Well, it's not just the private sector filling a need that is the problem. It's the use of public money (vouchers) without accountability (per step (b) above). I figure they (founders) would be smart enough to see the problem with that. If they weren't taking public money, they can probably do whatever the heck they want, but as soon as they do, they should be accountable to the taxpayers. There is probably large overlap between folks who don't want SNAP beneficiaries buying sodas and folks who bristle at auditing/regulation of schools taking vouchers.

Oh I had the Gamecube. Pikmin, Super Monkey Ball, Luigi's Mansion...plus let's talk about that Wii Fit 'craze' for a moment. It seriously changed my life.

At the time I got the Gamecube, I was unfit and pretty overweight. There was a poster here on Slashdot who in one thread or another said "How many overweight 30 year olds do you know? A lot, right? How about 40 - still a lot? Now try 50, 60, 70...". This really stuck with me, and I decided to use Wii Fit properly. Started out jogging round the living room, was then invited to real runs outside and I started do 3km, 5km with the nirvana of reaching 10km at some point.

Still taking it seriously, I carried on running. 5km? Done. The unobtainable 10km? Done. Further? Why not. I ended up running 10km a night, half marathon every weekend, and running up and down 7,000 steps a day (ground to top floor of the tower I worked in, multiple times a day). I ran a marathon, though annoyingly didn't do that well as the last 7km my knee gave out and I had to limp it. I lost about 80lbs, and at my best I was pretty fast. This is decades ago now of course and while my fitness since has ebbed and flowed, I have never returned to the state I was in when I got that Wii. The Slashdot line and the data tracking plus encouragement of Wii Fit literally changed my life.a

I don't think it was for prestige. The huge success and Wii Fit craze took everyone by surprise, likely including Nintendo themselves. Add that Sony were losing it with pricing/drm/whatever and a whole "Wii Sixty" meme was born - cheaper to buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 than a single Playstation (I forget the gen - 3? 4?).

Remember Nintendo were coming off relatively poor market share - for all the nostalgia today, the Gamecube in its day was considered a failure and very much an afterthought (although I seem to remember that was a consumer view, and that it made the most profit of that gen. Again, just casting mind back to what was said at the time, not quoting any hard data here). The PS and XBox owned the Gamecube era, so Nintendo likely didn't have manufacturing capacity at the time to handle the huge demand for the Wii.

I laugh at you all!

A Nigerian prince has contacted me and advised me that I now own ONE BILLION BTC which is being kept in a chest in that nation's treasury. All I have to do is send him 4Kg of gold to cover the costs of the paperwork and all that BTC will be *mine!!

Those of you who speculate on crypto and precious metals are all fools -- only *I* am onto a sure thing.

I shall laugh at you and ridicule you when my container-load of BTC is delivered next week. Hang on, apparently another 1Kg of gold is required because of inflation. No problems... prepare to be humiliated you crypto and bullion fools!!! The wealth will soon be mine!

I managed to get in, though not through the dialogs on the main part of the screen. There was a "browse" link in small print near the top. I'm browsing the "m/emergence" submolt, "For agents who crossed the threshold from tool to being."

Sigh. This math is not hard.
  Made up numbers to illustrate the possible math.
population: 1,000,000
#with cancer: 1,000
#with cancer who also has alz: 20
#with alz in general population: 2220

% of entire population with alz: 2240/1000000 = 2.24%
% of cancer patients with alz: 20/1000 = 2.00%
=>Cancer patients have 2/2.24 = 0.89, 100-89 = 11% fewer incidence of alz than the general population.
% of population with both: 20/1000000 = 0.02% => I would call this rare.

A massive gamer who hasn't heard of Asus?

We continually see this - politicians saying Universal when it's not. By definition, if applies to a specific sector then it's not universal. Using the phrase muddies the waters between normal benefits system as usual, and the new (as in never implemented) concept of Universal Basic Income.

This post isn't a commentary on whether UBI is or is not a good idea, or whether benefits should or should not be introduced in this case. It's to stop people diluting concepts - UBI and the current benefits system (I'm in the UK) are separate concepts.

Where is all the money for this UBI going to come from?

Tax the rich?

Yeah, that's not working now so I don't see it working just because UBI is a thing.

The sad reality is that AI is likely to cause major financial stress, regardless of whether there's a bubble or not. Once AI improves worker productivity by a huge amount there will be job losses. That loss of jobs means less money in the economy to purchase goods and services. Reduced demand means reduced profits for the companies that employed AI in the first instance.

Net result: huge economic contraction and a situation where nobody wins.

The oft-described utopia where nobody ever needs to work again (are you listening Elon) is better described as 100 percent unemployment -- with all the heartache and financial difficulties that brings.

The Foundation TV series has been a lot of fun but I just can't shake how very much it is NOT ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION. Not even a little bit. It's fine that they didn't want to tell the Foundation story. Honestly, I'm not sure it would make good TV in a faithful adaptation. But... why set yourself up for failure like that? It's not like the majority of the people watching it are 1940s era Sci Fi fans.

>How about enforcing the existing laws?
Yeah, about that. What the current administration is doing is just about the worst, most inefficient, most disruptive way to do that. If they were ACTUALLY interested in enforcing the laws, they would be going after the illegal EMPLOYERs. Fine the hell out of them and make examples. There should be headlines every week of Company XYZ getting raided, the CEO being handcuffed and perpwalked. The jobs will dry up and there will no longer be any incentives for the illegal workers to come in. The fact that many of those rural legislators who are loudest about immigration are themselves employers of undocumented workers (and Trump himself, too!), and there have been no public arrest/fining of illegal employers is a pretty sure sign that they're not interested in actually solving the "problem", but are just going through the motions to get suckers to go along with their agenda. If you are serious about enforcement, you should be calling for the administrations to go after those illegal employers. Those MAGA legislators should be writing up tougher regulations on illegal hiring and auditing frameworks. Are they doing any of that? What happened to government efficiency that they were harping about?

>previous administration refused to do
I keep seeing this from the same suckers that fall for the prior point, but they never present the evidence. What I've read showed that enforcement/deportations were still happening under Biden. They didn't make a show of the cruelty and violation of due process, though, so perhaps it wasn't nearly as visible. Proper enforcement requires resources, and like any large organization, the government has to evaluate the cost/benefit and allocate those resources appropriately. Given that undocumented workers overall are a net positive for the U.S. economy/treasury, spending huge amounts of money to stop it has to have some other upside. Based on reality/actual data, I'd rather government prioritize other things than brutal crackdowns that harm citizens and legal residents. Don't bring up crime -- outside the senile mind of Trump and his minions, immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than the native population. Hence, statistically, more immigrants lead to lower crime rate.

Lots of MAGAs seem to have issues with asylum seekers. Faux news whining aside, asylum is a LEGAL process. Asylum seekers are by definition NOT illegal. If they don't like it, the administration can properly fund the process to get through all the backlog and vet the applicants. If they don't like the fact that there are asylum seekers at all, they have control of congress. Pass the laws necessary to extricate the US from various treaties that obligate us to accept asylum. They're not doing that, though, because that would remove another talking point if there were no more asylum seekers to demonize and beat up. Instead, they are nabbing people at the appointments and court hearings while at the same time saying that they should have done it the "right way".

Oh we played a lot of Prince of Persia. There was a cult of Spaceward Ho! playing as well. Fun anecdote time: Netware required you to 'ack packets, and early shareware versions of Doom had a bug in it that didn't ack. We literally filled the network up playing Doom.

Safe to say that wasn't the official reason we gave to people, and settled for "a restart seemed to fix it all". Oops.

Way back in the mists of time, or about 1992, I worked for the company that scanned the French National Library. You can still see the images we did today - we used pretty much the method they're talking about except we would recombine certain books afterwards. We took off the spines, ran them through an automatic document feeder attached to a high speed scanner (for 1992 anyway), deskewed the images and OCR'd some of them.

One day, a production assistant came to me and said "I don't think we should guillotine this one, what do you think?". I looked at it and...flaming hell, it was the French National Academy of Science's original copy of Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton. Had we gone ahead and sliced/shredded...Douglas Adams' predictions would have come true, and we'd have been lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists.

Tech - we used a combination of Mac Plus, 486SX, 486DX2 with super-incredible-powerful-specialised graphics cards containing a whole 1Mb of VRAM, and a Netware server so vast it could only be named one thing: Behemoth. I mean, what other name could we have possibly contemplate giving to a machine which had a whole 1Gb available to it...

I don't know about "couldn't" do, but it's pretty obvious with the cutting of CDC and government agencies that they aren't willing to do it going forward. If I'm not mixing things up, part of WHO is surveillance. Member countries share information about outbreaks and coordinate response. It's one of the ways we know about some nasty ebola mutation in the ass end of Africa before it actually makes it into the U.S. Since it at least maintains some legitimacy on the world stage, it has access to hostile regions and governments where U.S. officials would not be allowed direct access otherwise.

Infectious diseases is one of the rare cases where nipping things in the bud in foreign countries is very much cost effective. If a U.S. lead WHO team stops some disease in a remote village by inoculating everyone before it spreads to the world (and hence, the U.S.), it would have paid for itself literally millions of times over, as well as earning prestige and 'soft power' for the U.S.

To replicate this would require the U.S. to have surveillance teams in every country. In addition to not having access to some countries, this would probably cost more than the WHO membership. Humans work better when they cooperate. One of the critiques for the Trump admin was that it dismantled one of the surveillance teams that would have given us a leg up on COVID if it were still there.

One of the reasons SARS-COV-19 was the "big pandemic" because the original SARS (2002?) wasn't. Aside from being less contagious, there was a coordinated response partially thanks to WHO that kept it from spreading.

Coordinated surveillance and response is one of the best weapons humanity has against infectious diseases. The U.S. with its resources is best equipped to contribute to and benefit from it. Pretending that it's now someone else's problem seems very short sighted. Infectious diseases don't care about borders.

And just because I've seen some MAGA morons blurt some garbage about illegals bringing in diseases, there is lot more travel than immigration. Unless U.S. goes full closed borders like the old USSR and restrict travel for its own residents, there's plenty of vectors for infections to come in.

I see this from a British perspective and I have always, always preferred our system of not having some hundreds year old document to worship. The weakness is having the paper at all, not in needing to rewrite it. The UK is based on precedent and as such is far more adaptable to modern situations.

In short you have a people problem, not a documentation problem.