troyunrau

The thing is that the party conceding here actually trusts the election process. And Trump most definitely won the electoral college.

Even if he ends up losing the popular vote eventually, it doesn't really matter. The system is rigged and has always been rigged in favour of land over people.

Canadian observer. Two things, and I think they're related effects.

Harris is a minority and a woman. The Democrats were convinced they were the party that minorities would automatically vote for. But what they failed to realize was that those same minorities are misogynistic as hell. Like, have you ever been to a Baptist wedding? If you ask them what the role of a woman is...

The US is also the only first world country where the birthrate is above replacement. But if you look at who are having children, you'll find that it skews conservative. And they're passing those values along.

California is still counting. Not sure he won the popular vote.

Does it matter if they don't honour the patents of the rest of the world?

Your assertion that the document is malicious without any evidence is what I'm concerned about.

At some point you have to decide to trust someone. The comment above gave you reason to trust that the document was in a standard, non-malicious format. But you outright rejected their advice in a hostile tone. You base your hostility on a youtube video.

You should read the essay "on trusting trust" and then make a decision on whether you are going to participate in digital society or live under a bridge with a tinfoil hat.

In Canada, and elsewhere, insurance companies know everything about you before you even apply, and it's likely true elsewhere too. Even if they don't have personally identifiable information, you'll be in a data bucket with your neighbours, with risk profiles based on neighbourhood, items being insuring, claim rates for people with similar profiles, etc. Very likely every interaction you have with them has been going into a LLM even prior to the advent of ChatGPT, and they will have scored those interactions against a model.

The personally identifiable information has largely been anonymized in these models. In Canada, for example, there are regulatory bodies like OSFI that they have to report to, and get audited by, to ensure the data is being used in compliance with regulations. Each company will have a compliance department tasked with making sure they're adhering.

But what you will end up doing instead is triggering fraudulent behaviour flags. There's something called "address fraud", where people go out of their way to disguise their location, because some lower risk address has better rates or whatever. When you do everything you can to scrub your location, this itself is a signal that you are operating as a highly paranoid individual and that might put you in a bucket. If you want to be the most invisible to them, you want to act like you're in the median of all categories. Because any outlying behaviours further fingerprint you.

Source: I have a direct connection to advanced analytics within insurance industry (one degree of separation).

Step one: soap and water. Step two, a mild acid -- you probably have a citric acid based bathroom tile cleaner already or similar. Wrap it in a sacrificial towel or similar and let it soak in that weak acid overnight.

New Testament: Given that the bible, as we know it today, wasn't assembled into its current form until hundreds of years AD...

While being written, it wasn't being used as anything other than a record of events. Given that most of the events recorded in the Gospels happened decades before they were written down, they were effectively turning oral tradition to written tradition. The later books in the new testament, excluding Revelations, are largely letters traded between early churches.

Revelations is where shit gets weird. A bible without this would be far superior, harder to weaponize, and probably would be considered a living corpus rather than a fixed thing. If there was intent when writing anything in the bible, it was here. And here is where we can start arguing nefarious intent, turning the religion into a death cult.

The legal and administrative overhead to do all of that would incur significant additional costs. We shall see.

Personal anecdote. I run a small business with a business partner (co-owner) and we have no employees. We need an employee. I'm personally a huge fan of employee-owned companies.

But from a hiring perspective, it is mind bogglingly risky for us to hire someone and just automatically stake them. Like, what if it's the wrong person? How do we claw back control? Do we risk dilution sending the company in another direction?

It's just so much easier just to pay someone and not have to deal with the complexity. And therein lies the rub.

Probably should be launched with a trebuchet

Hot take. But put it in the context of the year it was aired, not today. Star Trek (and sci fi in general) was suffering from being perceived as "blue babes and laser guns".

This episode was thoughtful if taken as standalone. And TNG really was about taking the episodes more or less independently. The season long story arcs and such didn't exist. People weren't binge watching. So the world building was less important than the specific hypothetical moral quandary of the week. Like, they are almost like Asimov short stories with a shared cast.

It wasn't until a few years later that serialized TV even really became a thing -- Twin Peaks probably was the first here, but Babylon 5 would have a good claim (and DS9, Buffy, and others were coming together then too). So the style of storytelling on TNG S2 is different.

Divorce the story from Star Trek and the setting and evaluate it as a sci fi ethical quandary. And in that framework, it is a remarkable episode.

Also, Brent Spiner played it well :)