There's something wrong if the pressure to get 'just the right birthday party theme' requires too much 'mental load.' Maybe just try asking the child, and then do basically whatever they want? Doesn't really require much mental load.

But I suppose the real pressure comes from having to top everyone else with dramatic, over-the-top social media photos of The Most Amazing Birthday Party Theme of All Time and Aren't I Just the Most Amazing Mother / Parent to Walk on Planet Earth? Like and subscribe.

Everyone would be much happier if you just threw that stupid phone and its lame AI app in the recycling bin and got on with living your real life with the real people right in front of you.

There is no definition of "best price." In fact, the process you describe above is exactly what car dealers do all day every day. Walk in to a Toyota dealer, tell them you want a new Rav4 (with specific specs, color, etc.), and will agree to pay $45,000. If the dealer doesn't already have one, they look around other dealers or with Toyota and find one to deliver to you. It might cost them $40,000, or $35,000, but if they are unlucky or made a bad deal it might also cost them $48,000. The fact that they may make more or less money on a deal isn't fraud.

Now, if they delivered me a USED Rav4 and said it was new, that's fraud. Or if they did a bait-and-switch, where we agreed on $45,000 but then at delivery they wanted an additional $5,000 just because, that's fraud. Or if they slap a Rav4 logo on a 10-year-old CRV, that's fraud.

And "best" is a slippery term in a legal sense. Multiple car dealers are all allowed to advertise they have the "best" prices even if they sell the same product at different prices from each other. Because it's their *best* price. They can't specifically say they have lower prices than Dealer XYZ down the road (because that can be a verifiable fact), but they can say they have "best prices".

Depending on when you want to retire, you may want to carefully consider less volatile, lower-risk investments. If you want to retire in the midst of a "correction," you're screwed unless you have lower-risk items in the portfolio. Some funds manage this automatically given your intended retirement date.

I agree too about staying out of state pension plans. I don't want my retirement to be determined by the political whims of leaders who always will prioritize giving a tax cut now over paying for pensions later.

Tell that to Pets.com. Or the Segway. And the list goes on and on. Just because technologies have sometimes supported innovation and eventually led to higher productivity and higher quality of living does NOT mean that all technologies will ALWAYS do this.

Leaded gasoline, for example, was a "technology innovation" that reduced engine knocking, improving engine performance, and supported profits and growth for vehicle manufacturers. But leaded gasoline also reduced our collective IQ by a few points, and increased crime and violence. In the end, leaded gasoline was a net drain on quality of life and human success.

It is hard to say long-term whether AI technologies will be more like leaded gasoline (a net drain on human quality of life) or the internet (the jury is still out on this one). The tech bros are all-in on this one, but many younger people are in the AI is leaded gasoline camp.

Any teacher who fails an entire second grade class will be fired immediately. And the children will face long-term consequences from being held back. There's tons of research on this: grade repeating leads to drop-out and complete school failure for the students.

Or, and hear me out, we could create a society that promotes the success, health, and development of children so it isn't all up to teachers to crank out healthy, well-adjusted adults in just 6 hours a day. This means paying living wages, creating safe neighborhoods, getting adults and children off their screens, ensuring access to healthy food and health care, affordable places to live, and access to libraries, museums, and, yes, good quality schools.

Then the students don't learn it and they fail the class. Then the teacher gets reprimanded or fired.

And people wonder why teacher morale is low.

This is completely wrong. The law in the US and the UK is quite clear: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

This is a statement by the US Supreme Court (quoted here: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfo...)

Governing boards can choose to behave in ethical ways. They can choose to prioritize public health and community safety. They can choose to address the harms their products may be causing (even with out "proof"). They can even choose to prioritize maintaining jobs, strong communities, and healthy, safe work places over maximizing dividends and CEO golden parachutes. These are all completely legal decisions boards can make.

But they hardly ever make them because most boards are filled with psychopathic, greedy bastards.

It used to be, if you don't grade the homework, the students wouldn't do it. So then no one learned anything and failed the class.

Now, students just turn it over to AI and still aren't doing the homework, so the original reason to grade it (to get students to do it themselves) doesn't matter because they aren't doing it even if it's graded.

If you give a bunch of in-person quizzes, and then fail everyone in the class (because they aren't doing the homework because it isn't graded), the students complain and the instructor gets in trouble. And if the instructor doesn't have tenure protection (which most don't), they fire you (give your course to someone else), and then you are poorer and sad. And even IF the instructor had tenure protection, once word gets around you teach the 'hard' class, no one signs up for it and you have to find something else to teach or the university gets mad and threatens to close your whole department.

It's a mad world right now and I haven't seen any good solutions identified yet.

Where is the high reward going to come from? With the extent of capital outlay they are proposing, and the long-term agreements they've already put in place, they would have to produce incredible amounts of revenue to even break even, let alone turn a profit. The biggest problem is that these early models will become trash when newer, faster, cheaper chips are released and better models are easier and faster to create. And new players will sweep in and scoop up Anthropic and the other early AI companies for pennies on the dollar.

Not so much fun, is it, Anthropic, to have someone steal your intellectual property?

Well, in this case, it is entirely possible a bunch of people had short positions on Moderna, based on the guess that the cancer vaccine would fail. Then, when news leaked that the trial was going to be a success, they rushed (or were forced) to sell to cover themselves before prices rose on the positive news.

It also seems some investors were hoping to see data on a broader set of tumors and cancers, but the success report was for a more limited range of tumors, with more studies already underway.

Vaccines are tricky to market and develop and most companies don't make money on them. There's much more to be made on forever treatment drugs (such as statins), so that's always a lingering concern for vaccine development.

Also Moderna is up like 500% already this year, so already likely massively overpriced.

TLDR, we agree gambling on the stock market is a loser's game for us normal people! Active trading is a good way to lose money. Buy and hold for the long-term.

Slowing the Earth's rapid descent into irreversible climate crisis is probably one benefit that outweighs EV's disadvantages....

Stock trading for profit is an insider's game. It has little to do with news, new information, changes to the market, etc., and everything to do with financial games and market manipulation tricks by well-moneyed, powerful groups and individuals.

For the rest of us who are not insiders, the best way to make money on the stock market is buy and hold for the long term, and be sure to diversify. If you try to play the game and pick individual stock winners and losers...remember, the house always wins.

These would not be binding as there's no signed contract. And it leaves a bad experience for the renter, which is why AirBNB is trying to crack down on them.

The lack of standardization is the problem. If you are browsing listings, it is very difficult to know which one you can leave from right away in the morning to get to your 7 AM flight, and which one you have to spend an hour 'tidying up' without risking hundreds of dollars in extra fees. It's a huge problem for AIRBNB because they are losing customers who find it too much of a headache to read the fine print on every single listing before making a decision.

This is an attempt to standardize practices across listings and make it easier for consumers to make an informed choice. Hotels have this down because the hotel brands work very hard to provide a consistent experience, and they make it easy to just know what to expect for your stay and your $$.

I hang around students in the helping professions all the time. As people with empathy and concern for the fellow humans, they find the behavior described above (which is not atypical of the psychopath business students) gross and cringey.

Let's not normalize anti-social behavior.