What if the people are disabled so you get support from the state to employ them?

I'm not sure I disagree. I think what you are saying is more or less what I wanted to say, just with more specific detail. I am, however, assuming that somewhere out there are investors who haven't been following Musk in detail.

This clearly needs some out of the box thinking. An idea. How about we put a member of Waymo staff in the vehicle who can see even when network coverage is out and can halt the vehicle? You could even give them a set of local controls, duplicating the ones the remote staff use so that if the remote staff can't respond to a problem they can just take over and keep the vehicle able to move. You'd call them an "engineer" like in a train or a "captain" like in a ship.

BT in the UK is getting rid of its last real POTs customers by offering VOIP with power backup. They can even install a copper to fiber conversion in the DSLAM to make it work, in which case they maintain the last mile copper but nothing else. AT&T could find better (defined as more independent of the wireless network and less subject to collapse during emergencies) solutions than wireless if they wanted.

The crucial thing is some sort of physically connected, no wireless, connectivity and that there needs to be proper UPS and generator all the way back to the exchange. DSL over copper can be fine, VOIP over Cable TV could theoretically work. Satellite or 5G mobile is not the same. In real life that probably means that FTTH is easier in most cases. The little bit of flexibility of allowing copper for places where nothing else has been laid and its difficult to lay new lines can make a big difference to the costs.

Yes, damning food just because it is "processed" is stupid, as there are many forms of processing that improve food health-wise, and yes, there is a lot of hysteria around "what diet one eats" with little evidence backing it.
What they should really say could use an abbreviation: "Food processed by greedy corporations that improve their profits at the expense of making it more unhealthy for the consumer should be avoided to become the main component of one's daily intake."

The small overall score difference between Claude Opus 4.7 and DeepSeek 4 in contests that are based on mostly English speaking participants scoring the results could well be the other way round when doing such contests among a mostly Chinese speaking population.

That is why I do not connect the Xbox to a network. And will certainly never buy any future one that refuses to work without network connection.

Yes, for the price of a new gaming PC they will send you one, outfitted with an "Xbox"-sticker at the front. Then you will only need to buy once again all the games you have on your Xbox discs, and you are good to go again. Ok, some of those Xbox games you previously bought won't be available, but that is just to enhance your experience.

I think nobody at the top of Microsoft really expects or even wants to re-enter the console market. They just want yet another marketing bullshitter join the attempt to mislead people into believing that that Windows pig painted with some Xbox-branding lipstick is a gaming console.

Unfortunately not. The whole point of this story is that SpaceX looks like a reasonably sure bet on space and the military industrial complex (which wants/needs SpaceX's launch capability). However, in fact it's a bet on Elon Musk's ability to deliver AI this time, having failed already in Tesla and OpenAI. He's seemingly let his ego get ahead of himself and forgotten that Tesla, SpaceX and his other success were due to good engineers.

Hantarvirus has an 8 week incubation period. The experts who are currently reassuring us that everything's fine and it doesn't spread have no way of actually knowing that for at least the next two months. Obviously it couldn't have happened yet.

... to allow for the use of LLM-based bots to read texts or to do math, and just like that scores will dramatically improve. I'm sure there are certain companies willing to sponsor such a change of scoring rules / education goals. Remember, as one famous Oligarch stated: “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”

... not for Microslop, who are just doing their business as usual, and won't squeeze any less money out of their vendor-locked-in victims.

And even when they notice that vibe coding does not work that great, they will still try to move expenses away from wages towards tokens paid to some LLM hoster. And once they find out how expensive that gets over time... well, they probably have been replaced by LLMs themselves at that time.