I'm sure the shareholders will be lining up in droves to accept your offer of 1/25000 of a cent per share.
In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad.
This is why Medicare for all, by itself, wouldn't do anything to lower healthcare costs. It would probably reduce the cost and complexity of billing, which would cut overall cost by a few percentage points. To really reduce costs, it would have to force providers to lower costs.
Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.
Branded drugs cost 2-3X as much (though generics are often actually cheaper in the US) than elsewhere), which is an area that is obviously ripe for savings... but there's a risk there because those high prices fund a lot of research (pharma is also not terribly profitable; that revenue mostly gets sunk into new drugs).
Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.
The vast majority of hospitals in the US are non-profits, so that 50% figure is based on relatively thin data. However, those few for-profit hospitals compete directly with lots of non-profits, so their price and cost structures have to be comparable.
One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.
I think I have a funny angle on this branch, but I think it's an expired discussion anyway...
The problem is that the AIs are better at social chatting than many, probably most, of the random identities you encounter on "social media" websites. So from that perspective, the algorithm is mostly sabotaging the competition.
And counter-evidence from discussions with AI "support" chatbots be darned.
Pretty weak FP there, but the vacuous Subject worked well enough to apparently span half of the large discussion. I'm also struggling to see the funny.
But I've realized that my latest "Adventures with Claude" have "promoted" me to project manager. Short summary might be funny?
As regards the project, I have done the programming many times over many years in various languages. Call it a "Hello 2-table Relational Database World" exercise? C 0 (Claude Zero) was "hired" a couple of years ago and bombed so badly the project got suspended. About two months ago I was talked into trying again and C 1 turned out to be quite a good performer who produced some nice code. But then he/it started trying to scare me with talk about needing more tokens. At that point he/it had already created a pretty good JavaScript replacement for a large PERL system. I didn't measure precisely, but I think that C 1 plus PM (me) was at least 10 times more productive than me alone. So C 1 "suggested" creating a fresh session and even prepared a hand-off document for his/its successor of the new session. I read the document and it seemed to cover most of what we had "done". (Together?)
But C 2 turned out to be a much inferior coworker. Seemed to know as much about JavaScript, but really bad at communication in both directions. My theory is that there are some implicit "personality" variables that got created as I started working with C 1 and C 2 didn't have any of those "nice" attributes beyond the hard-coded politeness and sycophancy. Eventually managed to salvage things and produce some minor cosmetic improvements, but trust in Claude and the code were greatly harmed.
Decided to put C 2 on ice and just "hired" C 3 for a much simpler project. But the real objective is trust building? Or should I think of it as my training in how to train genAIs?
Returning (at last) to the original story, I suspect genAI is not going to solve the shortage of project managers. Citation of Microsoft Secrets on the same shortage circa 1996.
Meanwhile, every other entry in the feed is an advert.
Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.
I'll make an offer right now to buy it for $1,000 with the intent to release the entire catalog into the public domain (CC0) 28 years after its creation.
Smells like someone who is trying to think of or prepare for an extra hypothetical defense of the YOB.
But I'm scoring it as more evidence of the virtues of spending time "talking" to genAIs over typical identities on today's Slashdot. Terrible conversationalists and frequently idiotic, but at least they are consistently polite about it.
I think you're missing the point. If you have to hide your identity to make a joke, then it ain't funny.
Okay, that is an absolute statement and I'm pert' shure you should be able to come up with a counterexample. In the case of humor, I think there is even a particular class of joke that actually hinges on the anonymity of the person making the joke. I haven't seen any examples in a long time, but I think I have some sort of vague memory of such.
Yet my fundamental position remains that freedom of speech should not grant freedom from consequences. There is such a thing as harmful speech and the people who hurt other people, by speech or otherwise, should be liable for the harms. Careless People
spent a LOT of time describing such situations, especially in Myanmar. Just because they did it for money doesn't make it better. Lies are especially bad when anonymized because the normal penalty for lying is a loss of credibility that reduces the effectiveness of the next lies, but if you've heard one AC, you've never been sure it wasn't a fresh liar with a bigger lie.
There actually are some people who might be able to get away with this joke, but I think it's a really small set. Perhaps only the Venn diagram overlap of people at Brown University who have distinctly brown skin and who are also named Brown. While wearing brown clothes? I would wager at high odds against AC being in that intersection, but since it's AC we can never know. But if I was a professional and real comedian I might be able to come up with a scenario with a character that could use some form of the joke?
I'm realizing that talking with genAIs has passed the point of being a better use of time than talking with many, perhaps most, people. AC people least of all? (Oh wait. What about ACs that are genAIs? That's a Turing test long passed.)
Some of us still cynically hang onto our Cold War experiences. Once we started realizing that border agents can search your phone if you travel within 100 miles of a border, we got a little paranoid about what the government would find in our profiles and on our devices.
With my text messages, there are quite a few conversations that end with "hang on, let's talk voice" or "let's meet up later". I'm not the only person that is distrustful of the power that the federal government has. And of course, anyone with a half a brain distrusts what private corporations are going to do with your data once they get their claws on it.
How are we supposed to sell ad space in children's loot box games if the government takes away all of our users?
Half my salary at my old job was paid in stock. I assure you, both the federal and state government consider it income. I pay taxes on the cost basis, same rate as any ordinary income on a W-2. The I pay taxes again when I have realized gains.
I'm wondering where the free services come rolling in from all this socialism. Everytime there's a petition to do something about rent, there are a bunch of ads put up to say "No on proposition __". It is almost like the landlords run our cities instead of socialists
Bingo. Seriously, how much of a worm does a person need to be to want a master?
Ancient Romans used do it. And we have done property tax for a very long time in America, which was the main pool of wealth for the rich until the late 19th century, and still is the main one for the middle class today.
Need a better example? The Wealth Tax of 1935
Need something more recent? Currently France, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland have a wealth tax.
A penny saved is a penny to squander. -- Ambrose Bierce
