If you haven't seen anyone suggesting this, you didn't look hard enough. For just one example, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel was interviewed in April:

Eventually, Bancel added, Moderna hopes to be able to have a two-in-one vaccine of sorts that protects against seasonal flu and Covid. The company in September announced its intentions to make a flu vaccine.

“What we’re trying to do at Moderna actually is to get a flu vaccine in the clinic this year and then combine our flu vaccine to our Covid vaccine so you only have to get one boost at your local CVS store ... every year that would protect you to the variant of concern against Covid and the seasonal flu strain,” Bancel said.

This brings to mind the CDC vaccine schedules for babies and toddlers, which call for them to get as many as six or seven vaccines in one day, on the theory that many people bring their tots to the doctor rarely if ever, so any opportunity to vaccinate them should be seized. I'm personally skeptical that any proper investigation has been done on the possible ill effects of kids getting so many shots at once rather than separately, and so my kids got their vaccines one at a time, spaced a month or so apart.

Yeah, there is a big push to get kids into "coding". There's even an outfit promising to get them coding React apps for money in fifth grade, when they should be building tree houses. It's ridiculous.

One great organization teaching kids creativity and inventiveness is Destination Imagination. It hosts a global competition in which teams of kids compete for the best solution to both a challenge that's known in advance, and "Instant Challenges". Parents promise to help, but not to interfere in the slightest-- so the kids end up learning to self-organize and work as a team, too. My kids participate, and it is terrific.

So who's pushing for "an army of code monkeys"? Two groups, parents and corporate bosses.

Parents have noticed that software work still pays a living wage (unlike so many other jobs in America) and so they want their kids to get into the field.

Corporate bosses have noticed that software work still pays a living wage, and so fund learn-to-code programs that they hope will increase the supply of people with the necessary skills. With enough people chasing the same number of jobs, their corporations wouldn't have to pay developers a living wage anymore.

Something doesn't sound right.

What's not right is your unit of measure. The new floor is 30 cents per minute, not per hour. 30 cents per minute is $7.20 per hour, which is about on par with the U.S. minimum wage of $7.20 per hour.

It should have read: He would work his full day in the office.

> I'm still flabbergasted that he was using servers in the U.S.

He may have used some servers in the U.S. but the server the FBI grabbed was overseas. From the complaint, page 14, item 22:

In particular, the FBI has located in a certain foreign country the server used to host Silk Road's website (the "Silk Road Web Server"). Pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request, an image of the Silk Road Web server was made on or about July 23, 2013, and produced thereafter to the FBI.

There's a list of U.S. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties here. Who's got a guess?

I only support this if it can eventually make Maciej Ceglowski's awesome Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel a reality, so that we can finally get decent burritos on the East Coast:

Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.

High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second - even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.

Though there are interesting speech recognition products for other applications ; for this task Dragon and IBM ViaVoice, both sold by ScanSoft, are pretty much the only software choices until someone qualified gets an NSF grant to beef up Sphinx.

I can second the recommendation of the LDC's XTrans if you're going to do this yourself.

If you want someone else to do it, here are a lot of podcasters who want transcripts, and a bunch of transcription services have sprung up to address the market. They've already implemented a lot of the quality-control mechanisms you'd have to address in order to get good results from something like the Mechnical Turk.

The Wall Street Journal ran a side-by-side comparison back in 2008 and recommended castingwords.com, but another provider may very well be better by now. Shop around.