Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

Yes, I intentionally don't go to work because I'm too busy going to the Illegal Immigrant Volunteer Slaughterhouse. This means I don't have the money to feed my family or fuck hot chicks. It's a sacrifice we all have to make for the future of our children, though!

Man, they really need to pass a law or something to make it affordable to have healthcare in this country, man. Someone should run on that premise. It's something long past having not been tried.

How do you think those immigrants get those skills in other countries? Are they randomly birthed with them, perhaps assigned them? Bequeathed, like a royal bloodline?

Are you retarded?

No. There are 3 ways they get them, the same as in the US:
1) earn them
2) buy them
3) fake them

At the very least, they had to have the forethought to acquire them in piece or in farce before applying for the job, unless you're suggesting a very large percentage of India appears to have precognition as well as having a disproportionately high rate of supposed idiot savants/high functioning autists (and that 'functioning' is doing a lot of work).

I'm so sick of this shit. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is, you've got to admit that this is completely self contradictory:

"shortages in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, mental health counselors, construction worker and airplane mechanics"

If there is less of something (labor) the value of that thing will increase due to increased demand. It does not matter if they were allocated by government fiat (a communistic thing, funny enough, given the prevalence of H1B as a so-called "capitalist" measure).

More H1Bs and 'helping' companies is more of a planned or managed economy. It's more communist. But the fact is that no amount of societal uplifting that will make an 80IQ citizen a 120IQ citizen so that there's enough doctors or engineers. The only real option is to pay more for it, as a larger incentive to allow those who are smarter to be more likely to pursue it. (After all: as much fun as it is to operate heavy machinery all day, construction still wasn't the career that the smart kids who liked to play into the dirt went into...)

When Disney+ started, it was a great value: everything Disney ever made (aside from the stuff now so cringe it's been memory-holed) plus high-quality new content on a weekly basis. For a genre nerd who likes Marvel and Star Wars, it was rare that Disney+ didn't earn its pay in any given week.

But that was expensive and creatively difficult to maintain. So the price went up, the quality went down, and then the cadence of high-quality original content slowed. Library content disappeared to save on royalty checks. To spackle over the gaps, Hulu got dumped into the app, and now the high-quality Disney stuff is hidden by the deluge of cable-grade Fox programming from Hulu.

A few years ago, Disney+ was at the top of the "keep paying" list for me. Now, I can see dropping the subscription until something interesting comes out once or twice a year. AppleTV has claimed the "always something good this week" spot, and no one can compete with YouTube for "you'll find something that interests you, is the right length, and matches your current ability to concentrate."

Disney lost the plot (and the race) when they stopped trying to be Disney and started trying to be everything for everybody.

Your statement would apply if these data center space nutters could certify that everything they launch will reach escape velocity.

For everything else, what goes up, must come down. Right back into our jurisdiction.

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

We can't afford to let the success of big tech companies depend on the health of fragile meatbags. We need to get resilient, fault-tolerant AGI in there running the enterprise. Also, unlike meatbags, you don't need $100M stock payouts to convince an AGI to work as a corporate executive.

This story has the wonderful title, Fidji Simo says Mark Zuckerberg gave her one piece of health advice years ago, and she wishes she had listened.

In short, she was so excited to have hit her dream job at the age of 40, that work-life balance never entered the picture. Now she's a multi-milionaire who will, probably, spend the rest of her life struggling to have something approaching a normal life.

So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?

Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.

A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.

They've already dealt with this. If you read the fine print on these agreements, many or most of the recent ones say that the company has the option of rolling up any "substantially similar" arbitration cases into a single mass arbitration. (Which as usual, is decided by a person whose paycheck ultimately depends on the business of that same company.)

Probably.
But the mirrors, for example, are made by Zeiss. Lots of parts are from the supply chain and ASML doesn't even HAVE their secrets.

You are right that some industrial espionage could be useful. I just say it's not as useful as most people would assume (which is basically the Hollywood plot of "steal this secret and we can copy it"). Nah. You can find on the Internet how a nuclear bomb is made. But it takes a lot more than a print-out to actually make one, and a couple of those steps are genuinely hard.