You’re taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.

Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you’ll be living in. Technology is part of that.

I mean, I get that. As I said, it’s the surprise that confuses me. I understand “ugh, why are we putting profit in _____”. It’s that someone would go “whoah, hold on, people are running daycares for money?”

I’m honestly slightly confused by this response. Any business type will end up with some that do well, open more locations and get some manner of central office. It’ll inevitably be some manner of corporation because that just how we structure any business beyond small. The daycare is where the kids go and the office their handles local stuff like contact forms and medical notes, and corporate office handles billing and such.

Like, yeah it’s weird for something as personal as childcare to be a franchise, but no one gets too worked up about corporate pharmacies and that’s literally trusting a stranger giving you a bottle of drugs to eat not to hand you the poison they keep a few feet over.

It’s weird and kinda dystopian, but I’m confused by the shock.

That’s not what that research document says. Pretty early on it talks about rote mechanical processes with no human input. By the logic they employ there’s no difference between LLM code and a photographer using Photoshop.

So you get in the bathtub with the bike pump and have the hose connected to a nozzle going out. You might need something stronger that shrinkwrap depending on what you get, but your bathtub is invariably able to handle 1 atmosphere of pressure.

Or, hear me out: a bathtub, some shrinkwrap, a bicycle pump and so e good old fashioned grit and determination.

Ugh, I’m one of those people who will defend imperial as not being irrational, just built ad-hoc for purposes that aren’t in alignment with modern ones and … No, that’s not what Fahrenheit is.

Fahrenheit was trying to make a temperature scale that was easy to recreate to ease the calibration of thermometers. Zero is a temperature that can be created in your garage with some ice, salt and water. 100 was his best, ultimately inaccurate, attempt to measure human body temperature, since it’s another easy calibration point, and from there water was defined as 32 and 212 so that they were 180 degrees apart, which would fit will on a temperature dial.
Not irrational, not a comfort scale, and not in alignment with current needs.

It’s pure coincidence that it kinda lines up with comfortable outdoor temperatures in the opinion of a good chunk of a population living in the northern part of the western hemisphere.

I think they gave it two wireless adapters for basically that purpose. That way it and the computer can form a dedicated channel where they don’t need an intermediary for better performance.

50% of the electorate wouldn’t be hurt by sanctions, or 50% of the electorate would be arrested?

In either case, I’m referring to the president, his staff and cabinet. People actually directly making decisions who won’t see any consequences from sanctions.

Nah. Just a targeted police action to arrest the rogue elements who purport to be the lawfully elected government.

They’d be justified in sanctions, but I don’t think that it would actually accomplish anything. The people doing this shit don’t give a flying fuck about them because it would hurt you and me, not them.

Honestly, nothing much really comes to mind as a special precaution that I would think of. Don’t go down alleys alone, don’t follow strangers that try to get you to go places. Don’t get drunk alone in unfamiliar areas that aren’t super populated. Don’t make flashy displays of wealth.

No real impact on daily life. I’ve gotten lost in bad parts of Detroit before and that was unideal, but that was because there’s still a lot of ability for people to know you don’t live there just based on appearance.

So, my intent is not to turn this into the misery Olympics or anything, so I’m just going to clarify a few points and say that the main thrust of my message was the end: if people are telling you what they can and can’t afford in a country you’re less familiar with, it’s probably better to assume they know their own economy better than you do, rather than deciding a nation of hundreds of millions of people are financially over cautious.

The $1000 figure is for all of the US, regardless of if it’s high income low cost of living or anything else, and refers to money that can be deposited in savings at the end of the month.
For example, the UK has this figure at roughly $1100 USD.

The city I live in has remarkably close to twice the expenses as yours. In the US a car isn’t optional unless you live in the biggest if cities though. It would take four hours for me to walk to my doctor’s office, and longer by bus, but there’s only four bus visits per day at the office. A fair bit of the roadway lacks sidewalks. Either way a doctor’s visit means taking a day off work if you don’t have a car.

The 25% rate isn’t poverty rate, it’s more a measure of financial safety margin. You can be well above the poverty line and still have zero net income, it just means you can’t tolerate changes in income or expenses without things becoming extremely problematic. Our poverty level is based on an idealized measure of food costs nationwide and does a poor job measuring things. It was originally put together before we had great knowledge of what contributed to poverty, and it’s been a political tool used as a lever to justify cutting assistance programs for a long time, so changing it has been difficult.

I think you got my description backwards. There’s an amount I pay no matter what, and a point after which I pay nothing (with caveats). So the most I pay is that $11k number, unless the insurance company decides a procedure was unnecessary or the provider was unsupported (if you end up in the hospital you might not be able to choose your doctors, and some of them might not be covered by your insurance, which you’ll find out later. Aforementioned baby delivery cost $650,000 . I paid $6,500. Then I got billed for another $12,000 and change because of stuff like the insurance company deciding some tests were unnecessary and not working with some of the nurses.). My insurance situation is pretty good though, since a lot of people have significantly less at a higher cost.

it sounds like you’re probably better off with any odd job in Europe if you put it that way

That is in many ways true. America has a higher cap on income but Europe generally has a better safety net. I’m fortunate to have ended up in a low cost of living area with a high salary job, so I’m currently better off where I am, but as children and myself get older, a social safety net that means my retirement isn’t at the whims of the stock market and an education system that won’t potentially put my children in debt for life has an increasingly large appeal.

San Diego is a very high cost of living area. $100,000 would be a modest income there that would get you a minimal comfortable life. Like, $3,000 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment.
San Diego is also one of the safest cities in the US. Fun fact: while confirming that I found out I live in one of the more dangerous cities in the country. So that’s fun.
So yeah, San Diego is gonna give you more wealthy people with higher costs of living and very low crime. Factor that in to your assessments.

Housing economics are very disparate between countries. You can’t directly compare them easily. A two story house is basic construction here, they tend to avoid building anything smaller because it’s not significantly cheaper to build or sell. Our houses are built with different objectives so they tend to be cheaper to make taller, and it’s just expected that it’ll get replaced in 50 or 60 years.
The person you talked to in San Diego was likely renting a house, which is often cheaper than an apartment. That fits with the price you mentioned.

understand this as over half Americans make less than 1400€ a month. I assume you were exaggerating a bit

After expenses and taxes the average American household brings in under $1000 dollars a month. It varies by region since cost of living and wages vary significantly. 25% of Americans have no net income after expenses, and 1/3 have a net worth of $0 or less. In euros that’s less than €800 a month.

Essential goods usually refers to medical expenses, but it’s also used to refer to food, rent and utilities. Even if you’re employed and have insurance medical costs can be high.
I’m not in a bad situation at all, I’m actually in a very good one, and I pay about $400 a month for insurance and have a yearly cap of $6500 in costs, not counting medicine or the actual cost of insurance (so I’ll pay at least $4800, and at most $11,300+the cost of medicine+the cost of anything the insurance company thinks I didn’t need after the fact. ). I’ve hit the max for the past two years, once because baby and again because baby got a nasty cough and they spent a little being observed for safety.

My example was not homeless people. That’s what happens if you become elderly and have financial difficulties earlier in life here. A lot of Americans simply can’t afford to stop working, ever. I don’t remember a time I haven’t seen at least a person who should definitely be retired doing menial labor, and wheelchair and oxygen is common enough that it’s not really not worthy.

Besides, I know many people doing odd jobs and working a couple days a week. Working this way allows them to safely rent a house, to have food and extra money for diversion as well as saving up for times in which there may be no available jobs. Most of them can probably go on one year without working with the minimal savings they have.

That is not how it is in America. Housing, food and recreation on a part time job is actually a laughable fantasy, and that’s before you add “having savings”.

America’s economic disparity and lack of social safety net makes risk taking exceptionally dangerous.

You seem like a worldly and well traveled person. Use that experience to understand that there’s a rational reason Americans tend to be risk adverse in this regard. We either actually can’t afford it, or we can’t afford it without a shocking risk.

Most of the country is not New York, and transportation is more expensive. Basing travel costs off of the cost at a major transit hub isn’t representative.

France requires you to file your visa applications before travel. If you show up on a travel visa and then apply for long term residency they’ll reject it because you didn’t follow the rules.
A residency visa requires €1400 a month in income, so good luck getting residency with €1000 cash. Particularly when a significant portion of Americans don’t have that to begin with.

No one said you had to be rich to leave America and move to France, just that it’s not available to most Americans.

I don’t see how losing one year of income could noticeably ruin your life

Says the person who is obviously not American.
https://www.norc.org/research/library/most-working-americans-would-face-economic-hardship-if-they-miss.html Remember that we don’t have a social safety system here like most countries do. Being unemployed means you don’t get medical treatment , and even if you’re employed the costs can be devastating in their own right. You can end up homeless, where housing assistance can have a wait list of more than a year, if it even exists. Same for food assistance. The only medical care you’re entitled to is that the ER must do the minimum necessary to stabilize a life threatening condition.
That’s what’s looming over Americans when we weigh taking financial risks. Loosing a month of income can create an unrecoverable financial burden.

That’s what I mean when I say most Americans can’t afford to fail at something like that. They may be able to afford to do it, and it might work out, but if it doesn’t the consequences are crippling.

How often do you see an elderly person in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank doing menial labor at a supermarket or hardware store?

I think you’re conflating the wealth of the nation and the wealth of individuals. Saying that if you really want to go to France it’s possible, you just need to sell or abandon your belongings, walk away from your debt, abandon your family and travel by steerage on a cargo ship to get to France and live illegally because you don’t qualify for any type of long term residency and you also can no longer return home because you’ll be homeless and left to die in the street is… Unrealistic.
A very significant number of Americans simply do not have the resources to fail at something like that.

Yup, that’s a good one.

Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.

Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.

Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.