Looks like a truck/pickup body on a regular car platform. What they call a "Ute" Down Under.

The only thing I ever got out of doing homework at Uni was a case of beer. The reward for our team coming first in an assignment to devise a strategy for maximizing throughput through a telecoms switch. A far as grades went, midterms and finals set them, 50/50.

But my high school was the same, come to think of it (though it was a Montessori school, a bit different from others). Teachers assigned homework, some even checked that you completed the work, but the only homework that was actually graded were essays. Teachers usually covered the homework quickly at the start of the class, pausing to clarify things if a student had questions. Seems like a good way to find out what students are struggling with, and provide some reinforced learning.

In other words: homework can be a tool to help struggling students to catch up with the class, not to punish them for falling behind. Grading homework is worse than pointless. And in this age of AI, grading homework only further encourages the use of AI.

Reminds me a little of the short story "Manna" about AI taking over all production, and 2 outcomes for society. As a staunch capitalist, I think that in an AI-driven world, or a "post labour" world or whatever you want to call it, capitalism as a means of distribution of wealth is not going to work. Yes, I think many would argue that it is already failing in that regard, but I would counter that the safeguards we have against people falling through the cracks still mostly work... and more importantly, that we have no better system to replace it. But if work itself pretty much becomes redundant, capitalism will only continue to work if we can find a good answer to the old question: who owns the means of production? And those means ought to include natural resources and land as well.

I am sure there are some good answers, and a way to organize society around that new reality. But I'm not at all convinced either that this is where we are headed. By the time governments would have to take action, they'd be wholly owned by the new aristocracy.

You should probably also read the ticket where eMudhra is removed because it clarifies a few things.

They're using Ultimaco HSMs, but it seems likely they weren't willing to pay the HSM vendor to unlock a feature, so they rolled their own and ended up generating the bad keys off-device and then loading them into the HSM externally. So it's less likely that the HSM itself was bad and more likely they did something insecure and dumb to be cheap. There are some pointed questions there which they've just decided not to answer so far, including things they should be able to provide like the key generation script.

The proposed EU age verification app is a good deal less intrusive than any of the nasty mechanisms that some social media is already employing. Most of those are a privacy nightmare. The EU app, in contrast:
- Site / App operator does not get your identity, only a proof of age.
- Government does not get to see which sites you visit.
- Actual verification takes place once, and whatever ID you use does not need to be stored (and can't be subsequently stolen)
- App is open source, so the workings can be verified.

Has it though? In the West, certainly. It's what the MBAs all parrot: focus on your core strengths, divest everything else. Or at least split it off under different names. But there are still Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean conglomerates that make everything from oil tankers, appliances, musical instruments to motorcycles. All under the same name. Somehow they are not too concerned about brand name dilution or core strengths. Like the MCP guy says in Robocop: "Good business is where you find it".

The stock argument is a good point... I'd love to invest in SpaceX the aerospace company, not so much in SpaceX the AI company with a satcom division and its own rocket department. Certainly not if they add an automotive department that seems to have lost its way. Though I don't know if this is about Musk's wants, it smells a lot more like the acquisition of X and xAI by Spacex: a trick to artificially pad the company's valuation, or something like that.

about the Synergy post?

No, not me!

I viewed a YouTube about how Mafia control of the Las Vegas casinos ended by the 1980s on account of Department of Justice going after them for "skimming" income from the counting room to avoid taxes.

Apart from cheating the government, meaning you and me out of lawfully imposed tax revenue, along with the services we the people derive from it, and the odd murder here and there to maintain organizational discipline, Mafia Las Vegas was the Golden Age of the $1 buffet lunch. Sure it was a loss leader that you would drain your bank account at the gaming tables, but whether through illegal of legal gambling, the Mafia offered much better odds than the government in the form of state lotteries.

Sure, from the images, The Strip of the late 1970s was cheesy schlock, but private equity has sunk billions into schlock with high production values. And how they (the current owners) fleece you with a 50 dollars for parking, 40 dollars per night resort fee, mandatory 20% (or more) tipping and on an on. If you had no interest in gambling or set a strict budget on how much you were going to blow, Las Vegas used to be a budget destination, but not anymore!

in Back to School, explaining to a Business School professor tha palms you need to grease came to mind.

who gives it one star in their review on account for the catastrophic meltdown at an urban site.

I would feel better if these modular nuclear reactors were shipped from an Amazon warehouse and hence eligible for the over $35 dollars free shipping.

If they are sourced from an Amazon Partner, I bet they arrive with a cracked reactor core and a leaking pressure vessel?

Capitalism just means that the means of production are privately owned, by investors with a profit motive. That's all. You mention the post WW2 era as an example when life was still good for even the lower incomes, and that was also a capitalist era. Capitalism has brought a standard of living unheard of in most of human history, not to the rich but to the working class.

It took more than capitalism to make that happen, capitalism does not provide equal opportunity to everyone nor does it necessarily distribute wealth fairly. And it seems that capitalism tends to concentrate money and with it power into ever-smaller groups. It takes unions, governments, laws and watchdogs to ensure that businesses keep their proper place, play fair and do right by everyone. And they used to do that fairly well for over a century. It's those entities failing us now, not capitalism. GP is right about that.

Yes and No.
MBAs are taught to look at the wrong things. But that "wrong thing" is not the profit motive. Profit is the purpose of a business, in its essence. A founder or enlightened CEO might give it purpose beyond that, but at its core, profit is the goal.

The real question is: what agencies and regulations exist to ensure that this profit motive - useful as it is - serves society's higher goals?

The mass events (global ones) are not so common, we've had like 4 in the past 80 years or so. But there are some regions (Great Barrier Reef for instance) where it is more or less a yearly affair. It doesn't seem feasible to manually re-seed these areas by hand every year.

It means "you will own nothing", as they no longer offer FSD as a lifetime puchase. It's a subscription.