This stuff is just so marginally important compared to what actually matters: improvements in battery chemistries and motors, etc. In the last few weeks alone, we’ve had flash charging coming onstream for LFP, sodium starting from three big players (CATL, BYD, Gotion), Geely saying solid state starting in 2027 and being very specific about it this is what really matters.

This has to be a parody, right? You’re lampooning idiocy, correct?

Remember that the costs have to be compared against the baseline costs-to-treat for the relevant population, which is often going to be cancer patients, and their treatment costs are already eye-watering. If this approach can genuinely cut recurrence, it may be a net saving.

Why do you say this, though: “My local retail chain (Target) gives me a 5% discount if I use their credit card, which I can link to their app”? Why would that prevent you paying with Apple Pay? I don’t think you can get a credit or debit card in the UK that you *can’t* link to Apple Pay, any more. There’s never a need to use the physical card, and there’s integration with credit card apps and Apple Wallet too.

I wonder if it also has to do with the fact that you have to drive to do your shopping, and so you have your wallet for your ID. I have lots of shops that are walking distance away, and so it’s convenient to head out with just my phone and not bother with a wallet.

There were 906 billionaires in Sep 2025 according to Forbes, and they had $7.8tn of assets at that time.
That’s about the same as the 200,000,000 poorest American collectively owned.
The vast bulk of America’s remaining 150tn of wealth — about 100tn of it — is owned by the 15m or so that constitute the 90% up but who aren’t billionaires.

In other words: the majority of Americans own practically none of the wealth; many of the rest are still pretty damn poor; a big chunk of wealth is owned by the rich and very rich; and then there’s a tiny number of billionaires who own an extraordinary amount given their numbers.

I’m curious why you’ve never used Apple Pay? I basically haven’t bothered with a physical wallet in years, living in the UK, I’ve just not needed to as Apple Pay is accepted everywhere. Also true in most places abroad from Norway to Saudi Arabia to Colombia (except in the US, natch, where i once had to run back to my hotel to get a physical card to pay at a big pizza chain restaurant in Chicago that supposedly took Apple Pay but wasn’t able to complete the transaction).

I think my deeper question is: just how much versatility is it sensible for a manufacturing plant to require of the robots that surface it? Humans are well-adapted for quite a few things (eg tool use, endurance running) but not others (giving birth safely, for one!). Most animals are adapted very extensively for a particular environment (eg a koala’s two opposable thumbs), rather than versatility per se.

We have the advantage of being able to actively design, but disadvantage of not having thousands of generations to evolve a well-fitted answer.

Interesting to think about, for sure

I just don’t get the value of using a humanoid figure. Are car assembly plants really so heavily optimised for the human body? Are human bodies so flexible in what they can manage? It all seems rather misconceived.

Scots with a single t! Do not make that mistake if you’re ever there, or someone’s gonna rip your bawbag off

You live in the UK, right? You know that Frank Dobson’s best achievement as health secretary was bringing in the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), which makes decisions about what treatments to fund? Because no health system has infinite money, and so the alternative to making difficult, but calm, considered, evidence-based decisions for the whole country, is making those decisions whimsically and locally creating postcode lotteries and funding care for the patients who excite the most sympathy (eg cancer) over care for who who don’t (eg Alzheimers).

I have a dear friend, a senior clinician, who has served on a NICE committee. Genuinely some of the most amazing work he does. The decisions are really hard but they’re also inescapable.

Worth remembering that many European countries have tax-funded state provision of healthcare, often with national components. It’s not all social insurance like France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Spain, Portugal, Italy, DK, NO, SE, FIall Beveridgean. The UK has the highest degree of centralised organisation, though.

1. Separate shots haven’t been made at scale since 2009, so there’s no chance of doing this for the relevant populations
2. It creates a significant window of months in which babies are unprotected for two of the diseases, so it’s materially more dangerous
3. It means all these kids have more injections and discomfort
4. It’s pandering to idiocy. It’s really simple to explain that kids are exposed to far more pathogens on the daily than they’ll get in the three shots, and that their immune systems can cope. We need to do that, not admit defeat by dumbasses

Gosh, what a thing to live in a country with unstoppable child rape gangs. How *is* President Trump, by the way? Bitten any 13 year old nipples lately? Silly question, of course he has!

It is always, *always*, ALWAYS projection with you lot. Every fucking time.

I understand the *theory*, in the same way I understand the *theory* of the second amendment. But just like I cannot look on with anything other than horror and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of the theory being implemented for 2A, so I cannot look on with anything other than dismay and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of having small settlements run their own police departments.

And obviously, while the citizenry of a place can, in general and in principle, vote the bastards out, or up sticks and leave themselves, many types of consequence of the (ab)use of coercive state power are permanent and terrible. From disfigurements to deaths to many other sorts. So when a town kicks out its councillors or fires its police chief, it may simply be too late for an individual innocent citizen lying dead in the gutter thanks to an aggressive and badly trained cop who took against them.

And that's just misreading errors! When you compound it with the mess that is the NCIC, plus other errors in the system, it's fairly miraculous that it ever actually manages a true positive.