>What doesn't have a nonzero death rate?

must resist temptation to take rhetorical question literally *thinks through long list of things found on earth that have never killed a human*

Anyone remember Teddy, the super-toy in the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence?

That was essentially an AI chatbot companion for kids in the form of a teddy bear.

If I had a kid, I'd rather have a well-planned, well-guardrailed, run-by-a-reputable-organization, designed-for-children-the-age-of-my-kid AI-companion interacting with him than some rando human who on one of the less-savory corners of the intertubes where half the people would think nothing of driving someone to tears for the lulz, or worse.

>What happens then is any professor who gains a reputation as a "hard grader" will find students avoiding their course and giving bad reviews.

I don't know about that. Where I went to school, one of the engineering professors in another major had a reputation for challenging his upper-class and graduate students: He was very tough with grades during the semester, but having a reasonably fair curve at the end of the semester.

He also had a reputation for being a GOOD teacher: If you passed, you learned a lot.

He didn't have any problems attracting students.

Hey ChatGPT, which top-20 university has an average ACT score of 34 and an average GPA of 4.2? Provide a list of all instructors who teach a single class.

--

On a serious note, that prompt probably won't work as intended, but it was good for a laugh. Some universities have hundreds of adjunct instructors that only teach one class. Plus, ChatGPT is sometimes flat out wrong.

>It's now entirely plausible that an adversary with a budget of under $1M US could cripple the country for days to weeks,

About 5-10 years ago I read that there were 2-3 dozen electrical substations that, if a key component at each one was taken out all at once, would cause major disruptions for large parts of the United States for years.

If you knew where these 2-3 dozen substations were, you might be able to take them all out at once for a budget of $10M (think: drone with bomb). Granted, $10M is far from $1M, but it's still "not a lot" if you have nation-state- or mega-corp-level money. The hard part is not getting caught before it's "go time."

What was so special about these 2-3 dozen substations? It was who they served and their lack of redundancy. Also, at the time, the lead-time to replace certain key components was measured in years, not months. Multiply that by 2 dozen and you are talking either taking decades to get everything back up or spending years building new plants and training people just so you can get the substations back online within a decade.

The news article that talked about this didn't say which substations these were, for obvious reasons.

My hope is that people at three-letter-agencies are aware of this and are making the power-delivery industry become more robust where feasible and that they are making sure the industry protects those that aren't robust but whose loss would put America in a world of hurt.

I also hope the three-letter-agencies are paying as much attention to the parts of the internet's infrastructure that could be taken down quickly.

>A corporation should start life as it's own entity an be required to end as it's own entity. No mergers or buy outs by other corporations.

Such a rule would be too easy to work around: Instead of "selling yourself" as part of a merger, sell your assets, little by little, to the company you want to be absorbed by, and passing the profits on to your stockholders as a special dividend (sadly for the stockholders, this will mean taxes on dividends). When you are down to nothing of value beyond your corporate archives and the paper they are printed on, dissolve the company and pay out any remaining cash to your stockholders.

Sure, you could probably find a way to make that illegal, but someone smarter than me would figure a way around that too.

If I'm hiring or deciding who I want to be on a committee or board, I want more than individual merit and individual skill.

I also want a good, cohesive, intellectually diverse group.

This means I want

* people who can work with each other
* people who have diverse live experiences
* people who have different things to "bring to the table"

I'm fine if the entire group is "white men" (or any other "born the same" group) but I don't want them to be all "white men" (or whatever group) who grew up in the same neighborhood, traveled in the same circles, have the same attitudes, and who have the same skill set, even if they are the best in their field.

Likewise, I don't want a racial/ethnic/nationality/gender blend if everyone of them group up in the same neighborhood, traveled in the same circles, have the same attitudes, and have the same skill set, even if they are the best in their field.

If I'm hiring for a open slot in an organization, I'll be looking for what the organization needs in addition to what the specific slot needs. If the company is thinking about expanding to, say, Mexico and we have very few people who speak Spanish or who have knowledge of the culture, I'll hire someone who has the basic competiency for the current position who can speak Spanish and who has lived in Mexico for several years and who can bring that experience to the table in a way that is useful to the organization before I hire someone who is a better fit for the open position but who brings nothing else to the table. Why? Because I'm planning ahead.

It's not that easy.

Let's say this organization went to trade shows and academic conferences to present its research.

Let's say it turned out that in aggregate, the seminars it went to had an attendance that was skewed towards some minority group.

Let's say someone in the government got a bee in his bonnett about it and accused the Python Foundation of discriminating against white males in choosing what in-person events to present its research at.

Even if the Python Foundation eventually won, they would still have to spend a large amount of resourced defending themselves.

Now let's say this happened a dozen times, and the Foundation wasn't able to prove their innocence in one of the cases. Then the feds will start "clawback" procedures, which could become an existential threat to the organization.

The combination of the rules and the likelihood that the federal government will come after the Foundation for any perceived violations is just too much. The "other golden rule" says "them with the gold makes the rules." With the current administration, it's best to avoid taking federal government money if at all possible.

It's actually worse than that... your calculation is off by three orders of magnitude. 1.4B users, not 1.4M.

At a trillion dollars a year they'd need to increase the cost by a factor of more than 4 and increase the paid user count to 1/8th of the entire planetary population just to cover capital spending. If you charged corporate America $30k a year for each employee made redundant by AI you would need to replace ~20% of the entire productive US workforce to cover just those costs.

Oddly enough, buying ponies for those million little girls would cost less around 1% of the proposed annual spend here. You could also buy a backhoe for a million little boys for another couple of percent or so.

"Corporate America" typically has non-management advancement tracks. When I worked for Siemens, engineers were well compensated, senior engineers were more well compensated, and principal engineers made more than the managers they grudgingly agreed to work for.

>A paper passport doesn't increase your odds of getting out.
If your passport is flagged, you can still take a real paper passport and sneak across the border into Canada or Mexico then either ask for asylum or just live like a tourist, using your passport as your ID for routine things where it won't be verified.

In the post-WW2 era, most towns of any size had several very active social/fraternal groups, not to mention churches and workplaces where friendships were forged.

Try Bluey. Seriously. It's a parenting show disguised as a children's show.