Nobody commenting is reading the article.

The headline suggests that medical bills drove them into poverty so much so that he’s had to be driving for Uber at 76. Thats not the case, and the article lays it all out.

It looks like about 25 years after the medical bills wiped them out financially, they recovered financially:

I really didn’t want to retire in my 60s, but we were getting older, and my wife wanted me to be spending more time at home. When I retired, I had some equity in my home and around $300,000 in my IRA. I also started to fund an IRA for my wife, which I built to mid-five figures. This allowed us to travel extensively within the US for the first few years. But a part of me felt like we probably weren’t going to live that long anyway because everybody around us was dying.

We should be celebrating two things:

• the fact that the ACA passed into law and that what happened to this couple in the 1990s can’t happen again under today’s law
• the hard work they did rebuilding financially to have over $350k in savings + home equity and have have a comfortable retirement to be able to afford extensive travel they did in retirement.

The population of NYC is larger than the combined population of the smallest 28 countries in the world.

I’m a proponent of UBI, but that has nothing to do with the “IF everyone benefits from it in the form of higher wages/less working hours due to the higher productivity” philosophy OP posted though.

I think you may want to read the quote again. He can afford it “barely” without working. The working 3 days a week at Costco is what makes it not barely.

Puton won’t be able to keep going back to the same wells for long,

I think its already hit this point. Reports of recruitment from Russia has fallen dramatically in the last couple of months with a net loss of troops Russia is fielding considering the losses every month.

and other countries won’t be willing to send mercenaries for his meat grinder.

This is still ongoing, less so that countries are intentionally committing troops, but more from scams where nationals from abroad are tricked into coming to Russia being told they will be doing regular jobs, and only then finding out they are being assigned to Russian frontline combat units for the meat waves. The most recent high profile version of this was the adult daughter of a prominent South African politician scamming South African men to going to Russia. Some of these men lived as POWs capture by Ukraine.

IF everyone benefits from it in the form of higher wages/less working hours due to the higher productivity.

I know this is a common philosophical statement, but I haven’t yet seen a great implementation of it in reality. I’m interested if your approach is viable.

Scenario:

Lets say we have a 25 year old worker named Jim. Jim was hired and his job for 1 year was to log into a system, look up specific values, and populate these values into fields in an Excel spreadsheet. At the beginning of the second year, a small Bash script (computer code) was written by an engineer and set to run on a repeating daily schedule that did all of the lookups and sheet population that was Jim’s entire job. The entirely of Jim’s job has been replaced by automation.

Result:

Jim no longer has any work to do for the organization. There aren’t any other open positions at the company for Jim (or if there are Jim is not even remotely qualified to do those other jobs).

• So how would you apply your philosophy to this situation?
• Do you believe the organization should continue to employ Jim even without any work for him?
• Should he be let go, but still paid? If so, how much, and for how long?

At 325,000 dead, literally every Russian must know a victim, or the family of a victim. Every neighborhood, every high school graduating class must have several dead.

Part of the reason Putin has been able to do this for so long is that this isn’t the case. Moscow and St Petersburg have largely shielded from the loss of their populations through drafts. Putin has drawn significantly from the rest of Russia instead, especially those in impoverished regions.

Does anyone else just like…not care about this?

If you see how common kidnapping for ransom is in some other countries, and that now it is appearing in a nation where it was rare before, that should be concerning to most.

If the kidnappers are not found from this one, I would expect other copycats to start the same practice.

Interesting story, but headline not accurate:

When asked if he could cover all of his expenses using Social Security without a roommate, Ferber said, “Barely. What really helps naturally is working at Costco three days a week.”

So, yes, he could afford rent without a roommate.

imagine wrecking your life working to advance a thing for which the ultimate end goal is to replace you entirely

That isn’t new with AI. Non-AI Automation has been the goal (and achievement) of business for decades.

But in general it’s just understanding what makes people happy: dopamine. And then understanding how that specific person varies from average.

Like, it’s entirely possible they keep doing all things that would make most people happy, and they’re just wired differently so it’s not working.

This is where my answer would go to. I’d extend on what you said about dopamine though in two specific directions:

• Learn what drives you as an individual. Besides chemical inducements, what actions/accomplishments/behaviors give you a sense of satisfaction? For most there is some form of creative or active pursuit like artistic painting, dance, woodworking, moto racing, skydiving, sport, memorizing trivia, study of a field of science, organizing, home design, or any number of the endless activities that exist. Figure out what it is that you like doing, and do more of it.
• Cut back on the chemical inducements of dopamine. If you can get the 10x-100x the dopamine hit you need from just putting a chemical in your body, the tiny bit of natural dopamine you get from a non-chemical activity won’t even register with you. You’ll be desensitized to the natural dopamine you get from the things you like doing. The things you like doing that would normally give you dopamine won’t anymore that you’ll be able to detect. This means you stop doing the things you like. So the only way you can get any measurable amount of dopamine you detect is by the chemicals.

Remember when the church used to sell “indulgences” for cash as pardons for sins? What trump is doing is the modern day version of it and its just as disgusting.

Before the TSA existed (pre-911) airport security was run and paid for by the airlines.

I’m glad it was helpful!

The cost problem for medium or long distance trains is the cost of human labor.

In a given 10 hour work day (apparently common for airline flight attendant) how many flights can that worker work? Let say New York to Los Angeles flights. So the answer is about 2 flights per day. Compare that to the time it takes by train for the same distance, which is about 72 hours. Because of this length this means you also have to have more than one set of crew available to the train passengers.

The staff have to be paid significantly longer on the train to transport far fewer people simply because of more elapsed time. It may be worth it for a nation to subsidize long distance train travel, but understand that that is the problem with profitability vs airplanes that can simply move more people in less time, requiring few paid human hours of labor.

Kent Walker suggested that this initiative would stifle innovation and deny people access to the “best digital tools.”

Perhaps in specific scientific or engineering situations the “best digital tools” may be needed, but isn’t that just a tiny fraction of the European userbase? How many office workers need bleeding edge tools to make a quarterly report or send an email?

It was probably a law written expecting the use case to be temporary power perhaps for an event or temporary maintenece need. The drafters of that law likely didn’t think someone would blatantly skirt the spirit of the law by simple placing the generators on trailers as a permanent fixture.

In short, the state needs to update its laws.

Printhead compatibility: HP 63 (US), HP 302 (Europe)

Use the Google flag of “before:2022” added to any search. This will limit returned results to only those captured before 2022, which is when AI slop feedback started. Obviously this doesn’t work for current events, but if the data you’re looking for doesn’t need to be recent it can be useful.

Example: