Does "The bias is in favor of clean athletes: that you can be clean and win' actually follow in any way from the discussion of various bike, itinerary, and diet optimizations that would presumably also be helpful to people shot full of veterinary hormones or whatever; or is this just Tygart saying what his job requires?

I'm definitely not a cycling strategist; but the various optimizations described sound like they are either neutral(like lower drag frames), or potentially even more helpful if you can find a way to sneak a few drugs in(like tighter diet control and better route planning that would potentially reward the ability to make quick metabolic adjustments under specific circumstances); none of those changes sound like they are skewed in favor of baseline users specifically.

Per Delta, the AI pricing isn't individualized, meaning all customers buying the same class of service at a given time will see the same price, so I don't think that would get you anything, unless maybe your AI agent gets good at predicting when exactly you should buy your ticket, but that seems unlikely because your agent will always be operating with less information than theirs (e.g., yours doesn't know exactly how many seats are already sold).

I find that it works well to treat current-generation AI agents like bright, incredibly fast but overenthusiastic and incautious junior engineers who do not learn from their mistakes. They can be extremely useful, but you have to be careful to limit the damage they can do if they happen to screw up.

I don't think anyone struggling to afford health insurance -- especially now that insurance can't deny pre-existing conditions -- is shelling out $20k for bleach injections. It would be much cheaper to get an individual healthcare policy and get it to pay for proper chemo.

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

Nah. Transactional implies a level of coherence and planning that is clearly absent in the current administration.

Sharepoint is where documents go to die; so ransomware is more of a euthenasia policy than a real attack.

The only nice thing I can say about Broadcom's support portal(which is shit regardless of what 'entitlements' it thinks your account has) is that it treats the SHA hashes as being on the public side of the paywall for any downloads that require a signed in account and specific blessings of that account; rather than putting the SHA and the download link on the same paywalled page.

This makes getting the binary from someone more competent and then checking its legitimacy considerably easier.

Yeah, I was adding that note mostly because it is relevant to the "but what if they encrypted a hospital and people are dying right now?" case. If it were actually the case that you just needed a private key and 10 minutes to get things back up and running you would need to at least reckon with the "yes, we are in fact incurring more downtime now, with the consequences that probably entails, because we believe it will result in better ongoing results" issue. Since recovery tends to be fairly arduous even when people do pay up(and often relies in large part on the same capabilities you'd use for a rebuild or restore from backups) the questions about whether you'd really let patients die while the lab is down are often less compelling than they sound(not entirely fictitious, depending on the size of the population served by the lab and the urgency of their requirements even an hour's difference could easily be killing someone). It's still something you do because you think the ongoing equilibrium created by not paying will be better; but the option you are turning down is not necessarily particularly fast.

I'm really not sure why I'd want to risk helping fund a domestic authoritarian when I've got the option of spending less on a foreign one whose reach is less likely to include me.

There are absolutely Americans I could get behind buying hardware from; but, for some weird reason, naming your defense contractor after a Tolkien thing is a pretty reliable sign of being among the most degenerate flavors of reactionary techbro going.

As an American, I'd be doing the same if I were in your shoes.

exception proves the rule. Most marathons are very very flat.

As the grid gets greener, they aren't 'causing' the problem anymore, just localized hotspots.

The planet will not warm to levels where AC/Heat Pumps aren't viable* cooling tech. 120-130 is well within operating ranges....for AC and heat pumps, even up to 145.

*with the caveat that if the average global temp on the planet is 130....AC will be quite a few rungs down the ladder of problems we'll be facing.

OP is just wrong.

Ask yourself what other sport has the physical demands of cycling.

3 grand tours each year that are 2000 miles long...
in 3 weeks...
over 100 miles each day...
over multiple mountains on any given day....
while sprinting on flats at 40 mph.

Plus dozens of day and several/day races.

Marathoners are the only other mainstream sport close and that's generally pretty damned flat...lol

One issue is Grand Tours. 19 days in 21 days. You need the bike basically every day.

They already x-ray every bike, every day I believe.

I also believe I've seen then use FLIR/infrared on the bikes while a race is going on. hiding a heat signature in very small spaces isn't easy.