Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.
Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.
I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween
I don’t know that I’d agree that the EU and the articles of confederation are comparable. There were a few big differences, including states printing their own currency without a common exchange medium (as opposed to the Euro), and that the mechanism for funding the federal government was (IIRC) entirely voluntary. States could just choose to not send money without consequences, and most or all made the obvious choice of not funding the federal government. The articles of confederation also had a few things about it that were more progressive than the constitution; for example, if I’m remembering right, it offered automatic citizenship to all native Americans, which pissed a lot of the farmer-settlers right off.
This is how nations destabilize. States perpetuate themselves through maintaining the exclusive monopoly on violence and using that monopoly to secure certain guarantees for or against its people. The Roman empire saw a similar decline of administrative willpower and rises in both vigilantism and shitty little civil wars between the wealthy elite who really ran the show (spoiler alert). I’m convinced that Balkanization of the US is, at this point, inevitable. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good or bad thing in its own right. On one hand, it might be better for both the states and the world if we went to more of an EU type structure. On the other hand, a nuclear armed independent Texas.
This is really cool, but it would have been cooler if they’d named their scouting missions Hugin and Mugin, since they’re Odin’s ravens that scour the earth for secrets to give to Odin.
I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!
I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.
Edit: disregard. I thought you meant lanes, you clearly mean sweepers
I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.
Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.
Is this ceasefire deal in the room with us now?
Not to mention everyone buried under rubble.
Good point. I think a bigger problem than the customer facing AIs is going to be the internal ones that make shit up. Someone on here claimed to be working somewhere where they gutted their HR department and replaced them almost completely with an LLM that was fed their documents. They claimed the AI had already told them several blatantly illegal things. Any company that does that is just begging to get sued to death, and I’m sure the investors will be reeeeeaaaaal happy with the, what, 1% they saved by killing HR? I mean, HR aren’t the good guys here, but just imagine a company being brain dead enough to say “hey, let’s get rid of the people that keep us from getting sued to death and replace it with a chatbot lmao”.
It’s got to be more than that. This is a little like saying that there are at least two stars in the sky.
If I was a Cisco investor, I’d be looking to move my money elsewhere. All these companies laying people off, shuttering whole ass teams, and replacing them with non-proprietary and, frankly, unproven LLMs are going to blow their own legs off here pretty soon. I have a feeling that a pretty dramatic change is AI pricing models is coming soon, since all of these companies are providing access to their models for a fraction of the cost to run them, and the VCs are going to want their money back. Is chatGPT good enough at, what is it, 0.004 cents a token? Maybe, I guess, if the ghost of quality control doesn’t haunt you at night. Is chatGPT still good enough at 0.1 cents a token or more, or with surge pricing models? I sincerely doubt it. If openAI implements surge pricing, stay on the lookout for articles about some company or user getting a surprise bill for a million dollars, AWS-style. Given the current quality of LLMs, I don’t think that the cost shakes out for what you get.
Yep, that’s me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that’s hardly the first.
I was wondering if this was a legit tribe or one of those shitty “white people desperate to open an Indian casino” tribes with two registered members that are like 1/24000 native American or some shit. I kind of looked them on Wikipedia, they seem legit.
Yeah, I’ve had the experience of paying off a bill, only for the hospital to, about a year later, send us a newly adjusted bill from the same encounter where they discovered we actually owed them a further three hundred. Healthcare is the only field where this kind of shit is tolerated as a routine matter. Any other business doing that would be shamed in town square, but it’s Tuesday for healthcare.
Okay, so the American system is an employer based model, meaning that your health plan, if you have one, is determined by your employer. This means a few key things:
Your plan may (and probably does) vary wildly in nearly every regard from someone else’s despite both of you being with the same insurer.
You are not the customer, but the user. Your boss is the customer. As such, the insurance company doesn’t really care if they piss you off, because you can’t just fire them and go with some other plan. They only care about not pissing off your boss. Well, you can technically, but individual insurance is so expensive and bad (and there’s only a few big players in the market anyway) that it’s an obviously better choice to just get jerked around by your employer’s plan.
The entire healthcare payment process is so arcane, unintuitive, and complex that no lay person outside the system can be really expected to navigate it if someone says “whoops, we’re not paying because the florp code was misapplied during Venus Wednesdays, and though you flipped your florp last month, some businesspeople made a deal just last week to agree that florps will only be covered by approved Todds (the closest is a convenient 600 miles from you). This judgment is final, may God have mercy on your soul.” As an example, I’ve had insurance pre-approve something and then turn around and deny it once it got billed, and because I didn’t think to get physical proof of pre-approval first, the insurance basically just ended it with “nuh uh, we never said that, do you have a receipt?” Lesson learned. And a lot of times, the people inside of it don’t have the full picture. There are people whose entire profession is either arguing with insurance companies all day to force them to pay what’s due, or helping patients navigate the system. It makes it really, really easy to rip off both patients and health providers.
Government insurance like Medicare also sucks. Their reimbursement rates are terrible, among other factors, and it’s caused more and more providers (those who can choose, anyway) to stop seeing these patients, meaning that you start ending up with a few Medicaid clinics whose soonest appointment is months from now and spend about 20 seconds per patient. This is largely a result of our conservatives trying to prove that government doesn’t work by making the government not work. Just so we’re clear, private insurance holders also have long wait times and doctors that are pressed for time, it just tends to be a little less bad.
Since insurers have figured out that there’s money to be gouged in medication, they’ve gotten into the mail order pharmacy and pharmacy Benefit manager (if you want to get a tummy ache, read up on PBMs, they’re the biggest bastards in a field full of absolute bastards) game. Since then, they’ve managed to kill off most small business pharmacies and turn just getting your medication into the same bureaucratic, clown energy pain in the ass as trying to arrange an MRI. (YMMV by insurer, plan, medication, etc)
On top of all that, about a decade or two back, private equity figured out that healthcare in the US is practically a license to print money, so they’ve come in, taken all kinds of stuff over, made everything worse for everyone involved but the businesspeople, all while jacking up prices and cutting services. Yaaaaaaaaay
Dr. Glaucomflecken on YouTube provides a pretty good (and funny / simultaneously infuriating) insight into the mess of healthcare in the US from a providers perspective.
No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.