Wait, everything is canon after 2012, so like I can just say the Ewoks were behind everything and it's now canon because I said so after 2012?
jj4211
Usually I'll see something mild or something niche get wildly messed up.
I think a few times I managed to get a query from a post in, but I think they are monitoring for viral bad queries and very quickly massage it one way or another to not provide the ridiculous answer. For example a fair amount of times the AI overview just would be seemingly disabled for queries I found in these sorts of posts.
Also have to contend with the reality that people can trivially fake it and if the AI isn't weird enough, they will inject a weirdness to get their content to be more interesting.
Both California and Texas have struggles with energy costs. California with their constantly high rates, and Texas with their spot pricing occasionally royally screwing people.
I'd say their example is just an oversimplification to keep it understandable. Ultimately fuel based energy has a lot of the same concerns. That natural gas facility costs money to keep viable even if, hypothetically, zero fuel were being burned in some given week. The power lines need repairs, maintenance, upgrades, and expansion over the potential capacity, not actual usage. You have fixed costs alongside the marginal costs. The marginal costs certainly make sense to map directly to usage based rate, but fixed costs are significantly covered by those usage rates as well rather than bumping up the "basic charge" sort of line item on a power bill.
Seems like in such a case, it should be a different mix of base fixed monthly bill versus usage based rates, to more accurately reflect the cost structure in play.
For example, in my area it's about $15 a month even if you use absolutely no electricity, that's just the base charge ostensibly for the infrastructure required to deliver power, should you want it. It might make sense for this number to be increased rather than raising $/kwh rates.
Suppose the counter would be that at least with the rate increase, folks in more dire circumstances can cut back to avoid the increasing costs (which might be a bit of a feedback loop...)
If only there were more context and nuance available than "convict/not convict" when making such determinations and risk assessments about candidates...
Fire fighting is a category that has tried privatized model and thoroughly thoroughly shown to not work at all as a privatized endeavor.
Key problem in that is that requires the firefighters to protect only properties that have paid for their services. So a wildfire breaks out in the middle of nowhere, and you see it, but no one pays to protect "middle of nowhere", so business wise it doesn't make sense to fight a fire without a customer. Nevertheless, that's your only hope to control it, so you end up protecting a whole lot of non-subscribers to try to protect your subscribers. What if your customer is surrounded by non-customers? You shouldn't fight fires back, but unless you push back on the neighbor properties your customer gets burned. If you know your neighbors have protection, you might opt out knowing that, practically speaking, their coverage means you get covered.
Another problem is that privatized suggests competition. Which means coordinated response is severely limited. Also, they can't run parallel fire hydrant infrastructure in any reasonable way, so water on the truck or from the customer direct are all you can get. This is a recipe for being highly ineffective.
This is putting aside how private industry loves to optimize around the normal day to day demand. Being prepared at all times for the worst case is expensive, so private industry tends to shit the bed when faced with a catastrophe because they only have the modest capacity to keep expenses under control. When this is something like a shortage of smartphones, no big deal people just have to wait for the scenario to subside and get by as-is, it's worth it to have affordable smartphones 99% of the time. But for a wildfire that would cause multiple gigantic catastrophes a year. What we see in LA now would be a routine disaster in the privatized scenario.
I remember despite being receptive to the goal, finding that story a bit maddening.
spoiler
So the dystopian half was sadly credible enough, so not much to say there.
I didn't like the way he tried to pave the way to the "better" approach as a contrast to the dystopia, while somehow being set in the same world.
So how does the socialist utopia come into being? By a nation of people transforming themselves into a better society? No, because of some benevolent rich dude. Well at least he spent his money to make it happen, but wait, first he had to get money from millions of people for no guaranteed results. So shockingly a rich dude with a very scammy seeming premise happens to be truthful, but realistically if other rich dudes saw the gullible people buying tickets to "maybe utopia one day" then there'd be competition and I can't imagine the sincere rich dude prevaling against the con-men. So the story is firmly rooted in worshipping some abstract concept of a rich guy, strangely Randian in a way.... But fine, it happens, not great, but let's put that aside for now.
Ultimately, the difference between his dystopia and utopia is that "poor people" in the dystopia are confined to soul crushingly terrible dormitories, and in the utopia, they aren't even allowed into the country at all. Sure no one will become poor in the utopia, but it's likely that any person on the 'right' side in the dystopia also will never become poor. The mechanism to make it seem "better" is a lottery ticket, further waved away by having someone "off screen" buy it on his behalf, to let the protagonist benefit without actually spending money. Ultimately though the mechanism to get into the utopia was effectively buying a lottery ticket from an already rich dude to make him richer, a pretty capitalist mechanism.
There's this part in the dystopian side where they reflected upon how when the plight of people in foreign lands were bad, they ignored it because it wasn't their problem. Now they feel all too keenly being on the 'outside' while the rich enjoy their presumed paradise while the poor are trapped in their dorms. That now that they are afflicted, only now do they care. Ok, fine point. So the nature of the "socialist" paradise in this work is that you or someone you know paid for admittance, and so the protagonist leaves behind just a ton of anonymous folks to once again be part of the 'in' crowd. I made the connection that the guy basically had a lottery ticket purchased on his behalf that let him participate in what was likely just like the "rich" crowd. So I thought that the author would circle back to how quickly the protagonist got comfortable with ignoring those on the 'outside' again. Nope, now it was just just cool to live it up while the poor saps who did not buy the scam-like tickets are stuck on the outside still forgotten by the protagonist and the narrative, as their existence is now inconvenient to the message.
Then there was the solution to crime, which I thought would touch on a dystopian facet. That there's a mandatory centrally controlled brain implant that, when "bad" behavior was detected, it would disconnect the brain from the body to prevent incorrect behavior. A world with constant thought monitoring and removal of bodily autonomy at the discretion of a central authority? That sounds like something that will be highlighted as some nightmarish bullshit... Nope, the author seemed to sincerely love the concept as a perfectly valid way of controlling the population, and all the characters loved it to.
Trump has already asked for action on TikTok to be delayed so that he has authority to "address" the situation. Trump doesn't have to choose between the bribes offered, he'll gladly take them all at the same time.
Using it from chrome is how I use it.
Two limitations:
- You cannot let someone else control your screen. This is fine by me, I never want someone controlling my screen anyway. If I want to collaborate with them, I use any number of better ways to get them shared access.
- You cannot control other folks screen. This is often a challenge as too many people offer this up as the only way to remotely help them. I hate doing this because even in Windows the experience is utter garbage, but sometimes the other party just forces my hand.
I feel like it's not great to say "Congress is already prepping" instead of "Marjorie Taylor Greene is prepping legistlation"
You must be working on the same project I'm helping out with...