The networking is most valuable. I have my career because of being contacted via LinkedIn. It’s also a good tool to monitor certain trends if you have a decent network. For instance, if you are thinking of taking a job with company A, but nobody you know of who went there lasted longer than a year, you know it’s probably not a good place to work.

Rent seeking is not applicable for any company developing new medicines because that by definition is creating new wealth. I wouldn’t disagree with that characterization for any company milking an out-of-patent treatment by trying to make it unfeasible for any other company to manufacture it. You are correct that does exist.

Cures are difficult to develop due to how variable human physiology is, but we still manage to do so. Vaccines are also a way more effective instrument for disease eradication; it’s better to prevent anyone getting the disease in the first place.

This would be terrible business if any pharma worked this way. The vast majority of potential treatments fail either in the lab or in early phase trials. It is not very likely that’d you’d be able to on-demand develop a novel treatment for symptoms before one of your competitors figured out your already-discovered cure. That would be unless you patented the cure, but by the time you spent years developing a new symptom-only treatment and testing it through each phase, you’d have a few years at best before your exclusivity on the cure patent expires and thus your treatment becomes worthless.

Pharmas are run by the same short-sighted wall streeters as every other corporation. Actually successfully executing this sort of long-term plan would require thinking further ahead than a few quarters, which they are not capable of doing. A new cure is a big stock boost now that they could never resist.

The shareholders in question suing are a public employee retirement fund. I wouldn’t exactly consider retired sanitation workers and bureaucrats societal leeches, but to each their own I guess.

I know someone who has a similar outlook (climate change is real but science will solve it, so we don’t need to change anything). Basically anything science produces toward that end they will move the goalpost and say it’s not worth pursuing because science will fix it.

It is essentially their way of making climate change denialism seem reasonable and open-minded. I think if somebody came up with a miracle device to magically reverse everything, they’d complain it’s too costly at any price.

Exactly. If it’s a regulated industry, they’re not just paying for Teams. They’re paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I’m not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it’s a fraction of the available options.

Not being in constant contact with everyone you know, and not having a neverending stream of notifications assaulting you via your phone.

When you got to see relatives who lived far away, you talked about what had been going on in their life because you probably had no idea.

You read, listened to, or watched the news when you wanted to, unless someone you know told you sooner.

If you had to wait somewhere without a book or magazine, you just sat there with your thoughts. During childhood, you learned how to be bored and practice imagining things.

Check out their controversies section on Wikipedia. This doesn’t seem out of character for this publication. It’s more likely incompetence than malice.

Especially with certain accents. You really want your voice commands to be quite distinct. There’s virtually no extra labor is saying two or three extra syllables.

One of the regional grocery stores in my part of the US has these (if you have an account). Before I did online ordering with curbside pickup, this was how I shopped. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t more popular. It made checking out so quick. Every twenty or so trips I’d be randomly “audited,” where some poor employee had to rifle through my bags to double check I wasn’t stealing anything.

As someone who’s consumed every album and special George Carlin produced, it felt like someone retelling their memory of some of his bits. Like regurgitation. It’d be impressive if your nephew performed this at his thirteenth birthday party after becoming obsessed with Carlin.

I tried it a few times when it came to my area after hearing people rave for years, and I feel the same. It’s good, but that’s it. On par with KFC.

Popeye’s is way better in my opinion. It’s also cheaper, and the staff tend to be pretty entertaining in an unintentional and chaotic way. It’s the only fast food restaurant where employees are consistently very honest. Like, if they don’t have red beans because somebody fucked them up, I have been told exactly that.

The physical limitations are an important difference. A human can only read and remember so much material. With AI, you can scale that exponentially with more compute resources. Frankly, IP law was not written with this possibility in mind and needs to be updated to find a balance.

Ave! True to Caesar.

Vegas already has a poorly implemented monorail.

I don’t think that’s the message at all. It’s disproportionately punishing women for nudity that is sexist.

It’s ok if they buy lunch for the juniors every one in a while.

Sometimes it’s really valuable to have a greybeard with no fear for their job who just stops everyone from making stupid decisions that they’re too in the weeds to appreciate. Hopefully they’re one of the funny ones, and not one who condescends everybody constantly.

I used to root against the Golden State Warriors solely because they played at the Oracle Arena.

Was that the Adam Kinzinger one? It’s a low bar, but I’ll give him a modicum of credit for saying his vote against the first impeachment was cowardice and that he’d vote for Biden in 2024 if Trump is the Republican nominee. Doesn’t totally feel like a lesson learnt that he still considers himself a Republican, though.