> What Happens to an Economy When It's Too Hot to Work?

Same thing that happens when it's too cold to work? Wait for another season?

> Texas is a gerrymandered purple state, not a red state

Man, I just don't get this at all. Sure, there may be some democratic areas in the large cities, but they pretty much have zero say in the local state governance. Look at the recent walk outs and leaving the state only to return to have the legislation they were protesting pass with nothing they could do. There is no democratic power. Even those large cities that lean left have attempted to buck the system by passing local regulations that the state then sues them to prevent those liberal policies from taking place. As an example, Dallas passed decriminalization for marijuana, but the governor said no via law suits. This idea of Texas being purple just comes across as farcical and out of touch. I say this as someone that grew up in Dallas, lived in LA, and now lives back in Dallas. You sound just like someone from Austin.

I know plenty of women that are very unhappy with the state for not dissimilar reasons as the GP with friends that have moved out of state specifically for the government's apparent disdain for women.

I think your assumption of lack of caring is misplaced. The citizens clearly care, but have no power to do anything about it. Those in power are the ones that do not care or are paid not to care.

Why would they? What would be the return for them?

Nothing is in it for them. It’s why I called it a tip - like tipping your blackjack dealer when you have a good run.

On the same basis as phishing emails having spelling mistakes a smart pyramid scheme would hire him as a mascot to keep the idiots buying and the critical analysis hard to separate from jokes.

Is that super speed reading human going to then make itself available to instantly-ish answer any and every possible question from anyone with a paid subscription?

This argument is pretty lame.

Yes, we call those people “consultants”.

I've yet to meet a consultant that was anything near what was on their CV

So I guess not dissimilar to an LLM

There was definitely a build up. Trump was held back from being Trump in the first term. Even with that, there was no recourse for any of the actions that he took. There were also the court decisions that happened in between terms. So this term, he naturally feels no need to hold back. It is unlikely this Trump term would happen had his first not happened.

Four weeks ago, California received the last of the shipments coming from the Strait. Everyone said CA only has on hand six weeks of supply. There was a bunch of panic baiting posts at the time. I haven't seen any suggesting that the supply is coming to an end, but maybe I've missed stories of resupplies coming in to the west coast??

California itself produces a substantial amount of oil.

A mile off Interstate-5 in the southern Central Valley, and you can’t tell you’re not in Texas oil country. Santa Barbara regularly has oil leaks from the offshore production in the Channel Islands area, and Beverly Hills High School famously has a productive oil well on campus.

So the state isn’t going to literally run out of oil (though lack of imports could lead to shortages).

I too am really enjoying all of these new apps with less features than already existing apps. /s

I feel a little pain seeing how big, fully-formed apps appear in GitHub, created in days, completely hollow of pull requests, issues, or discussions.. just imagining the chain of prompts.

"Make me a web app like Stellarium"

"Make it dark mode"

"Increase the resolution of the graphic assets"

"Oh, I'm out of credits for today. Where is my wallet?"

"..."

"Suggest me a catchy name that is not in use right now"

"What a productive weekend! I'll license this as MIT so other prompters can freely benefit from my prompts. I made this".

I'm probably being unfair, maybe this wasn't vibe coded in days, maybe the author worked more on it than it appears, was very careful Claude didn't use GPL code that can't be relicensed as MIT, etc. I can't know. I'm basing my opinion on what I can see.

even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them

So we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?

I think realistically we're waiting for someone in the top 10-20 richest people in the world to get cancer (or a close relative etc) who will then throw billions at research to try and fix the problem.

We spend upwards of $15B a year globally on cancer research. About half of that is funded by government and charities, half by pharmaceutical companies.

If spending billions was the main trick, we’d know it already.

Do we actually spend it, or do we raise that much money while only a fraction of it goes to research? <looksAtPinkRibbons>

Usually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1].

[0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage

[1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/

So according to your timeline, we're ~10 years from medical research becoming enshitified?

Depends where in the history of the web you count it as such. For me it was more like the late 2010s when that happened, so 20 years. And of course vanity surgery is already a thing, so it may have already happened to an extent with medicine?

10-20 years for an Alastair Reynolds' style Indoctrinal Virus? I hope not, but I can totally see it happening eventually.

I don't know if we "had" something called Theranos. In fact, I believe that was the subject of a couple of lawsuit because we didn't.

I'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.

I think you've captured exactly what they are trying to say

This doesn't exactly make it clearer. I can think of two things it can imply. Neither make a lick of sense:

- Theranos was at the forefront of medical technology

- Apple is a fraudulent company to the core

Apple is first and foremost an affordable luxury brand that makes sleek hardware.

And theranos did that too? Theranos, a medical company, was an affordable luxury (??) brand that makes sleek hardware? In fact the hardware was not sleek at all, since it didn't function.