At that point decent emergency healthcare in remote locations like the upper Andes, remote mining camps, container ships, and antarctic research stations becomes possible. Parachute the robot surgeon in to the site, set up the mobile operating theater, and carve away. For that matter, it would make sense to send one along on lunar and deep space missions, both as surgeons and general fetch-and-steps.

This is a projection of personal issues.

Normal people find "not being able to comprehend other person's words" to be a much greater obstacle to comprehension than "psychological issues".

Because most people are sane and have a reasonable amount of control over their psychological issues.

I had a friend who knew both Spanish and French. She decided to take up Portuguese because it was similar to both. At one point she got so confused she couldn't use any of the three!

For totalitarians, need to identify people is critical. It's why DPRK is indeed democratic and holds elections where Kim wins every single time.

Because voters are identifiable.

This is why 16 gig slow GPUs are more expensive right now than very fast 12 gig ones. More RAM means bigger model can be fit into memory. Also why 24 gig models are unobtainium.

4090s and 5090s have been long used for narrow models in things like research in much of third world. This is the natural next step. Shrinking models further so they can be operated from phones that already have good enough cameras to enable things like discriminating vision, where model helps identify specific things that camera looks at. We're looking at the next big ag breakthrough in marginal places like Sahel. We now have an actually good chance of AI machine vision doing something we just couldn't do with mere human vision and algorithmic machine vision. Identification of pests and weeds, their eggs and larvae, etc.

And in medium to long term, it looks even better. We may have an actual viable chance of eradicating Tsetse in medium term future with AI vision. One of the main reasons why Sub-Saharan Africa is still absolutely fucked in terms of human development may actually be finally removed.

X's "automatically translate into your language" feature has actually rebuilt the tower of Babel. The main barrier in interpersonal communication came crashing down.

I suspect that minors can to an extent form contracts. For example, to buy anything from a store, you have to fulfill a contract (money for product). This does not require parental intervention. They can take on a summer job. Same thing.

Parental intervention only comes when there are contractual violations (i.e. minor shoplifts, parents are on the hook for at least some if not all of the damages). Though in some cases/places, parental acceptance can be required for taking on a job as a minor.

So the argument they're making is most certainly legally sound in this aspect. The point of contention is going to be "how much can a minor contractually agree to on his/her own" and "with this much additional obligations, how can amount of obligations for each contract be verified".

The whole thing is a horrible mess because before ease of access granted by computerization and proliferation of networking of computers, most contractual obligations required some kind of face to face verification of basics. When you applied for a summer job as a teen, you got into an interview where your identity got verified.

Meanwhile today, the issue is that due to aforementioned factors, we now have countless contracts that are made without parties ever encountering each other in a face to face situation. This seems to be, on a fundamental level, an attempt to get something that is as close to "face to face" as can be generated in age of social media. I.e. other party gets to at least verify if you're specially protected kind of a human (minor), or one that is fully legally responsible for him/herself. Something that used to be done face to face for each contract that extended significant legal obligations for both parties.

But it's clumsy to the extreme, which is likely the main reason why it's being fought over. Essentially instead of "protecting the companies from having unknowingly taken on additional obligation of contracting with a minor", which the legislation purportedly is trying to do, it instead just punishes everyone who isn't a minor (both users and companies) by forcing companies to assume that unless proven otherwise, everyone has those additional obligations of contracting with a minor.

A lot, if not most, gold trades never involve metals physically changing hands, any more than stock trades involve you handing over paper certificates. Generally if you're a large buyer you purchase the gold from an exchange and it sits in their vault where the neighborhood meth head can't get to it.

They also claim:

They're not going to be the first, China already will sell any friendly country advanced modern nuclear reactors which go into production only six years after ground breaking. The US, not being a friendly country (to anyone but billionaires, anyway), still relies on 70 year old technology for ours.

Oh? Didn't know that. They still make spring steel in Switzerland?

The info out of the Ukrainian MOD is even less reliable than that from the Kremlin, which isn't reliable at all. Both sides lie with abandon.

And Baba Yaga drones are mostly used on resupply missions for trapped troops.

And don't forget to include "board memberships for the family members of generals and admirals" among those incentives.

Middle-range drones are in use because anti-aircraft measures have gotten so good. Once they've been depleted you'll see single-use drones replaced by reusable aircraft dropping dumb bombs again, which Iran did during the height of the Usrael attacks and Russia occasionally does in lapses of NATO weapons shipments.

Pretty sure he means "made in" like a new VW can say "Made in the USA", but all the components were made in Germany, Mexico and China and it's just assembled here.