Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.

Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.

I'll make an offer right now to buy it for $1,000 with the intent to release the entire catalog into the public domain (CC0) 28 years after its creation.

Of the listed factors (lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction) the only one we can easily handle is the lack of child care.

Child care is ridiculously expensive, in part because of insurance and regulations. Many state regulations limit it to no more than 4 or 5 children per worker, which makes the labor expensive even though we underpay them ($12/hour is common). $12/4 kids = each parent paying $3/hour just for the labor, not including rent, supplies, and of course, insurance. Insurance is high because of the high value we place on the children.

So the solution is to have either local governments or large businesses supply the child care. In those cases, they can self-insure.

It is all or nothing. We can't seem to do middle ground, or reasonable. There is plenty of good to be had online and used in the correct manner, but that would require parents to be RESPONSIBLE rather than abdicate to TV or whatever else is handy.

Everyone my age knows what the stereotypical 'robotic' voice is. They changed it because they wanted to hide the fact you were talking to a machine.

We all know that a mouse moving in a perfectly straight line means a machine is controlling it, while humans do something more like a squiggly line. Basically a normal human drawing a line looks like someone with Parkinsons did it as compared to what a machine drawing a line looks like.

Similarly, humans typing have pauses that tend to end after set thoughts. New sentence = a pause. If I am seeing a long unbroken, steady text output or text that all appears in full sentences quickly, I know it is a machine.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

I think you got the timeline wrong. IT work is technically easy to replace because a lot of their output can be achieved using APIs that usually already exist. The work itself may be more complex, but the integration isn't. But it's different for, say, a bookkeeper. They may have to deal with things like paper receipts, or do phone calls. You need to be able to digitize input and output for those jobs. That's the difficult and time-consuming part. But once you've done this, these jobs are far easier for a LLM to execute. That's why I think these jobs are even more at risk of being replace, but it will take years to digitize the whole pipeline.

Human customer services gets it wrong at times and someone needs to fix it :)

This seems dubious at multiple levels.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

Tesla semis are pretty efficient, and they use about 1.7 kWh per mile. So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range, or 15 minutes of extra driving — the equivalent of plugging into a Tesla Megacharger for maybe 30 seconds or so.

Let's optimistically assume that the vehicle can carry 48,000 pounds. If those panels occupy the full roof area, then at about 3 pounds of weight per square foot, those solar panels would weigh 1500 pounds, or about 3% of your cargo, all to reduce your fuel usage by as little as 1% if you're doing long haul at 65 MPH. And that weight number may be wildly optimistic. Trailers like that aren't designed to have weight on the roof, and would require additional structure to hold that extra weight. The real losses could be significantly higher. Unless you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles in a day, the solar panels won't break even. And if you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles per day, there's no reason you can't go electric.

Battery and motor on the trailer: I would expect most trucks to be used primarily for either short-haul or long-haul purposes, not both. If you're doing long-haul, you'd probably be better off with an actual hybrid tractor so that you get the benefit no matter whose trailer you're hauling. If you're doing short-haul, there's likely no reason not to go full electric.

I just don't get it.

For the best hybrids, the major advantage is not the regenerative braking. While that helps save some energy, it is relatively minor.

Instead the main advantage is that you can design the internal combustion engine (ICE) to run at a consistent RPM. You do not need to run the ICE at different speeds to get 30 mph, 45 mph and 60 mph. Instead you have one that just runs at a set RPM. Then you use the hybrid battery to supply all the power at low speeds and a boost at the max speeds.

The more efficient ICE can add 10 more mpg to an engine alone, without even considering the regenerative braking.

You have no idea what the article is saying or what is real. here is an unbiased summary of reality.

No state 'dislikes' billionaires, they all want them.
All states have various taxes.
A bunch of conservatives claim California hates billionaries, because they tax them more than certain red states do.
Some conservatives think a proposed one time tax law in California will drive away billionaires.
The actual facts are that billionaires do MORE business in California than they do in ANY other state. After it is New York City.
California has not changed anything about themselves, they continue to do the same thing they always did.

This article is implying that the conservatives are wrong about the relationship between California and Billionaires, as demonstrated by these facts. But of course, the conservatives that hate California also do not respect the Los Angeles Times.

If a person makes an offer and accept the money, that is a non-verbal contract for services. Certain states have laws that prevent businesses from cancelling orders without just cause.
In those cases, it may very well be illegal for a company to cancel an order because an AI that was authorized to set prices did not follow the company's intentions.