Accidental renaissance?

That was the most disappointing subreddit. A bunch of people posting random pictures with no explanation of how it had renaissance era artistic expression. It could have been so educational while being silly, but no, it was just a random picture sub.

Lemmoned

DS9 “Past Tense” is a prescient episode in a lot of ways, but there’s one line that I think doesn’t get enough attention: it’s not that people don’t care, but that all the problems they face seem too big to handle.

Having a baby swiped away based on a drug test for drugs the hospital gave you is horrible. Yet, it seems to rate rather low compared to a huge list of other problems we face, and I really don’t know how to deal with that.

Compare the health care spending per capita of industrialized countries:

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/

The US spends $12,555 per capita (per 2022). To bring us in line with other industrialized countries, we would need to cut that number in half.

Compare to the number cited in the article:

To get your head around why this is, think for a second about what happens to every $100 you give to a private insurance company. According to the most exhaustive study on this question in the U.S.—the CBO single-payer study from 2020—the first thing that happens is that $16 of those dollars are taken by the insurance company. From there, the insurer gives the remaining $84 to a hospital to reimburse them for services. That hospital then takes another $15.96 (19% of its revenue) for administration, meaning that only $68.04 of the original $100 actually goes to providing care.

In a single-payer system, the path of that $100 looks a lot different. Rather than take $16 for insurance administration, the public insurer would only take $1.60. And rather than take $15.96 of the remaining money for hospital administration, the hospital would only take $11.80 (12% of its revenue), meaning that $86.60 of the original $100 actually goes to providing care.

Administration overhead fixes wouldn’t quite get all of the difference, but it is a huge chunk of it. That on top of Medicare being able to negotiate better rates would likely do the rest.

So, yeah, do universal Medicare. That alone takes care of almost the entire problem.

Arguably, the most important job of a CEO is to take the blame for a bad year. Then they golden parachute out and find another company. Even if not the CEO, then at least a board member who shows up for meetings every once in a while.

Pat Gelsinger

They got those because the Gremlins are falling apart. They’re not likely to be scrapped. They’re probably going to be sold at auction a few years from now.

USPS doesn’t like selling the old Gremlins at auction because they’re sensitive about anyone impersonating a mail carrier (though a few have slipped through into private hands). Nobody else operates them, so any Gremlin looks like a mail carrier. A Metris, though, is just another van, and a quick paint job to remove the USPS logos is all they need.

I think you’re under some misconceptions about how this has happened. The old trucks are completely non-viable. Way past their expected lifespan. They all need to go. If there was a time to phase out the old trucks, it was about 20 years ago.

The new trucks come in EV and gas flavors. The EV version only has a 70 mile range, but that’s plenty for many city/suburban routes. So they’re putting them in where they make sense and everything else gets the gas version. Over time, a longer range EV version could take over the vast majority of routes, if not all of them.

They’ll still get the gas powered ones. Pretty much have to; those old mail trucks are far past their expiration date.

Except there’s evidence they do, in fact, go both directions.

For example, DES had its s-boxes messed with by the NSA. At the time, the thought was that they were intentionally weakening it. Some years later, public cryptographers developed differential cryptanalysis for breaking ciphers. They found that the new s-boxes in DES made it resistant to differential cryptanalysis. It appears the NSA had already developed the technique and had made DES stronger, not weaker. Because again, they need to protect their own stuff, too, and they used and promoted DES to get there.

They also gave it a really short key that was expected to be broken by the '90s, which is also exactly what happened.

They appear to be going a similar direction with elliptic curves. They seem to be resistant against certain attacks, and the NSA was promoting them earlier than most public cryptographers.

A headline that starts with “Florida prosecutor” that isn’t a crime against decency?

I tend to agree with this. It’s why I’ve become less and less interested in the advancement of technology and more interested in ways to use the tech we have to build community.

It’s important to how they operate. The idea is that when you measure the value, it collapses into the right answer.

There’s plenty of publicly funded research for that, yes.

Three letter agencies also want to protect their own nation’s secrets. They have as much interest in breaking it as they do protecting against it.

Must be the dumbest take on QC I’ve seen yet. You expect a lot of people to focus on how it’ll break crypto. There’s a great deal of nuance around that and people should probably shut up about it. But “dime stuck in the road is a stable datapoint” sounds like a late 19th century op-ed about how airplanes are impossible.

Blowing billions on quantum computing ain’t helping feed, clothe and house the homeless…

Your problem is capitalism, not QC.

By simulating molecules, quantum computers have a huge promise of creating new medicines that are more effective, have fewer side effects, and are more likely to get through FDA trials on the first try.

Please stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.

The latest versions of TLS already have support post-quantum crypto, so no, it’s not all of them. For the ones that are vulnerable, we’re way, way far off from that. It may not even be possible to have enough qbits to break those at all.

Things like simulating medicines, folding proteins, and logistics are much closer, very useful, and more likely to be practical in the medium term.

It’s way more complicated than that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zu41rrc_Ng

The way the complicated orbital mechanics work, there is a “gate” which is the only place where asteroids/comets/whatever can cross Jupiter’s orbit. This doesn’t usually result in them hitting Jupiter, but it does limit their options for hitting Earth.

Been a while since I watched the video, so I don’t remember all the details, but that should be the basic gist.