Aren't they all about prepping the student for the world and their future in it?

If you're someone who fails at written tests, hope you at least learned that much and go into a field where you don't need to do work similar to that. Ex. don't be a supervisor that has to fill out a lot of paperwork. But if you excel at test taking and book learning, maybe look into something fitting (legal?).

OTOH, if you're someone who doesn't do well with oral exams, learn that and don't go into such jobs. Ex. don't be a sales person.

AI grading will have its place too. There are those that excel at interfacing with LLMs, and that's a skill in itself. If you suck at these, that's good to know too.

For those looking to use the test results to grade students, if they pass any of those (assuming the test isn't horribly flawed), then they probably know the subject matter well enough, or can fake it enough that it's just about as good. For example, if you can fake it on a chemistry test by looking up the periodic chart, that's fine - you can look it up on the job too. FWIW, my personal favorite are tests that allow outside material - like sure, bring the AP calc book and a calculator with your favorite algorithms saved, but you'll need to do the work.

This is the one area where satellite service makes sense, IMO.

Expecting enough batteries/power at each tower to handle 24-72 hours of power outage is asking way too much; Too much as in, we don't want to foot that bill financially, environmentally, or the maintenance needs. 4hr seems like plenty of time. If one has critical needs, they can setup their fallbacks during that time. One can organize with neighbors in that time to find emergency comms (ex. the neighbor who has satellite service or the local ham op). Emergency services has time to coordinate the move to old radios if needed.

For more than that, additional uptime should be solved by their normal power delivery. Make sure those lines keep power, that way it's central generation instead of batteries up in the hills. If a transmission line goes down, oh well - fix it. That wouldn't be as widespread an outage anyway.

By that measure, you must acknowledge the tech progress Warren Buffet brought us.

You're moving the goalpost because you were called out for being completely wrong. Companies that Musk has a stake in are not the same as Musk the person.

No. That false acknowledgement is not necessary.

Makes me wonder if that is related to how one normally thinks? Lately, I've been reading/watching more about how neurotypical versus various neurodivergent types perceive things. One of the topics is how one experiences thoughts. The visualization of things falls on a spectrum ranging from those who can visualize photographic images on one end to the other end being aphantasia - where they cannot form visual images at all.

That's definitely a thing, and people having different types of acid trips is definitely a thing. I wonder if there are any studies that have attempted to correlate those two. Do people who normally visualize things have more or less intense visualizations when tripping? Do people with aphantasia have more or less intense visualizations? It could be unrelated, or could be a direct relation (ex. maybe you're on the aphantasia side and won't ever get such things?)

That may be, but you literally asked, "Why can't I work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?" Not only can you do that right here in the good ol' USA, you can do even more. And those "great" benefits get worse every year - ask anyone who tried to visit their dentist this year (FYI - they changed plans to save money), or compare the retirement options for new employees versus those hired 20 years ago. Just saying, it's no panacea.

I appreciate the reply. In particular, because it prompted me to look up where NYC gets its power (FWIW, I thought the largest source was from upstate nuclear). Turns out, NYC gets roughly half its electricity from in-city fossil fuel based generation. That comes from 24 power plants, the largest of which provides roughly 20% of the total electricity.

Going back to my back-of-napkin math, at least 12 of these SMR's would be needed to cover just the average load, which I thought was a lot of them. But NYC already has 24 fossil fuel run plants, and they only provide half the power.

So I stand corrected! There probably is enough room within NYC for enough of these SMR reactors to power the entire city without using up much more space than the existing infrastructure. That's a surprise to me!

Three of them would still be inadequate LOL

That would be the imaginary bullshit part that's not actually happening.

HAHHAHA Well played :-)

Joking aside, let's look at the scale here. (please note, I'm using the figures as provided in TFS and some general usage stats from the first google results)

Sweden's population is around 10 million people.
For comparison, NYC is around 8.5 million people. ... this had me wondering how many reactors NYC would need. Finding space for 3 may be feasible, but how many are needed?

NYC uses around 50,000 GWh/year. That averages to 5700 megawatts sustained (yes, I'm ignoring fluctuations and overhead).
TFS says such reactors, "typically generating between 20 and 300 megawatts of electricity."
Some other comments have guessed these may generate around 500 megawatts.

If NYC used these same reactors for baseload, they'd need at least 12 of them. ... Sweden may have room for that, but where would NYC put them? All the surrounding areas have millions more people who also need power. There'd be nuclear reactors everywhere! Surely, we'd cluster them or build a few larger reactors instead.

BUT WAIT! IT'S WORSE! Sweden consumes about 140 TWh annually. That's about three times more than NYC. They'd need about 35 just to cover their average usage!

"adequate" my ass :-P LOL

* Population of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* Population of NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* Electricity use of NYC: https://www.eia.gov/states/NY/...
* Electricity use of Sweden: https://www.iea.org/countries/...

Good news - you can! Ex. get a job with the FDNY and you can easily work 4 back to back 18hr shifts and pick up overtime on your days off too!

Apologies in advance for the following off topic rant/tangent...

FYI, FDNY dispatchers work an abnormal schedule. It's so abnormal it's difficult to quickly describe it. The normal shift, without mandatory or voluntary overtime, looks something like this:

DAY: SHIFT
1: 7am - 7pm (12hr)
2: 7am - 7pm (12hr) ... 24hr between here ...
3: 7PM - 7am (12hr overnight into next day)
4. 7PM - 7am (12hr overnight into next day)
5. off, but they did just work until 7am, so does that count as a day off?
6. off
7. off
8. off ... cycle repeats ...
9: 7am - 7pm (12hr) ...

IE: 4 days on (2x 12hr day, 2x 12hr nights), 4 days off. That repeats 3 times before they get 5 days off, then it goes back to 3 of those with 4 days off between them.

And vacations? Those are pre-assigned and you don't get to pick them.
Sick time? Can't take more than a day without a doctors note.
Lunch breaks? None. Technically not even allowed to eat at their desks, but they obviously must or they'll literally starve.

And they're minimally staffed. If someone calls off, that has to be covered, often requiring mandatory overtime (in 6hr blocks). And due to their pension setup, many try to take excessive amounts of overtime whenever its available, the result of which should be no surprise - they sleep on the job, so their exhausted coworkers on "short" 12hr shifts have to cover for them.

If one has overtime on their first day (IE: 18hr shift), they have 6 hours between the end of that shift and the start of the next shift. They're also expected to come in early to relieve those on duty, and nearly everyone comes in early.

Lastly, their union keeps voting to keep this structure. My guess is some variant of stockholm syndrome runs rampant there. Labor laws have made this sort of practice illegal for ages, but there are exceptions for emergency services. Those exceptions are abused.

DRIVEN BY PROFITS?!?!? Can you say that with a straight face amid this AI bubble?

From this story yesterday: https://slashdot.org/story/26/...

"OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025 ..."
"... measured as a percentage of revenues, the company's operating losses slightly improved year to year, from 237 percent in 2024 to 160 percent in 2025."

Compared to China's EV situation - "the profit margin for China's auto industry plunged to 4.4 percent and dropped further to a historic low of 3.2 percent in early 2026." ... "Gross profit, not net profit, per vehicle, plummeted to a mere $2,000. We can expect the net figure to be loss-making."

IE: Depending on which figure you use, China is somewhere between making a small profit, breaking even, or at a small loss. Meanwhile, OpenAI's losses dwarf those figures.

You have a valid point about RAG usage, but it almost certainly was trained on that data.

FYI, I tried the question GP posted on Google with AI results on: "I have $1000 to spend on a projector, what should I get"
The answer included reference to one URL and 2 products:
https://www.rtings.com/project...
A Google product link for Epson Lifestudio Flex Plus 4K PRO-UHD Projector
A Google product link for ViewSonic PX701-4K Projector

If/when those review sites stop posting such lists, where will the RAG get its results? IE: GP's point stands. When those sites go stale, so do the LLM results.

Aren't the rockets themselves a big fuck you to the environment? Maybe if we send all the billionaires into space that'd get rid of a lot of polution?

If/when we get a space elevator, or some other pipe dream, then *maybe* something? But we're all here, not in space. And in space, getting rid of heat is hard - AI data centers as satellites is a complete fiction. And the moon? That thing is WAAAAY far away. If we need somewhere cold with lots of water, we have a whole continent to use (Antarctica)! And it's SO MUCH CLOSER and much more habitable.

It gives those with the biggest purses more control over the market.

Case in point. Who can offer higher wages? The guy with more money.

For small businesses, it's awful. Look at how many people Google snapped up back in its heyday, and all the bonuses and stock and such they threw at them. And those people may have even made the right choices with respect to their personal financial gains. That didn't hurt Google.

If one has the money and power, labor shortage or labor surplus can be used to their advantage.