID death toll each year. We're mostly not talking about COVID anymore, either.

Vaccines for bacteria are... problematic at best, because they have relatively low effectiveness at preventing infection. The best way to eliminate TB is to get clean water everywhere. Stopping TB through vaccination is like stopping pedestrian deaths with inflatable pedestrian balls. Yeah, it might reduce the mortality, but the real problem is unsafe pedestrian crossings / unsafe drinking water.

Well, we've seen this before...sloppy startups launch with sloppy code, but a good idea. They get users. They get marketshare. They get revenue...with real revenue comes real responsibility...there's a data breach and now they realize they cannot be sloppy. They cannot write their core code in Python and port it to a real language. Now they need process and release engineering and backups and rollback....all the things that slowed down their competitors.

With Vibe coding, we'll see it all over again...although weirdly enough, are we even seeing it? Which vibe-coded startups have you heard of? It seems like all LLM activity is simply selling LLMs and LLM tools...where's the video game or data startup that leveraged AI to launch in record time and pushed their story all over the news?

I'm not personally familiar with any of them, but I think we saw this with facebook. It was famously written in PHP...until that stopped working for them...now it's written in a mismash of technologies. LLMs will be similar...maybe something to get you started, but unless you like lawsuits, you'll need to stop vibe coding and have serious professionals fix all the vulnerabilities you've introduced.

We don't, though the laws of supply and demand pretty much dictate that there must be some equilibrium point beyond which people buy fewer tickets and they end up losing money on non-refundable tickets.

Note that I'm not suggesting that raising prices is the right solution. It's a terrible solution.

Which in a free market indicates that the price is below what the market would bear. Otherwise, they would be unable to make a profit by reselling them. So the GP is not wrong, at least from a pure price optimization perspective.

This is not to say that there aren't societal benefits from charging less than the market will bear, of course, nor saying that scalping in any way adds value. It is basically rent seeking behavior, which makes it a drain on society. But the point still remains that obviously the ticket vendors could raise the prices to what the scalpers were charging and still sell tickets. Whether the scalpers would then be able to raise their prices further is unknown.

In the blue States it's generally individual cops getting caught doing it. Albeit a lot but still individual cops.

In the red States it's coming down from the top that's the difference. It's because corruption at the top is more common in a red state than a blue state.

This is to be expected if you understand how left and right wing politics work.

In a red State you have a right Wing state. So you have people that are prone to hierarchical structures and obedience.

That's going to encourage corruption because the people at the top will view themselves as being absolutely in charge and the people beneath them will encourage that view. It's why Trump can get away with committing so many crimes and the public still loves him.

A hierarchical command structure versus a democratic command structure is going to lend itself to top down corruption more often and the corruption is going to be worse. There is just no getting away from that or the consequences of right-wing politics.

Why would it stop when you feed it and propagate its vacuous Subject?

Mod FP funny, and if that moderation had happened sooner, then maybe the humorous opening FP would have been more productive. But I don't have another joke to add, so I'll fork (as is my tendency in most cases).

New Subject:

Not an actual case of cryocide, so what's the problem here?

Near as I can tell (without actually breaking down and reading everything) is that she died, was pronounced and certified as dead, and he didn't incinerate or bury her corpse, but chose to freeze her remains. Minor question about how long that process took, but not too interesting.

Now imagine that it was a case of cryocide. Imagine that she was still alive when she pushed a button to carefully freeze herself BEFORE she was actually dead. On the one hand, the cause of death is now a kind of suicide, but on the other hand, if the freezing is carefully done with the intention of minimizing the damage and the hope of being revived in the future, then we may be looking at an entirely fresh can of worms.

I actually imagine this as an opening for a series of SF stories called "Cyocide Crybabies" about waking up in worlds gone wrong. Any leads? Or even interest?

Are actively hiding their economic data. We are going to have a 1930s style economic collapse.

All the pieces are here. We are in the middle of a industrial revolution with massive amounts of automation and technological unemployment without any significant new employment opportunities on the horizon. Seriously sit down and write out what the jobs are going to be after automation and ai and machine learning rip through the economy. You can't just go and make cars after the buggy whip factory shuts down when the car factory is also automated.

Next we have a huge economic bubble where we are spending trillions of dollars specifically AI infrastructure spending and the massive bank loans that go with it.

And we have widespread drought resulting in crop failures and increasing food prices. Even if you don't believe climate change and the water cycle breaking is the problem the drought is still real.

This is everything that led up to world war I at world war II.

We have the technology to stop this but we don't have the education and critical thinking and social structures to stop it...

Seriously. I understand the bomb squad needs robots that's a good thing. But every year a crime goes down and every year we put more cops with better weapons and more weapons on the street.

I understand what's going on with all that immigration enforcement bullshit. There's a bunch of bitter old assholes who get off on seeing people slammed into the ground.

But is there really that many people for whom the pleasure of watching a couple of Mexicans get dragged into a black van by masked goons is enough to make them A-Okay with this bullshit?

I just had to get the new fancy license and they made me take my glasses off because they're using facial recognition now.

One of the funny things I keep seeing over and over again is confused white people in the middle class pulled over by cops and harassed the same way they're used to seeing "those people" harassed.

The place where it's really showing up is DUIs. In several red states with heavy duty police enforcement there is a ton of stories about people getting pulled over and arrested and losing their license when they were Stone Cold sober. There are a couple of big scandals where the local police were just told you need to get your arrest numbers up or else.

DUI is really popular for that because the cops can arrest you without cause or proof and it takes months before it comes out that you were innocent. Meanwhile your license is suspended.

The fact that they're doing this to the in group is a massive red flag. It's a huge shift in how things work.

I don't think any security services are daft enough to have actual backdoors now. They just look for vulnerabilities and then keep quiet about them.

So I'd be more worried about the mass bricking US made routers, world-wide. Do it as a false flag, pretending to be some teenage hacker. Give their own tech a nice boost too.