Well yes, and. That's probably directly due to Rural areas in the US having greatly inferior healthcare than what is found in cities and especially having a lack of specialists. And that is due to money, as you say, higher incomes for populations.

It is indeed about being fair.
The Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers is running things now.

Yeah... but an opening for Cursor? In the here and now? I'll believe that when my 250mph, 1.9s 0-60, 600-mile range electric sports car has working full self driving.

Oh? So names like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, Alex Jones, Steve Miller, Nancy Mace, Nick Fuentes, Charlie Kirk, Greg Abbott...

Those are *NOT* everyday mainstream names that you hear on traditional non-algorithmic televised news channels? What channels are YOU watching?

> They'll see a Conservative proposing that
> Trump be given a 3rd term and trans kids get
> rounded up and forced into conversion
> therapy or some crap like that.

Yeah, the thing is that this is EXACTLY what mainstream conservativism is now. El Presidente for life, ban all the LGBandespeciallyT people from everything and convert, or ideally kill, them... That's not not fringe trolling on the dark corners of the internet like 4chan and stormfront anymore. That's their actual position which they publicly avow now on mainstream platforms. And I don't mean just algorythmic social media feeds. You can turn on the television now and watch them say these things openly.

FaceID already does that... better than the sort of person who can only get those jobs in the first place.

The next step is for the lenders to bundle the small loans into securities to sell to investors. They'll say the securities will be safe because they'll be protected with credit default swaps, CDS, that will be sold on the open market. They will get AAA ratings.
Next, you'll be able to trade naked CDS and securitized bundles of CDS guaranteed by investment houses and major insurance companies. This market will be holding trillions of dollars of putative value.

Then a bomb will go off in the lobby of one of the investment houses, perhaps figuratively, and that company will collapse. The CDS will all be called and the trillions will evaporate, and by that I mean anyone who is not a too-big-to-fail entity will lose their shirts. Also, they'll lose their houses.
The treasury will prop up the too-big-fail-entities and, oh, btw, the investments of the political leadership, and by that I do not necessarily mean the elected leadership.

> every major OS refuses to do backups by default

That is demonstrably untrue. MacOS is quite happy to do backups right out of the box. It just needs a destination. If you don't have a Time Machine drive already backing up your files; when you plug in an external drive for the first time, the OS will immediately offer to format and use it for backups. It's literally one plug, one click. That's backup #1. Backup #2 is rsync scripts... one for my homedir to one drive, the second for my movies&music drive. THAT one is actually a bit difficult, because MacOS does not use traditional cron, but launchDaemon xml files that I can never remember how to set up manually, so I use an app for it. Definite Apple fail there. Backup #3 is off-site to Backblaze, easy peasy.

So, on the desktop; one backup scheme is kind of annoying and the other two are child's play.

On Mobile, iOS and iPadOS both badger you to log in to iCloud and back up to there. And backing those up locally is one plug-in, typing in a a password for the local encryption, and three clicks.

I know that journalism is dead and it's been apparent for some time that the inverse pyramid isn't taught anymore. But who the hell are/were OSS, besides a "now-defunct vendor" for PBS? And what was their relationship with Iron Mountain that this judge is blaming and punishing the latter for the former's... wrongdoing? WAS there any actual wrongdoing? Or were they just a business that failed?

Oh... posted by BeauHD. So of course the whole thing is garbage.

With proper controls, it could be a massive privacy boon. The thing with that physical card is that it has a bunch of information on it that has literally nothing to all whatsoever to its supposed purpose, but can be massive safety and privacy issues. The biggest offender of all, of course, being your address... most likely your residential address.

That bouncer at the club or the bar? He doesn't need to know your address... and should NOT know it. He doesn't need to know if you wear glasses or have a motorcycle or commercial endorsement. There is exactly ONE piece of information that is in any way needed or relevant there: your date of birth. And he doesn't even actually need THAT, just one simple boolean: Are you over 21 or not. So... since NFC is already there... it would be almost trivially easy for Apple to design a system where you walk up to the terminal, tap your phone to the pad, and he gets a little green light if you're over 21, a red light if you're not, and NO OTHER INFORMATION WHATSOEVER... not even your DoB, because that is wholely irrelevant if that value is > 662,256,000 seconds ago.

Same for would-be stalker cops who pull you over. One tap. One light: licensed driver, yes or no. Done and done.

Of course, we know that government will reject any and all sane privacy protections and they'd never land on the Android side in the first place. But yeah... done RIGHT, it really could be a massive safety and privacy win.

And for those who have not heard of Project 2025, it's also the blueprint for Doge's often puzzling shutdown of certain Federal Agencies.

Because you just might get it. Everything must be dead-tree printed hardcopy? Sure. But somebody at IBM just said: "Hold my beer."

What I'm reading is that none of you have been to MIT, Cal tech, Harvard, or such schools.
They have been doing the freshman pass/fail for decades.

I would offer a real-life counterpoint to this being helpful.

I was actually one of those kids who breezed through high school with high marks without really having to try and then got a big shock when college actually turned out to require real effort and studying. Dropping the actual grades for pass/fail would have been the WORST thing to do. I was doing C and D work my freshman year and masking that behind nothing more than a P would NOT have been the wakeup call I needed to get my shit together and actually work for my grades. And it worked. Those Cs and Ds motivated me to get my shit together and accept that everything doesn't just come naturally and after that first semester the first year I never got less than a B, and pulled mostly As.

Everyone is unique and YMMV of course. But I really don't see where sugarcoating the truth and not acknowledging sub-par performance would have helped me improve.

Maybe they'll pay a consultant to tell them to get rid of the smelly foot logo. But seriously, why not give money to another quasi-German DE that's actually good? You know, the more popular and intuitive KDE?