People buying essentials on credit has been around for a very long time.
Longer than most think.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
-Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford
Are they a university for research and learning or a tax-haven for investments^W gambling.
"Harvard is a hedge fund with classrooms" - Scott Galloway
Equating AI with Pac-Man isn't really the intellectual flex you probably think it is.
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.
Most likely Firefox will see and change direction. I do think though it'd be ironic if "Thing that relies on X destroys X and then inevitably dies as a result" ends up happening to an Internet browser if people are leaving the browser it's based upon because of the AI shit forced into the latter.
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.
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.
Inertia. Took me several years once streaming had taken off and we pretty much exclusively used our Roku and never used our Dish Network box to persuade the rest of my family that the $60-70/mo we were paying for Dish was a waste of money.
I also suspect a fair number have it for the same reason as their landline, as a reliable back up in case of emergencies. I had to demonstrate our antenna was fine for getting local news stations multiple times to deal with this argument.
I'm pretty sure most have some form of IPTV. Comcast even gave us a free box for their version. And honestly, usable gigabit speeds are available over coax, what's the need for fiber? Fiber is over-rated. If the use case is streaming, gigabit is ridiculously over-spec, you could stream 20 movies simultaneously at Blu-ray quality including all the unnecessary uncompressed audio streams for every language included on that disc all at once and still be able to browse the Internet while watching all 20 of them.
There's probably some use case out there that needs that amount of bandwidth, but by god it isn't "replacing cable".
> Where is your centralized TV Guide that allows you to browse and stream on demand as easily as cable does?
On the "Search" menu of the Roku?
I assume the Amazon Stick, Apple TV The Streaming Box, and whatever Google's pushing these days, have the same feature?
> Remember when Cable TV offered an ad-free television viewing experience, for a monthly subscription fee?
No, I don't. Nor do most people reading this.
In fact, I don't know what country you're talking about, but in the US virtually all TV channels - the subscription channels like HBO excepted - in the US provided over cable TV have had ads. That's because cable TV started purely as an alternative to antenna TV to relay the affiliates of the major networks to places that had poor reception. Over time cable-only TV channels were added to the line up, and some started off without ads, but most quickly included ads as they developed. MTV and CNN have always had ads, from day #1, and they're the two channels most people think of as the OG cable-only channels, although of course they weren't the first, but their predecessors were never as significant or as influential.
This "Cable TV was once Ad free" thing is largely a myth - I'm not saying there were never ad-free channels in the cable line up, but it was so early in cable TV's "More than just the broadcast channel" line up it barely is worth mentioning. Those channels played no part in the development and popularization of the format. Most cable TV growth happened long after the last free ad free channel adopted ads.
Except for that one time it was Lupus!
No, that would be you.
Some people are so obsessed with how great AI is in their mind they can't take it when others point out obvious problems. You would be one of those people. You need to recognize the technology isn't what it's sold as, and you shouldn't be worshipping a technology like a God anyway.
Except the Amiga. Obviously. That was perfect.
Actually most of those house are now occupied. The "train stations to nowhere", supposedly an indicator of the imminent collapse of their economy, are now surrounded by industries and towns.
No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.
I'm probably going to go for the 48GB/1TB as far as storage.
I tend to try and buy a laptop that I'll use for several years, this seems like my best bet right now. It will be replacing a 9 year old Dell Precision laptop that I've been using daily since it was new.
I am NOMAD!
