The US ranks 36th in literacy.

This is a deceptive statistic. It merely indicates that many countries like Uzbekistan and North Korea falsely report 100% literacy rates. Look here. The USA literacy rate is actually about the same as that of other wealthy Western democracies.

But… Do you want to? I don’t feel like this is a country I want to contribute to anymore. I’m not going to leave (because that’s very impractical) and I’ll still support myself, but the goodwill I had towards my fellow Americans is very much diminished.

It’s easy for me to say that because I could leave if I needed to. The situation is very different for the people who can’t. Maybe I should have more concern for them than I do right now, but instead I just keep thinking how one upside of Trump winning the popular vote is that whatever happens, most Americans will deserve it.

My problem with Windows is that when I want to eject a USB drive, Windows refuses to do so, refuses to tell me what program is apparently still using the drive, and certainly refuses to kill that program. I am removing the drive. I can’t just not remove it!

I oppose letting anyone define hate speech as a matter of principle, because even if I agree with the definition completely now, I may not continue to agree with the definition in the future. Look at what has been happening in the USA since the October 7 attack: a lot of people I had considered my political allies turned out to have beliefs I consider to be hateful, and meanwhile these people consider my own beliefs hateful. The solution is not to empower a single central authority to decide which sort of hate is allowed. It is (as it has always been) to maintain the principle of free speech.

Properly built, properly installed ceiling fans don’t vibrate. My $70 dollar ceiling fan from a big-box hardware store has no vibration whatsoever, even at maximum speed.

I’m a little surprised to hear people so willing to let the government of Ireland determine who they are allowed to hate and for what reasons.

… As opposed to a Nazi running the US space program, which this guy saw the day of.

Libre Office (at least Calc which is the one I use most) is usable but it has bizarre random slowdowns and crashes relatively frequently, whereas I have never once had issues like that with Microsoft Office. I still use Libre Office (on both Windows and Linux) because it’s free but I acknowledge that it has disadvantages.

You don’t mind their UI conventions? I suppose I could probably get used to them, but while I’m comfortable with Windows and Linux desktop environments, I find the Mac one to be quite unpleasant to use for some reason.

You use Arch? Bah, I am Arch.

I don’t think it is intended to replace busses for the public. My guess is that the target market is companies that offer private ride shares to their employees.

from within 5 minutes of where you live and goes to within 5 minutes of where you want to be

That’s technically true where I live but it would require waiting for a local bus at each end of most trips, and that’s usually slower than walking.

My impression is that the robo-van is intended to be a taxi with some ride-sharing capabilities.

The Robovan is intended for the company’s Tesla Network, an autonomous ridehailing service for purpose-built self-driving cars

A robo-taxi is private, arrives when you call it, and goes directly from where you are to where you want to be. I don’t see the similarities between that and a bus or train.

No, the tongs are for when the vacuum wants to take you alive.

It’s a good thing none of them were armed…

He’ll also have to come and help, unless he just wants to watch you go at it alone.

Mine says “cleaning”, “charging”, etc.

The health insurance company has little motivation to care about your health, but doctors have little motivation to care about money and money is actually important too. Ultimately you end up paying for all that unnecessary testing and there has to be some mechanism for controlling cost.

With that said, one time I was appealing a rejection of home care for my grandfather and I mentioned that his condition had declined and he was currently in the hospital. The guy from the insurance company said that clearly someone in a hospital doesn’t need home care and so my appeal should be rejected and I should file a new claim (which can take months) after my grandfather was home again. The arbitrator didn’t agree with that (although she said that she could postpone the hearing until he was discharged if that was what the insurance company wanted) but I was still so angry.

I disagree with you, because a modern human could offer the people of the distant past (with their far less advanced technology) solutions to their problems which would seem miraculous to them. Things that they thought were impossible would be easy for the modern human. The computer may do the same for us, with a solution to climate change that would be, as you put it, magically ecological.

With that said, the computer wouldn’t be giving humans suggestions. It would be the one in charge. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a modern human. (Not a naked guy with nothing, but rather someone with all the knowledge we have now.) That human isn’t going to limit himself to answering questions for very long. This isn’t a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don’t comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee’s can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human’s could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god; humans haven’t been good to chimpanzees.)