Nah, “conditional approval” is written into the regulation. You might know this wording better as “pay us a large sum and we’ll give you approval.”

Yeah, their sales team is incredibly fucked over from their only significant revenue being various AI farms.

Plus all the shock absorption for the lense. And the avionics if you don’t plan to just have this thing drop film into a predetermined area (like the old Keyhole sats or the U-2).

Legitimately nothing. I think this is MS looking for use cases, because they have sunk all their capacity into AI. They cannot detangle themselves from their AI, and they’re trying to course correct into SOMETHING that might be profitable and pull them out of their death spiral.

Legitimately the dude is a sociopathic teenager.

“Why would I wanna spend time with Grandma or the kids or my wife or my dog when I can sit and play video games and draw cool stuff in my notebooks.”

I don’t think any of these fucking weirdos know what “genuine human connection” IS. I don’t think any of them have actually internalized a genuine, caring relationship at any point. They know how the steps of the dance, they can do it on command, but it’s soulless.

Getting every episode of Dr Oz uploaded to your frontal lobes.

Nope, Corey is out of the house now too.

You would be extremely surprised. Car maintenance is expensive, and lack of inspection very often leads to people driving vehicles that should have been off the road years ago simply because a lot of states that axe it, axe inspections because they’re expensive for the driver (a lot of these states are in the former Steel Belt). In better-off areas or places where people have more time/money/equipment/space to wrench on cars, then yes, but here in my city, I definitely have seen cars where the entire frame is basically being held together by Bondo and prayer, cars where they’re running on 4 spares, cars where enormous sections of the body paneling are just gone. I’ve nearly been hit by people who clearly relied on yearly inspections to tell them “hey your brakes are failing” because they drive on autopilot and just adjust how they drive to accommodate failing/failed brakes.

In fact, I suspect maintenance costs are HIGHER in areas without inspection, because shops could rely on that regular-ish influx of cash even if it was only like $50-$100 a vehicle, AND you have the customer in the shop, so it’s easier to go “hey you really need brakes, it’ll cost you an extra $200 and take an extra hour or two”.

It’s also AFTER their IPO, so the owners can cash in beforehand

Pretty much exactly this. You stick useless people in these important roles so they can’t get enough traction to try for your chair, but you also want people who are at least smart enough to do whatever you tell them to do. Patel is actually a smart pick, he’s just too dumb to know how to push around actual field agents and only knows how to push around analysts and media.

Bingo. You use ML to narrow down results, not to give you answers. I have a friend who uses ML models to analyze radio telescope data, because it’s really good at the mind-numbing work of throwing out noise and junk from broadcast satellites and known radio sources. Then you go through the narrowed stuff to see if anything in that is more interesting.

It’s the question between sifting a million hits or a thousand.

Might be a nurse, too. I have met some nurses who very clearly weren’t taught to do things like solve problems or think critically.

All of those are MORE expensive, at scale. If you can just hand 1500 kids a $200 Chromebook that fulfills ALL those functions, that’s $300k, vs 1500 e-ink readers at $40 a pop, 1500 digital typewriters @ $100 apiece, etc. Hell, that scientific calculator ALONE might be $200+ in some markets because Texas Instruments practically has the market cornered (to the point that I had to go to the administration of my school district to show them that the Casio I had was functionally identical).

So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don’t align with the earmark, it’s incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can’t really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can’t really do anything else with it.

That doesn’t even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There’s so few real options that it’s incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it’s collusion.

They’ve stated elsewhere that even though they’re deploying “age inference” (whatever that is), verification is mandatory if you don’t want your account to be restricted to PG-13, basically.

Also doesn’t help that they apparently gave a bunch of half-truths to every other artist on the card (like Shinedown), and potentially just added some names they thought they could dial last-minute (Ludacris).

Now he’s also retooling Tesla facilities to build his Optimus humanoid robots.

Except your managers might think it’s important, or you’re a shitty manager trying to fill their time and look important by micromanaging your employees.

Remember, squids: if you’re in a big city, cops are better at responding to one big thing in one location than ten medium sized things across the entire metro.

Oh it gets more fun, because if you have to go by ambulance like I did, you get a bill from the ambulance company. The one I had tried to quadruple charge me and had to be told multiple times that the bill was paid, they can’t keep making up new charges because “we forgot one thing” or “rates changed”.

Luckily it was all worker’s compensation, so I didn’t pay a cent, but it was a rather interesting 6 months.