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.

This. They need some form of actual income, and ad revenue gives them theoretical capital to loan against.

That’s what they were talking about with the first part. It sounds like a ritual because of the language used, but it’s literally just an herbal remedy.

Or your advertisements.

If it’s a weird allergy that we haven’t heard of, we might even disregard your doctor’s note.

My coworker had this happen with her cinnamon allergy.

This is why you do not put bits you would like to keep attached anywhere near a powered rotating spindle.

Can’t look too Old, because then your audience might not take you seriously. Mid-20s at BEST, unless you can look Old And Erudite, in which case you might be able to pull off mid-40s.

Yeah, early antifascists kinda sucked too. It didn’t help that the leader of the SA was openly gay, so a lot of antifascists latched onto that as an attack and a rallying cry.

They were still selling into the 30s, marketed primarily towards women (“less maintenance, no gasoline needed”, etc). The Depression really killed off the environment that allowed many people to own multiple cars, and those little electric city cars were the first to go because you needed something that was big and could actually carry your kids and your dog and your belongings and whatever else.