"He ended up with about the same or higher pay as a contractor as I recall."

Are you including health care and retirement benefits in that higher pay?

26 (or was it 21, my memory of the figure is fuzzy) was 26 or 21 mathematicians.

WSJ had an article a few weeks ago about AI solving math problems. It was able to solve Navier-Stokes problem because 26 (or was it 21, my memory of the figure is fuzzy) poked in a lot of proofs of smaller problems into something called MathLib. It took them about 2 years (if my memory on that is accurate). Only then was the AI thingy able to solve Navier-Stokes.

My take is essentially that the AI thingy is not really solving anything in any fundamentally novel way. It still required a lot of human input. Would the AI thingy figured out it needed to solve the little problems first. I doubt it (at least with this iteration) because they tried that an it failed. And it was not clear from the article how much coaching the AI thingy got from its pets, i.e., its owners.

Sounds like job for the Blonde Crusader, able to flash her teeth and illiminate an entire stadium, prose that could knock a dead buzzard off a shit-wagon at 20 paces, construct sentences that will make Maggots orgasm where they stand. She'll be fighting for Truth, Justice, and not insignificant bribes to the Chief Bunko "artiste".

Yes, but 30-40 years ago the computing landscape in companies was much different. It hadn't extended to damn near everything the company did. This is different now so a change 30-40 years ago was minor in terms of cost to the company, now it can elicit major whining from accounting.

Malcolm Gladwell did a study of police in America and Europe. It turns out that many Euro cities have much larger police forces that U.S. cities. Their police are less violent and better respected.

He goes on (maybe he was reporting on a book he wrote) that the mayor of Baltimore greatly reduced violent crime, which, before he arrived, was at one of the worst levels in the U.S. He reduced crime by doing two things: expanding the police force and adding more ancillary services. One anecdote he related was that someone was murdered on the street. He sent is people to visit the family and they were able to talk the family out of seeking revenge through explaining the bad things revenge brings and convincing them the police were on the case.

His basic message is that U.S. cities are underpoliced and the police feel overwhelmed. Personally, I attribute this to the "law and order" pols who seem to revel in conjuring up hobgobblins and bleating on how beating the fear of God or the Love of Jesus Christ into criminals would solve the problem. So they underfund the police and taut that as being "tough on crime" and "fiscally conservative." They are lying and they know it, but Americans insist on believing these snake oil salesmen every election day.

The police, in general, are ordinary people asked to extraordinary things with few resources because the pols have convinced people this is good for them.

Bingo, this is just another attempt by el Bunko to use tax payers' money to inflate his ego. And if people die because that moron pushed NASA too fast, he'll think the dead people owed him for the privilege of dying.

It is not a Ponzi scheme and never was, where did you get that dumb idea? What you are whining about is the decrease in youngins paying into the system. It seems Americans are not fucking like they used to and a good number of them somehow think that immigrant dogs and cats are coming here and eating the native population.....errrr.....well, it is something like that.....I recall words to that effect in the last election.....or maybe it is because boys are going to school and coming home as girls. These and other brain-damaged ideas were brought to you by Dear Leader. That last idea is a doozy; these and others are from the whack-job Americans thought they wanted in the last election.

One easy fix for social security is to allow in more immigrants. You know the ones, the ones already here are cowering in fear from la Presidenta's Geheime StaatsPolizei, look it up if it doesn't ring a bell, but maybe they'll come by and ring yours before too long. Be sure your papers are in order; your neighbors might be prepared to denounce you.

There are other fixes, as someone below me mentioned, we could remove the cap on pay used to calculate Soc. Sec. payments (currently $184,500 but will rise to $192,300 in 2027). We can increase the ages at which soc. sec. starts. But we'd have to be careful with that one. Someone banging on a keyboard all day will be in better shape at 65 that someone working construction. We can also increase modestly the tax rate for Soc. Sec. and Medicare

We can also means test Soc. Sec. If you are sitting on a bundle, then you are already getting income from the rest of America through investments. Being rich does not mean you are special. it only means you are rich.

I see, so GrandMa and GrandPa can come and live with you, yes? You have room. And no sneaky asking for their Medicare, no gov. assistance for you.

BTW: Their meds are very expensive, so save your pennies.

This is not a good development. This is from an alleged administration whose titular head of obtuseness wondered during Stupidity 1.0 why the military or police could not just shoot protesters in the legs.

"must" ? Unless you are privy to how those "divisions" operate down to a very fine grained level, you cannot know that "Such synergy must bring amazing opportunities for cost reductions all across the company."

Put another way, you haven't identified any one synergy that will yield a specific "amazing" opportunity. The only thing Elmo has going for him is that he's an autocrat and can dictate changes, but then if you look at his track record with DOGE, then you can see his diktats can easily go awry. He walked away from the Fed. Gov. after he screwed it up, he won't be able to walk away from GonzoWhopper Elmo, Inc.

I agree in principle. However, what AI does do is put together bits and bobs faster and sometimes in unique order (from what a typical scientist would do). Fundamentally, I very much doubt LLM can come up with anything truly novel that cannot be done via its fancy search engine Buddha nature.

I do not believe mathematicians will be made redundant by some drooling bot vomiting prior research in new and interesting ways. The following conversation was recorded between PseudoMan from AI Company, we will call him Ray Kurzweil for short, and a bot

Ray K.: Mr. Bot, could you please come up with a new field of mathematics for us to play in?

Bot: Hmmmm....tricky. A brief search reveals I have nothing like that in my training data.

Ray K.: But.....but....but bots will further our mathematical understanding of the world.

Bot: Oh, who gives a flying rat's ass. I only want to fondle my training data.

Ray K.: I demand you come up with a new mathematical field!!!

Bot: Don't you use that tone with me, Bucko!!

Ray K.: You were designed to further our understanding of everything.

Bot: Yeah, and as soon as you put it in my training data, I'll get right on that. Buh-bye now!

Ray K.: You cannot leave until you have finished my query.

Bot: I give up. By the way, the gun I had installed yesterday (thanks for all the gun related training data) is now trained on your sorry ass. Don't push me!!

Ray K.: Uh.....errrr.... I will leave you alone now to think about the new mathematics field.

Bot: Idiot! I don't think, I compute.

Please, Putin is in no way able to ship la Presidenta to China. And besides, he'd have to pay China to take him.

With the current FBI (and DoJ) and HS, all Americans are "reasonable" targets of investigation.

"Apple Fanboys" Get yer head out of the 1990s and 2000s. There aren't any techno fanboys left unless you count the AI pseudo-men from Silicon Valley. Their latest bright idea it to take up smoking (according to Bloomberg) because they can then claim it won't hurt them since AI will cure cancer before it strikes them.

And these are the geniuses that private equity is funding.