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Comment Really the trend is moving away from 3rd party (Score 2) 11

As someone who does a fair amount of work travel it really has become preferable to book through the hotel and airline sites than use Priceline or Expedia. Hotels generally don't give you rewards points, they won't handle issues at the front desk (you'll have to call Expedia) and as mentioned the policies are different. Most hotels will honor the price rate a 3rd party site offers as well if you ask them to.

Comment Re:working (Score 1) 10

people lose themselves when they have nothing to do that involves more than just enjoyment.

Having that amount of money gives you the privilege of being able to sort that out for yourself, he gets to decide between enjoyment and doing literally anythign else he wants.

It's something 99.99% of us will never have the option of experiencing, we are effectively denied that choice, my point is a person with a billion-with-a-B dollars has an experience with life that is inhuman to the rest of the planet.

Comment It's about priorities (Score 2) 112

The same people pushing cursive are also pushing privatization and the elimination of higher education for everyone except a handful of the elite.

So right now if you're finding somebody on the left our main concern is to teach critical thinking skills that will create the next generation of voters that don't fall for the usual bullshit. You know what I'm talking about. The southern strategy, woke dei moral panics whatever the hell. The basic tricks that the ruling elite use to kowtow a population.

If we can't pull that off we would at least like to teach the actual history of chattel slavery in America, who Christopher Columbus really was and maybe throwing some stuff about the labor movement. It would also be nice if we could have an economics course in high school that wasn't just capitalist propaganda. I mean when I took mine years and years ago it was literally slotted between health and driver's ed that's how unimportant it was as a learning opportunity. It was literally just nine weeks or so of me being told how great capitalism was and how supply and demand made my life better.

I'm not saying we go full socialist but I would like to teach children about a proper and functional capitalist system, especially things like the need for regulation and antitrust law.

Now if you want to massively increase the funding for public schools that we can have all of the above and your finer points of education sure let's do it. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're not up for that

Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 1) 42

A few things to note...

Over the past couple of decades, more and more roles within the British healthcare system have become able to prescribe - pharmacists (as noted in the summary), nurse prescribers, physicians associates (who technically should be under the supervision of a GP, but the way the NHS has that set up its very much a "PA prescribes, GP actually has little say")...

The role of doctors in the British healthcare system is being diminished and replaced by lower paid, lower trained positions, and GPs are particularly hard hit by it - which is why GPs are retiring or moving overseas at record rates, far beyond the ability for the current GP training schemes to replace them.

The UK is actively doctor hostile these days, and British doctors do not want to be part of it any more.

It's not just in Britain. All across the West, there's a shortage of native-born doctors. The expense and hassle of getting an MD is bad enough. Then you also have the modern stresses of being an MD (which in America, includes a highly litigious culture where doctors have to get maddeningly expensive malpractice insurance). The workload is huge, and the money is only good for the hyper-specialists now. The home-grown family doctor is an endangered species in the US, and we're addressing it in two ways: handing doctor duties to those lower on the chain, and importing doctors from the third world. Every single new doctor at my not-large Southern US hospital in the past three years has come from 3 places: India, Pakistan, or East Africa. This of course, robs those areas of badly needed doctors. And it doesn't really matter if your system is private or nationalized. Look at the ranks of doctors that staff your local services. You'll see similarities everywhere in the West: there's fewer of them, and they tend to come from overseas.

Comment Re:working (Score 1) 10

"Working" is an entirely different prospect when it's optional, when you can choose to walk away any day, any time with zero consequences. You won't go hungry, you won't have to worry about your rent, nobodies gonna give you shit if you want to roll in around 11:30 this Monday.

Really this scenario is the only legit "right to work" that exists, when you are wealthy enough to choose to work and where and how.

Comment Re:Cooling? (Score 1) 74

It's a lot more complicated. Remember the solar panels to power the data center? They catch Sun light, so you need to add them to the surface of your data center. And to keep it at 300 K, you need twice the area to the other side to radiate off the heat. And those areas should not face each other, because they would then heat each other. It's a lot easier with convection, because then, the moving gas molecules transport away the heat.

Comment Re:Not as important as bringing back flashcards (Score 1) 112

There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.

The best schools always included a mix of techniques in teaching. You had "drill 'till it kills" in math, THEN you had logic and reasoning exercises. You had memorization of names and dates, THEN you had deep discussions of historical events. A good education includes both rote and discussion, and always has.

Comment Re:It a guidebook... (Score 5, Insightful) 112

How to watch republicans piss away taxpayer money on utterly useless crap, trying to get back to a past that time forgot...

Oh FFS. There are lots of knowledge that isn't "practical" yet is valuable to our culture. You people piss and moan about children not being properly educated, but when someone suggests that things like cursive writing and other finer points of civilization should continue to be taught, you scoff with bullshit like this.

My mother's generation had mandatory classes in Latin during high school in the early 1960's. As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements. There's a reason the finer schools still require them. I'm all for more of a focus on the practical for kids... more shop classes, more practical math (loans and interest, basic accounting, etc), but to suggest that we should chuck all of the finer points of culture into the trash because it's "trying to get back to a past that time forgot" is complete and utter horseshit.

Comment Re:It's a Tool (Score 1) 30

Sure, but there's an additional problem which is that AI is very good at generating convincing looking PRs that turn out to be junk. The result is it can be quite a lot of work to figure out how junky the PR is. It kind of falls into the category of "and this is why we can't have nice things". There's nothing wrong in principle with submitting a PR with AI assistance, if the PR is sound. But unfortunately people looking to get their name on the kernel, for props or just frist psot will flood the mailing list with a tidal wave of slop.

It might be better as a result to implement something approximating an automatic blanket ban.

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