There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

How can it be that? Survival has never been more assured. I wonder if we'd be less depressed if we had to do physical labor for food and fight the neighboring tribe once in a while to punctuate life with more immediacy and urgency.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

I do think what you're describing will be the future for the most part. We aren't going to be digging through layers of gui menus or doing keyword searches to try to find a setting. You'll just tell it what you want in plain speech and it will do it.

As for the demise of apps could there be a platform based on an AI that knows how to generate information displays and retrieve various information, and each 'app' is just set of prompts for the AI? Not sure. But I'm sure it will be tried.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

I wonder if this threshold was ever surpassed when "electronic mail" was one of the main internet applications. I remember hearing that a large majority of emails were spam many years ago.

Well, there's also the issue of having a "throat to choke." A large part of using SaaS is that when it doesn't work, it's somebody else's problem to solve.

What a load of contorted nonsense.

What is "OpenSource" anyway? Is that a word?

Is $1.68B for a battery a lot? Building a 1 GW natural gas plant costs $1â"1.5B. Then you pay $200M per year for gas, forever. Or $600M per year in Europe.

Of course, the energy to charge the battery isn't free either. But these numbers are getting to be in the same ballpark like never before.

No I think you're mistaken. The capacity is 800 MW, with a capacity factor of 40%-50%, which assuming 1 kW on average per home comes out to about 350,000 or 400,000 homes.

Hmmmm, does that mean my account is now a scarce resource that will skyrocket in value? I'll start the bidding at $50k.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

The AI already do math outside the LLM. Ask ChatGPT what's the square root of 12345, it replies immediately with the right answer rather than trying to figure it out.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.