The plan is to use human doctors to validate 250 prescriptions, and then declare the AI good for autonomous doctoring? A pharmacist fills somewhere around 500 scripts a day (according to the internetz). So, the company is gonna pay a pharmacist for a half-day’s worth of work double-checking their AI, and then they think they can just hit “run” followed by “profit forever”? Sounds like their leadership is 100 percent techbro and zero percent medically-trained.

I think they need to add several zeros to that number.

Anyone surprised? Anyone?

You find the ipad line confusing? Seems pretty simple to me - ipad standard, ipad air, and ipad pro. Sure, there’s a spec range in each category, but it’s not rocket science.

I totally agree that their macbook product line naming has gotten muddled up with their processor naming.

Trumps crowd is selectively letting in beautiful people. Is anyone surprised? Anyone?

Sorry dude, but like I said, I grew up in the Chicago area at a time when the Chicago DNC political machine was a well-greased operation with out-and-proud ties to the mob. That’s been partially dismantled, but more recently the region has produced winners like Rod Blegoivich.

Who was recently pardoned by Trump, it should be pointed out. It’s almost like the criminally-minded from both parties have some sympathy for each other.

I would agree with you that the red team is currently ahead in the “criminality/corruption score” compared to the blue team, but if you take a slightly longer look at history the picture gets blurrier.

Sorry to say, the Democrats have produced plenty of corruption themselves. I grew up in the Illinois/Chicago region, so I know firsthand.

The Trump/Republican way of operating is actually a return to the historical norm. This is the way it was before Nixon. The societal backlash against that guy produced a bunch of societal rules and traditions that enforced a cleaner level of operation, but it clearly only lasted a few decades and we’re obviously returning to the older patterns. We can expect both Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses to behave like this moving forward.

to watching a bunch of maga-heads overpaying for a gold-spraypainted midtier Chinese-made smartphone, sporting a generic Android OS variant with Trump-themed wallpaper and icons. The "made in America" has become "we activated the SIM on US soil, but who knows if China still has access".

Truly, this is what makes America great.

a sudden drastic increase rapid-unscheduled-disassembly events in the next 5 years coughWARcough.

Trillionaires run/ran a 9-9-6 white-collar-sweatshop, or wishes that they could. Any talk you hear from the CEOs about shorter workweeks should be put in the same bin that holds their statements about corporate governance, work-life balance, DEI, and anything about AGW or the environment. They don’t give a rats ass about that stuff, but society sometimes expects them to look deeply into the camera and let a tear roll down their cheek, but only wink-wink-ironically, because what society REALLY expects them to do is a) make money, b) make money, c) make money and d) make money. If they fail at those criteria, they get quickly replaced without a second thought, and they know it.

BBC isn’t really left-wing. They’re centrist and they try to apply filthy liberal ideas like “journalistic standards”, although not perfectly every time. What right-wingers think is “left wing” is usually “center-left” or straight-up “center”. Most right-wingers have no real ability to identify a true left-winger, and are clueless about the distinction between progressivism and leftist.

In the US, here are the true left-wingers: Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, and not very many others. Not Biden, not Obama, or any of the others on the list that right-wingers love to hate. In terms of media outlets? You have to find stuff like “Liberation News” and “The Socialist”. All the usual ones that are hated as leftist (PBS, cnn, etc. etc.) are actually pretty centrist.

True leftist ideals are mostly bankrupt, and deservedly so, because socialism and communism has a strong track record of leaving country-sized dumpster fires wherever they go. Modern countries have already adopted the best ideas behind socialism and binned the other sorry 95 percent.

Conservatism isn’t really fighting much true leftism any more. They won that fight in most parts of the world. And the few countries where leftism actually won are flaming dumpster fires that serve as an object lesson to any country with even a shred of aspiration. Nowadays, conservatives are fighting moderate-centrism. They’re less likely to win that battle.

Will they sell it? Sure. Advanced? Ehhhhhhh... mmaaayyybe. Iran is technically a middle income country, although they're probably a bit lower than the rankings suggest. I guess their weapons count as advanced if you're a third-world country.

membership dues and the buy-in-bulk model.

Between $65-per-year and the fact that a costco run is at least a hundred bucks. Haha. 200. Who am I kidding? This means that the bottom socioeconomic 2/3 of society is mostly excluded. The tweakers and drunks go to Walmart, along with almost all the poor people.

I'm not judging it or justifying it. Just pointing out that Costco is basically running the country-club of retail shopping. Is anyone surprised that there's more good behavior?

Fair enough, but I sincerely hope “market value” was the REAL market value, aka “your property is marginal and uninsurable” rather than the price that some wealthy beachfront owner THINKS their property is worth.

get away with that sort of in-your-face, I-does-whats-I-wants kind of bu$%sh&t is Trump. I realize that every conman is currently trying to model after the guy, but his mojo is not easily copied. He’s made of Teflon. Nothing sticks.

Bill Clinton was similar. The media called him “slick willie”. Although his shenanigans were pretty tame compared to Trump.

are rare, at least in my field (engineering).

I've done some consulting jobs, and I can straight-up state that they've never even come close to compensating sufficiently for time/hassle/energy expended. I still do them whenever I can, because I think that it's important for an engineering academic to keep one foot grounded in real life. However, I totally understand why my colleagues neglect it or straight-up avoid it like the plague.

When a company looks for a consultant, this is what they want. They want expertise RIGHT NOW. They want exactly what they need, and nothing else. They want to pay 100 dollars an hour. Actually, make that 90. If they can get away with 90, they'll propose 70. They'll haggle down to the last penny. Then, they insist that hours be accounted for down to the 15 minute increment and haggle over every increment in order to drive the price down.

I have no problem with this. These are businesses. They don't have the luxury of much state support and they operate really lean (at least in the US). So, I absolutely don't blame them. But the result is that my compensation gets nickel-and-dimed down to the point where it's barely even worth it. If it's happening formally through the university and the institution gets it's cut through overhead, I usually wind up doing 30 or 40 hours of work and my compensation amounts to a bag of groceries, and the paperwork alone makes it not worth it from a financial perspective.

The financials are so bad that, multiple times, I opted to consult and help a local company with a problem FOR FREE because that was a better deal for me, and at least I have the leverage to work the consulting around my teaching and research schedule. I still value it - I consider it an opportunity to get industrially relevant experience, and a bit of payback to the local economy and a form of charity. But it's a complete losing proposition from a pay perspective.

Maybe it's different in other fields.