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Comment Re:Social medicine vs private healthcare (Score 1) 81

You live in the UK, right? You know that Frank Dobson’s best achievement as health secretary was bringing in the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), which makes decisions about what treatments to fund? Because no health system has infinite money, and so the alternative to making difficult, but calm, considered, evidence-based decisions for the whole country, is making those decisions whimsically and locally creating postcode lotteries and funding care for the patients who excite the most sympathy (eg cancer) over care for who who don’t (eg Alzheimers).

I have a dear friend, a senior clinician, who has served on a NICE committee. Genuinely some of the most amazing work he does. The decisions are really hard but they’re also inescapable.

Comment Re:No vaccine yet (Score 1) 81

Worth remembering that many European countries have tax-funded state provision of healthcare, often with national components. It’s not all social insurance like France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Spain, Portugal, Italy, DK, NO, SE, FIall Beveridgean. The UK has the highest degree of centralised organisation, though.

Comment Re: America: Challenge Accepted (Score 5, Informative) 81

1. Separate shots haven’t been made at scale since 2009, so there’s no chance of doing this for the relevant populations
2. It creates a significant window of months in which babies are unprotected for two of the diseases, so it’s materially more dangerous
3. It means all these kids have more injections and discomfort
4. It’s pandering to idiocy. It’s really simple to explain that kids are exposed to far more pathogens on the daily than they’ll get in the three shots, and that their immune systems can cope. We need to do that, not admit defeat by dumbasses

Comment Re:American governance systems are so odd (Score 1, Troll) 22

I understand the *theory*, in the same way I understand the *theory* of the second amendment. But just like I cannot look on with anything other than horror and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of the theory being implemented for 2A, so I cannot look on with anything other than dismay and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of having small settlements run their own police departments.

And obviously, while the citizenry of a place can, in general and in principle, vote the bastards out, or up sticks and leave themselves, many types of consequence of the (ab)use of coercive state power are permanent and terrible. From disfigurements to deaths to many other sorts. So when a town kicks out its councillors or fires its police chief, it may simply be too late for an individual innocent citizen lying dead in the gutter thanks to an aggressive and badly trained cop who took against them.

Comment Re:Us number plates are hard to read (Score 4, Interesting) 111

That difference is just bonkers to look at. But unsurprising: the UK designed the registration plate as a standardized machine-readable piece of road infrastructure. US states treat it as a state-issued identity/emblem/mini-billboard which also happens to carry a registration number. States literally sell specialty plates for money. Sometimes a state will go for a sane design, but mostly they just arms race their way to the gaudiest shite possible, legibility be damned. And then have creepy shitty AI ALPR readers with wild false positive rates trying to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes the UK's centralisation is a really obvious advantage, and this is one of those cases.

Comment American governance systems are so odd (Score 1) 22

Why on earth would a small town (30k population!) be the right scale of organisation to run all this stuff? The UK is massively over-centralised, but it's still better as an approach than this. The smallest unit of government here is a town council, which goes up to 40k people, and all it has powers to do is manage things like parks, playgrounds, community halls, cemeteries, allotments, and bus shelters. Next level up is the district / borough / unitary council, up to 400k, and their powers are still limited to housing, parking, social services and a few other things, notably not including emergency dispatch or policing!

The tension between local and central is eternal, but I'll never understand the attraction of pushing coercive state power down to hyper-local level: it's just a recipe for abuse and fiefdoms, every bit as much as a fully national force accountable only to a national minister.

Comment AI is not the product (Score 1) 71

most of those companies have serious issues zoning data centers and getting power sorted out.

Right now, we're living in a world where for operations, all the companies need new modern data centers with the power grid and additional infrastructure to support them. By spending on AI, they get the land, the leases, the power, the infrastructure, etc... all because in the name of national security, the geriatrics... I mean congress and the president will just throw money at making it happen. They don't really need the data centers, they need the zoning and infrastructure for the data centers.

When AI bubble pops, the government will have to step in and bail them out and they will continue with business as usual. But these companies are much smarter than this. They know this is a bubble, they know it will pop. Unlike Anthropic or OpenAI, they all have products and long term customers and will be just fine.

Musk will use the data centers to handle self-driving, robots, space operations, etc.... this is money well spent for him. The other companies will continue to deliver cloud services to their customers and AI will still be a major part of it, just not he headline. OpenAI and Anthropic and ... all the rest of the "AI is our product" companies will just fizzle as if they never existed.

Comment Re: nobody should ever need more then 640KB or RAM (Score 1) 133

Please please please never use occam's razor in any way like this again. Occam is a terrible tool employed generally by morons to make themselves sound intelligent when they're simply spouting shit. I get it, it sounds really cool... like DeMorgan's theorem or Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems but unlike these, Occam's Razor has no foundation in science, math or anything else.

And that said, while Bill doesn't have a photographic memory, I expect that like myself, he can recall nearly verbatim every conversation he has ever had.... ever

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