But then they go ahead and rank extensively.

Because every broom closet, subway toilet and dumpster in town is now an AirBnB.

Besides that, it's unlikely people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg would have made it where they did had they not at least started college. Being at Harvard brought them credibility and connections that were essential to their start. In Zuck's case, Facebook was literally brought about as a digitization of the college directory.

Annual rankings never made any sense except as a device to sell magazines. Major universities don't rise and fall meaningfully on an annual basis. In fact, the vast majority never really change their place in the pecking order. It's only something like a mass influx of money or some calamity that is likely to meaningfully change the perceived prestige of a university.

Besides that, ranking schools as a direct competition never made much sense, especially when they have dramatically different offerings and goals. Very, very few students are cross-shopping The Air Force Academy and Pomona College, and yet U.S. News ranks both against each other as "liberal arts colleges." Likewise, someone looking to major in music at Oberlin isn't really comparing to someone looking at a mechanical engineering degree from Colorado School of Mines. Instead, it would make a lot more sense to just sort schools into some broad categories. Something like:

1) Elite private universities (i.e. Harvard, Yale, etc.)
2) Top public flagships (U.C. Berkely, UVA, etc.)
3) Military Academies (shouldn't be ranked against each other or other institutions)
4) Selective private universities and liberal arts colleges (Duke, Pomona college, etc.)
5) Second-tier state schools
6) Less selective private schools
7) Regional commuter schools
8) For profits

But I suppose you don't really need a magazine to tell you which category most fall into.

At this point they basically only exist as a rankings agency for colleges (and to a lesser extent institutions like hospitals). The paper news publication shut down some time ago.

First experience with the Prime free trial and the following cancellation was in 2016 (called Premium at the time), I did several times after that and I never had a problem. I never had a problem with Amazon in general, except for the following, who were mostly my fault:

- Forgot to unsubscribe after my trial period of Audible so I had to pay the monthly fee for a month, didn't get a refund but no problem cancelling, Maybe I could have got a refund by calling support, but I didn't bother and used the voucher I got.

- A single noticeable counterfeit received over about 100 purchases, a fake Samsung charger, but of good quality. I expected that considering I paid well below retail price. Didn't dispute, used the charger for years without problems. Now, I mostly stopped buying from sellers that don't pass the smell test on Amazon. If I want cheap Chinese crap, I usually go for AliExpress, which is significantly cheaper for the same product. In fact, many such Amazon listings are dropshipped from AliExpress.

In your situation, I suspect that someone else used your CC number for their own Prime account. It is possible that whoever stole your CC number had other payment methods, probably other stolen CC numbers, and he paid with them to renew his subscription. The surprising part is that both Amazon and your bank let an obviously fraudulent transaction pass several times, it looks like a big mess.

The FBI and DHS are now focused on Trump's round-up of illegal aliens.

>>CEASELESS lawfare

translation: attempting to hold trump responsible for all the blatant law-breaking

This is no longer a legitimate court. They twist the constitution however they want it. Precedence be damned. That they call this "originalism" is but a sick joke and icing on the cake of corruption.

So close... but no cigar.

In large companies, these pointless mandates come down from higher-ups who are completely divorced from individual contributor reality - and are initially completely ignored by everyone below a certain level in the org chart. Ground-level HR doesn't want to enforce these orders, because they're measured on (inter alia) employee satisfaction. If the higher-ups don't go investigate, they won't find that their whims are being ignored, and life will go on - everyone remote, but the top brass in blissful ignorance.

What can upset this apple cart is either a nosy higher-up who actually follows up on his diktat "just because I want to see my monkeys dancing", or a surprise event that reveals that no warm bodies are, in fact, sitting in cubicles. For example (and this is not a theoretical example) a site might get a surprise visit from a third-party inspection team, and nobody is there to answer the door. This typically leads to a progressive tightening of rules after each incident. Again, basically everyone below a certain level in the company recognizes that this is meaningless nonsense, and complies to the absolute minimum degree possible, with a strong element of "don't ask, don't tell". I've observed this at multiple organizations.

The only case where followup/investigation is guaranteed from the get-go is where RTO is explicitly put in place to cause attrition. Attrition numbers are easy to see on a single slide of a PPT, and they're watched closely. If not enough people quit, there will be an investigation as to why not enough people have been made sufficiently unhappy to leave the company.

The actual application refuses to discuss specific topics even for research and test purposes . This is wrong. The actual engine should not be programmed to limit speech. It classifies preprogrammed topics. If it doesn't like it it will refuse to participate. This is not an LLM issue. You can change LLMs and it will respond in the same way. The government should not be using it.

If we can automate cars, trucks are even easier as they mostly navigate highways.

Waymo is still very much in testing/pilot stages with service only in limited geofenced areas. When it has the technical capability to be general-purpose, it's likely to grow quickly.

I don't think this is necessarily a gender thing. It's more that when childbearing is a choice, a large portion of society decides against it. Most people who do choose to have children still do so as a couple. As a parent myself, I can't imagine how difficult the early years would have been solo. It's also hard to imagine having more than the two kids that I have, and if everyone in the world were like me and had two, the population would continue to shrink.

To stop population decline, you'd need to get rid of birth control, and I don't think that genie goes back in the bottle. But population decline caused by birth control is by far the most humane way for the population to decline. In the past, the human population has declined through famine or disease. I'll take low birthrate over that any day.