But even so we’re probably the safest country in the world to get bitten by a spider

Why? Do you have antidotes for all common venomous spiders readily available, or are there just not that many of them in reality?

Wait no this wasn’t 10 years ago it was like 3

Hey you forgot The Sun

Unfortunately, Reuters is a mass surveillance company moonlighting as a news company

Not sure about the others you mentioned, but given that they’re all American corporations, I suspect they’re going to be problematic too. Associated Press at least is a non-profit

Medicare sets its own prices, at least in the specialties I’ve interfaced with. Doesn’t matter who the provider is. The whole thing saves money because there’s no more need for 3 separate national healthcare systems (Medicare, Medicaid, VA) and a ton of bureaucracy can be reduced, especially on the eligibility check front. Whether or not medicare pricing is profitable for the entities providing healthcare or not is their problem, not Medicare’s, but they’ll get to lay off a bunch of billing employees themselves, because there’s so much work with prior auths, benefit verification, etc that’s no longer necessary, so they should be able to reduce their own costs too (which they’ll kinda have to if they can only ever charge medicare rates and not private rates).

Right now, the US federal government spends more on health care as a % of GDP than many nations with single-payer healthcare. And then you add people’s out of pocket spending, private insurance premiums, etc to it… It’s ridiculous. Oh and I forgot state gov spending! They spend some money on Medicaid. Medicare for all isn’t the absolute most perfect possible solution, sure, but it’s going to save a ton of money.

I haven’t noticed models using power idle, just a ton of memory.

So shareholders are now a long way down the food chain? If that’s the case, maybe publicly traded companies aren’t as evil as we once thought.

With -10C you might keep it as warm as 20-22C inside, usually with -20C and lower and an air source heat pump, you’re probably going to keep it a bit colder to save on electricity.

I don’t disagree, but it’s twice as common among women. That’s why there’s a stereotype in the first place.

This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.

Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down, and corporate profits are where most old people’s wealth comes from (401k, pensions, etc).

Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me.

The boomers had to support their parents. We have to support our parents and some of their childless friends. Our children will have to support more like 10-15 people each. Unless we raise our retirement ages enough that we aren’t a burden on our children. In general, if you’re under 40 and thinking of retiring one day, you’re selfish as fuck. Personally I at least acknowledge to myself that my desire to retire one day, is extremely selfish, as it requires me to accumulate resources that other people could use.

It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.

While there are places in economic where zero sum game does not apply (e.g you get more out of education than the money invested into it), resources are largely a zero sum game, as is time (labour). Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time. Etc. When there are fewer people working, less work can get done, unless those people work more hours. To have enough resources for everyone, a big enough share of people has to work. As we have more old people, we need people working longer, unless we figure out a way to replace human labor. As you’re against AI, there’s little real way to do that.

The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth. There’s enough growth that you can tax young people, either via corporations underpaying them (corporations owned by old people), or via direct taxation and a national pension (where the old people benefitting at least benefit a bit more evenly), without it weighing down on them too badly. This worked great for a while because the population kept growing, but that has pretty much stopped in the developed world.

Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them.

I mean calling half an entire gender stupid is pretty bold

It’s free though? Kagi the search engine is paid, Orion the browser is free. There’s still no paid browser that I’m aware of.

The problem with YouTube isn’t that it has ads, it’s that it ran at a loss for well over a decade and THEN started putting ads everywhere, increasing the amount every few months. If your service is only profitable with a ton of ads, put those ads there right away. The enshittification once you have a captive audience through the network effect is what sucks. We could have competitors and that would improve the quality for everyone, but Google sank billions into making sure nobody is using anything but YouTube and THEN started bombarding us with ads. That’s quite literally billions of dollars spent on making the market worse.

Over 55 isn’t babyboomers anymore that’s gen x.

And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.

I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.

Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren’t rising, that they can’t afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.

Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).

Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it’s still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I’m trying to argue is that you can’t have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they’re enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else’s wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation’s wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They’re enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don’t know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.

People just aren’t having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn’t specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.

Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can’t have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that’s absurd.

Ironically the AI everyone’s fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly “communist” countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it’ll get worse when their demographics crises hit.

They don’t control, yes - the control (on the level of the individual companies) is being handled for their benefit though. Line must go up for the shareholders - aka old people.

It is, but it’s the only way to get viable heating without fossil fuels in a climate with winters. I have a friend with a ground source heat pump and one with an air to water heatpump and the former has a bigger house and significantly smaller electric bill when the real cold hits (January, February). Think it was 100-150 EUR vs 400-500 EUR + also needed to keep burning firewood every day when it got proper cold. Both use floor heating.

All in, you can count on it costing about 15-40k depending on everything. Air to water heat pump is more like 10-15k all in, but when you’re burning 10 kilowatts on resistive heating and your place is still not as warm as you’d like, you’ll know exactly why.

It does not, it pays whatever Chinese or Korean company makes its battery cells, which pays whichever Chinese company refines the metals, which pays whichever Chinese company mines the minerals. China owns most of the battery industry and you don’t really get much of a say in what their labour practices are - but you COULD pay 2-3x as much to get a battery from a non-Chinese company, that may or may not have a better track record when it comes to slave labour and may or may not still use Chinese lithium and cobalt.

It then also pays a Taiwanese company to operate sweatshops in China, that the Chinese government is somehow OK with despite being “communist” and “for the workers”. It’s all ultracapitalism all the way down. Though I hear these days they don’t even need the suicide nets anymore.

Fast charging is already expensive (often moreso than fuel unfortunately). The idea being proposed here is that if you make it slower, people get hungry and you can sell them more junk food. You lose that opportunity when charging is too fast, most people get their petrol and drive on instead of getting food each and every time. So it’s actually better to have slower charging, even if you can then charge less money for the energy itself, since you have a captive audience.

Well that depends. In urban areas, it’s more of a problem. Side of the highway… Honestly, most fuel pumps sit empty 90% of the time it seems. Not that they don’t get business, it’s just that they’re nowhere near saturating their capacity usually.

If you’ve got tons of space and want to save money, you can have a horizontal system, you’d ideally want about 1.5 meters of pipe length for every square meter you’re heating, according to the companies selling heat pumps. The pipe should be a meter deep and I think it should be a meter from any other section of pipe. Think of the good ol’ mobile game Snake.

If you’ve got tons of money or just don’t have the space, you can do a vertical system. It’s even more efficient, but you’d want roughly the same amount of meters, in the form of deep holes in the ground - for a bigger house, it’s OK to use multiple, just keep a bit of distance between them (6 meters is supposedly OK).

When the air goes cold and it’s hard to cool down the outside air to heat up the inside of your home, the ground stays warm so the efficiency drops much less. With the vertical system in particular, there’s no measurable drop, since a lot of your refrigerant is running so deep underground, it’d take an ice age to cool down the dirt down there.

Looks like Voyager to me