well, according to the congressional budget office,

In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion

and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.

it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.

that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.

and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:

“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”

and

A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.

“Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”

exactly which “needs” are they trying to meet?

that sounds like a better choice to be honest. i haven’t used signal much and i didn’t know they supported that sort of thing

telegram has “secret chats” that let you set a self destruct timer for all messages sent in those chats. i don’t know of many other alternatives. and even telegram isn’t a drop in replacement, but it could work, depending on what you’re looking for

this seems like the only proper way to do anything in C++. it’s a language where there’s 5 ways to do 1 thing and 1 way to do 5 things.

authoritarianism is when no twitter

they should nationalize intel if they really care about chip independence

and then they had the audacity to put that picture on the cover of the textbooks

can you do reddit next please

don’t forget Big Data

best thing bethesda has done this decade

it is possible to rigorously say that 1/0 = ∞. this is commonly occurs in complex analysis when you look at things as being defined on the Riemann sphere instead of the complex plane. thinking of things as taking place on a sphere also helps to avoid the “positive”/“negative” problem: as |x| shrinks, 1 / |x| increases, so you eventually reach the top of the sphere, which is the point at infinity.

being a prompt engineer is so much more than typing words. you also have to sometimes delete the words and then type new ones

Microsoft is seeking feedback on the changes, so it’s possible the company could decide to ditch these ads […]

are they really looking to see if people want to see more ads? i can’t imagine this is anything more than a meaningless corporate “we value your feedback” message. they already know what people think about ads in their operating system, they’ve tried it many times

i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.

here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:

Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.

you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)

even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”

playing russian roulette is not going to give you permanent damage every 5/6 times

i would like to give it another try at some point because it seems like it will probably feel really nice to use once i get the hang of it. but the lack of documentation is pretty rough.

i also think that for nixos, a lack of documentation is a much more difficult thing to overcome. other distros can piggyback off the arch documentation for most things, but that doesn’t work as well for nixos.

i haven’t used steam a while (so i could be wrong), but it seems like that’s not a pop up. it looks like it’s part of the information that shows up when you click a game in your library. so i guess it would make sense the name of the game isn’t display there (since it’s somewhere else on the page)

i think i would’ve probably had to package the specific kind of vim that i needed, because i wanted neovim and a gui too or something. this was also like 3-4 years ago so its possible the documentation for this kind of stuff has considerably improved since i tried, or that there are now packages that make this sort of thing easier. and it’s definitely possible everything existed at the time and i just couldn’t figure it out.

but i ended up with a similar feeling to the one you described: stuff is easy when you do it their way, using their tools; but things are very hard to do if you deviate from the path.

i know this is just sort of an inevitable part of the design paradigm they use, and that everything probably works very nicely if you learn their language and the various ins and outs of the operating system, but i just wasn’t willing to commit that much to it.