If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.

Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.

I'm glad that worked out well for you, but a planned surgery is drastically different from emergency services. You don't have the time or option to make sure that all the dozens of providers are in-network, that your plan covers everything (such as life-flight, which usually is *not* covered), etc.

Not to mention, before Evil Obama signed the ACA into law, most cheapo medical insurance plans (and plenty of less cheap ones as well) had annual or lifetime maximums that could easily be reached for emergency life-saving procedures. Thankfully that's less of a problem now (damn you Obama!).

Nah, in the US we love using "buy now, pay later" for everything, including emergency medical care.

Unfortunately "pay later" often turns into "get fucked later" or "bankruptcy later" for emergency services. Maybe that $2,000 ambulance ride doesn't break the bank, but god help you if your unconscious body goes on a $100,000 life-flight helicopter tour.

And fun medical bonus! There's an extra element of surprise because you have no idea how much you're going to have to pay until months later and you're probably incapable of making an informed decision or agreeing to the services you receive! Whee!

I see you've never been in one.

Google and Waymo have explicitly and repeatedly said that they are fully liable for accidents caused by their vehicles.

I have some cousins who through a family member I'm not biologically related to inherited a congenital disease that the only current "cure" for is to have to have an organ transplant at some point in their lives. I have an idea of what you go through from knowing what they go through. I want to point out that you may be able to get your doctor to give you a prescription for the mRNA flu vaccine even if you aren't in the approved age range.

You enjoy your horse dewormer, I'll take the mRNA gene-editing.

Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics:
Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can.

So. Who wants to bet that no one will point out what abysmal sysadmins they are, letting internal servers run amok all over the open Internet, only finding out days afterward after someone had to tell them.

And who wants to further bet that the AI grifters will respond that the only way to prevent this from happening again is to give them trillions more dollars so they can build bigger, "hardened" datacenters?

Is there no level of rank incompetence they won't excuse?

What this country needs is a good two-dollar red-team AI, that will try to create an exploit based on a submitted bug report and use the exploit to compromise a Mac in the QA lab. If it succeeds, the bug report is definitely genuine and should be prioritized.

I agree that has historically been the case, but OTOH Trump is deteriorating so rapidly (both psychologically and in terms of his level of popular support) that after November's bloodbath (and whatever Trump's unhinged response to that will be), the remaining Republicans may well decide it's in their own interest to get him out of office sooner rather than later.

We've reached the "Pope is selling indulgences" phase of the American government's decent into blatant corruption.

You're the one claiming it's well-known, but you are unable to provide a single link.

Figures.

Worth it for what? If the answer is a different financial motivation, then it's just a different form of corruption.

NONE of them have done this, not in 250 years. Not until Trump. Presidents make a lot of money after they leave office, yes, especially in recent decades. They command incredible speaking fees (Obama famously got $400k for one speech), they write books that make millions, etc. There are lots of people who are willing to give them money to get close to them, get their advice, etc.

But until Trump, none of them has used the office of the president to make money. No one else has sold pardons. No one else has set up a public stock and a memecoin to facilitate billions of dollars in bribes. No one else has brazenly sold insider secrets to stock traders.

Trump's corruption isn't just new in scale, it's a completely new thing that the United States of America has never before seen. We've seen plenty of corruption elsewhere in government, at all levels, but never in the oval office.