I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).

Ju$tice.

Not at all - re-read the last one.

Not having to pay for Healthcare Insurance means it’s significantly cheaper for a person to do personal life projects that take months or years with little or no income, like getting further education or starting your own company, because your savings (or income from part time work) mainly have to cover housing and food, not Healthcare Insurance (which is almost as costly as housing, more so for people with pre-existing conditions)

It’s easier to change your career and even your life in general when you don’t have that extra cost of Health Insurance (and hence have a longer “runway” for your new situation to take off and become self-sustainable, as your money will stretch more).

As somebody who has by now lived in 2 countries with Universal Healthcare I can answer that:

• It’s for people who want faster access to non-emergency medical treatment than the public system will provide.

So if you want to not to have to wait months for specialist appointments and surgery and you can afford it, you get Healthcare Insurance. This even more so for aesthetic and run of the mill dental treatment - the Public isn’t going to, for example, just put you in front of the queue to give you an implant unless it’s deemed necessary because of your health, so if your concern is about your appearance you’ll have to wait years or it won’t even be covered.

Mind you, the whole thing is still backed by the Public Healthcare System: if during a surgery at a private hospital you have massive complications they’ll generally transfer you to a Public Hospital.

Further, even in the Private everything is way cheaper because of the massive competition from the Public System, plus the Public even uses its leverage to keep the prices of more common medicine low (basically since most of the prescriptions are done by doctors in the Public System, for things were there are multiple options the most expensive stuff doesn’t get prescribed unless it offers enough benefit versus the cheaper options to justify it, so for example things like Insulin are way cheaper if you get it without a prescription from a Public System doctor and free or near free if you do because the State pays most or all of the price)

Anyways, the single biggest benefit of Universal Healthcare which the “free market is the best” (in this case it isn’t: in general the free market optimizes for profit, not for outcomes, and further, in this domain people will pay whatever it takes to survive and don’t actually have the expertise to judge the quality of treatment and know the availability of other options, so there is no natural free market here) crowd forgets is the peace of mind and freedom Universal Healthcare gives:

• if you lose your job, you’re still fine even if you have and accident or get sick
• if you want to change jobs you have total freedom as you won’t be without Healthcare for you and your family in the period between jobs
• if you need or want to stop working on a regular jobs (because you want to start your own company or want to take a sabatical or want to go back to school and get a degree) you can without losing your Healthcare coverage during that period and it’s going to be way cheaper than if you had to pay Health Insurance (and copays) during that time.

Private Healthcare Systems are very much prisons that keep people tied to traditional jobs,

Meanwhile the NYC Police will be opening an emergency phone line exclusive for CEOs who feel threatened or harassed.

That’s definitely going to convince people in general that the Police “works for the community” and that they should “trust the Police”.

• Don’t break the Law for the company or the boss.
• Keep the company shit in company devices and your shit in your devices. That means company computer and phone for their stuff and your own for yours. If there’s ever any Lawsuit or Criminal investigation on the company they won’t take your stuff as evidence if you don’t at all use it for company work and won’t intrude in your privacy if the company stuff isn’t used for your own stuff.
• Even if it’s totally legal, if something that your are being ordered to do against your better advice might come back to bite you (i.e. you might get blamed for the negative outcome you predict will come from it), get that order in writing.

Even your direct lead can’t be assumed to be your friend (no matter how nice: niceness is easily and commonly faked) until you’ve gone through some proper shit together and he or she has shown themselves to be somebody that will take the hit rater than “blame their underlings” - trusts is earned, not due.

The kind of company were Management and HR go around trying to convince employees they’re like family and other similar things are simply trying to act like abusive cults.

Sound more like “abusive cult” than “family” to me.

There are two things that the aftermath of Luigi’s action has made poignantly clear to pretty much everybody:

• That the vast majority of people no matter their party affiliation and political leanings is feeling the pain and hates the abuses that carry on being committed by a minority of people in our system with total impunity … until Luigi.
• That the Ju$tice System, the Police and most of the Press, unlike what they claim work for that minority of people, not for the rest of us.

It’s amazing just how certain parts of the system that are supposed to work for everybody (such as in this case the Police, and in other cases large parts of the Press with their “poor CEO” articles) are pretty much shouting loud and clear for all to hear that “we’re not working for you, we work for the ones that abuse you”.

Most people just discovered now with this killing of a hated CEO that what they individually felt about certain things was also felt by almost everybody, and then these bought-and-paid-for minions who for decades have been putting a lot of effort in passing themselves as “working for the community” just repeatedly and overtly signal to everybody else their true minion-of-the-rich nature.

Mind you, as a Leftie who has been skeptical of whose those elements of the current system for decades, I’m happy they’re basically outing themselves and they should keep on doing it so that everybody sees them for what they really are and who they really serve,

But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.

As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

(That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes “Buy Land: they ain’t making any more of it” - but even that is backed by people’s belief and society’s enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be so if they had to actually protect themselves their “rights” on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the “owners” have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)

And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that’s not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.

Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.

As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.

If one thinks a lot, likes to learn and, maybe more important, thinks about knowledge and learning things, that person will probably get there.

A certain educational background probably helps but is neither required nor sufficient, IMHO.

Zionism is as much “Jews” as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they’re both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say “They do not represent me”.

Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is “Never believe Fascists”.

There are wankers everywhere and it doesn’t take that many wankers as a proportion of the population to screw things up for everybody else.

I think it’s a general thing with highly capable persons in expert and highly intellectual domains that eventually you kinda figure out what Socrates actually meant with “All I know is that I know nothing”

Studies have shown that something as simple as being tall makes people be more likely to be looked towards as leaders.

“Your qualifications trump my own claims of expertise and your argument ravaged my deeply held little-more-than-political-slogan beliefs and I’m psychologically unable to handle it so I’m going to attack your style of writing, make broad claims about your personality and block you to stop the mental tension that what you wrote causes in my mind”

Most of that time in my career I spent designing and deploying algorithms was in Equity Derivatives and a lot of that work wasn’t even for Market Traded instruments like Options but actually OTCs, which are Marked To Model, so all a bit more advanced than what you think I should be studying.

Also part of my background is Physics and another part is Systems Analysis, so I both understand the Maths that go into making models and the other parts of that process including the human element (such as how the definition of the inputs, outputs and even the selection of a model as “working” or “not working needs to be redone” is what shapes what the model produces).

One could say I’m intimately familiar with how the sausages are made, and we’re not talking about the predictive kind of stuff which is harder to be controlled by humans (because the Market itself serves as reference for a model’s quality and if it fails to predict the market too much it gets thrown out), but the kind of stuff for which there is no Market and everything is based on how the Traders feel the model should behave in certain conditions, which is a lot more like the kind of situation for how Algorithms are made for companies like Healthcare Insurers.

I can understand that if your background is in predictive modelling you would think that models are genuine attempts at modelling reality (hence isolating the makers of the model of the blame for what the model does), but what we’re talking about here is NOT predictive modelling but something else altogether - an automation of the maximizing of certain results whilst minimizing certain risks - and in that kind of situation the model/algorithm is entirely an expression of the will of humans, from the very start because they defined its goals (minimizing payout, including via Courts) and made a very specific choice of elements for it to take in account (for example, using the history of the Health Insurance Company having their decision gets taken to Court and they lose, so that they can minimize it with having to pay too much out), thus shaping its goals and to a great extent how it can reach those goals. Further, once confronted with the results, they approved the model for use.

Technology here isn’t an attempt at reproducing reality so as to predict it (though it does have elements of that in that they’re trying to minimize the risk of having to pay lots of money from losing in Court, hence there will be some statistical “predicting” of the likelihood of people taking them to court and winning, which is probably based on the victim’s characteristics and situation), it’s just an automation of a particularly sociopath human decision process (i.e. a person trying to unfairly and even illegally denying people payment whilst taking in account the possibility of that backfiring) - in this case what the Algorithm does and even to a large extent how it does it is defined by what the decision makers want it to do, as is which ways of doing it are acceptable, thus the decision makers are entirely to blame for what it does.

Or if you want it in plain language: if I was making an AI robot to get people out of my way whilst choosing that it would have no limits to the amount of force it could use and giving it blade arms, any deaths it would cause would be on me - having chosen the goal, the means and the limits as well as accepting the bloody results from testing the robot and deploying it anyway, the blame for actually using such an autonomous device would’ve been mine.

People in this case might not have been killed by blades and the software wasn’t put into a dedicated physical robotic body but it’s still the fault of the people who decide to create and deploy an automated sociopath decider whose limits were defined by them and which they knew would result in deaths, for the consequences of the decisions of that automated agent of theirs.

The individual on one side is indeed powerless (or at least it seemed to, until Luigi showed everybody that things aren’t quite like that).

However on the other side there are individuals too and they are not powerless and have in fact chosen to set up the system to make everybody else powerless in order to take advantage of it, and then deflect the blame to “the rules”, “the law” or “the algorithms”, when those things are really just a 2nd degree expression of the will of said powerful individuals.

(And as somebody who worked in making and using Algorithms in places like Finance, algorithms are very much crafted to encode how humans thing they should work - unless we’re talking about things done by scientists to reproduce natural processes, algorithms - AI or otherwise - are not some kind of technical embodiment of natural laws, rather they’re crafted to produce the results which people want them to produce, via the formulas themselves used in them if not AI or what’s chosen for the training set if AI)

My point is not about the point itself that you made, but the language you used: by going on and on about “the algorithm” you are using the very propaganda of the very people who make all other individuals powerless that deflects blame away from those decision makers. That’s the part I disagree with, not the point you were making.

PS: If your point was however that even the decision makers themselves are powerless because of The Algorithm, then I totally disagree with it (and, as I’ve said, I’ve been part of creating Algorithms in an industry which is a heavy user of things like models, so I’m quite familiar with how those things are made to produce certain results rather than the results being the natural outcome of encoding some kind of natural laws) and think that’s total bullshit.

Oh, it’s way worse than merely the algorithms.

You see, the algorithms are trained or designed according to the choices of people, the ones selected from the various possibilities to be put in place and used being the ones that people chose to put in place and use, and even after their nasty (sometimes deadly) effects for others have been observed they are kept in use by people.

The Algorithm isn’t a force of nature or a entity with its own will, it’s an agent of people, and in a company were the people creating the algorithms are paid for and follow other people’s orders about how it should be, the people with for whom the Algorithm is an agent are the decision makers.

Deflecting the blame with technocratic excuses (such as that it’s the Algorithm) is a very old and often used Neoliberal swindle (really just a Tech variant of rule-makers blaming problems on “the rules” as if there is nothing they can do about it, when they themselves had a saying on the design of those rules and knew exactly what they would lead to)