This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

I'll continue to stick to my traditional IMAP / POP account on my own domain. There is nothing trying to 'think' for me there and I can set up my own filters on my mail client if desired.

I have a paid account at Vimeo that I use to privately share videos for clients. They are known for their high quality / high bitrate streams and tools for business users. I imagine now the price will get jacked up and then the service ultimately shut down when everyone abandons ship after they've looted what they can out of it.

If you spend time with the higher-tier (paid) reasoning models, you’ll see they already operate in ways that are effectively deductive (i.e., behaviorally indistinguishable) within the bounds of where they operate well. So not novel theorem proving. But give them scheduling constraints, warranty/return policies, travel planning, or system troubleshooting, and they’ll parse the conditions, decompose the problem, and run through intermediate steps until they land on the right conclusion. That’s not "just chained prediction". It’s structured reasoning that, in practice, outperforms what a lot of humans can do effectively.

When the domain is checkable (e.g., dates, constraints, algebraic rewrites, SAT-style logic), the outputs are effectively indistinguishable from human deduction. Outside those domains, yes it drifts into probabilistic inference or “reading between the lines.” But to dismiss it all as “not deduction at all” ignores how far beyond surface-level token prediction the good models already are. If you want to dismiss all that by saying “but it’s just prediction,” you’re basically saying deduction doesn’t count unless it’s done by a human. That’s just redefining words to try and win an Internet argument.

They do quite a bit more than that. There's a good bit of reasoning that comes into play and newer models (really beginning with o3 on the ChatGPT side) can do multi-step reasoning where it'll first determine what the user is actually seeking, then determine what it needs to provide that, then begin the process of response generation based on all of that.

This is not a surprise, just one more data point that LLMs fundamentally suck and cannot be trusted.

Huh? LLMs are not perfect and are not expert-level in every single thing ever. But that doesn't mean they suck. Nothing does everything. A great LLM can fail to produce a perfect original proof but still be excellent at helping people adjust the tone of their writing or understanding interactions with others or developing communication skills, developing coping skills, or learning new subjects quickly. I've used ChatGPT for everything from landscaping to plumbing successfully. Right now it's helping to guide my diet, tracking macros and suggesting strategies and recipes to remain on target.

LLMs are a tool with use cases where they work well and use cases where they don't. They actually have a very wide set of use cases. A hammer doesn't suck just because I can't use it to cut my grass. That's not a use case where it excels. But a hammer is a perfect tool for hammering nails into wood and it's pretty decent at putting holes in drywall. Let's not throw out LLMs just because they don't do everything everywhere perfectly at all times. They're a brand new novel tool that's suddenly been put into millions of peoples' hands. And it's been massively improved over the past few years to expand its usefulness. But it's still just a tool.

For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

Indeed! They will never whack all the moles.

Colleges want to let in anyone who can pay whether they will eventually graduate or not, and take their money. The College Board is helping. College has become a scam like everything in the United States of Avarice.

Our charger has a long cord, even if the charger was inside the cord could run outside and you could shut the door on it.

As it happens, that's not a problem either. I put the charger outside on a north facing wall under a large roof overhang where it's protected from the elements. The Tesla wall charger is waterproof and designed to live outside. I've had zero issues with it.

Besides, isn't it usually recommended not to park an EV in the garage due to fire hazard if something goes sideways?

The car parks right next to where the charger is, we plug it in every night and it's on a timer to start after 9 when the cheap rates kick in. Between the TOD Prime rate that SoCal Edison gives for EV owners and charging almost entirely at home, the electricity for the car is basically free, as our power bills are actually lower on average than they were before we changed rate tiers.

I personally don't care for the car (it's my Wife's car) due to the driver-hostile control setup (no buttons) and the fact that it tracks your every move, but it works for her because she has a long daily commute and we were spending a lot of money on gas every month.

Crypto doesn't always mean PoW

Nah.

Iâ(TM)m 51. Iâ(TM)ve had health insurance continuously for 35 years and have used it exactly ZERO TIMES.

I am self pay. For everything but true life threatening emergencies, which Iâ(TM)ve had zero.

Even the ER is cheaper when negotiated self pay.

My urologist is stunned that I pay $85 for his visits. Self pay. Including labs. My colleague goes to the same urologist and his insurance pays $550 for the same visit and naturally it comes out of his deductible lol.

Insurance is a scam. All insurance is legal gambling and gamblers never win.

Thanks for the update. I did use Seatguru fairly recently and the information on my particular flight was still valid as far as I can tell, but maybe I just got lucky. I did notice that it was transforming into a booking gateway to maximize revenue. I've bookmarked the new site and I will refer to it for the next trip.

Always consult seatguru before booking...they have maps of the layouts for each plane for each carrier, and you can see the lemons....

Supply and demand dictate this is exactly the case.

If something is valuable to everyone, it should only be accessible to those who have enough saved value to acquire it.

The poor fucked themselves. My parents are poor but worked hard so I wouldn't be.