Xbox now owns the following franchises, among many others: Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Warcraft, Diablo, Call of Duty, The Outer Worlds, Wolfenstein, Doom… Those are just most of the important ones from recent acquisitions. Some already have movies or TV shows, but they can always make new ones for those too.

We don’t need doctors and nurses as long as we have claim approvers!

But that would actually allow to reduce the amount of claim approvers.

Why the fuck can’t you see a better solution would be nationalizing the rest of the healthcare providers

It’s a better solution, but much harder to achieve, particularly in such a large country. How do you forcibly nationalize hundreds of thousands of healthcare providers at once? Keep in mind, most of them aren’t Kaiser Permanente sized. Tons of businesses are one or two doctors, their nurses and front desk, if they even have a front desk employee.

Medicare for all could easily be a start, it does not preclude building a bigger nationally-owned network of providers.

Imagine this: All the VA hospitals remain government owned exactly as they are now, but everyone gets access to them, not just veterans. But since there aren’t enough for everyone, you can alternatively go to a private provider if they’ve signed a medicare contract, and to you the cost is the same - and to the government, the cost is decided by a regulatory body, NOT the private healthcare provider. If the private provider doesn’t agree to that pricing, they lose access to the medicare network and get fewer patients. Some doctors at the top of their specialty will refuse, because people will be willing to pay extra to see them, but most providers would prefer having the ability to treat literally everyone without having to worry about billing issues.

The government can then build more nationalized hospitals, particularly in areas where there aren’t enough private providers that choose to partner up with medicare.

Even most (all?) countries that have nationalized healthcare, allow for private providers, and many allow private providers to provide services to the national health insurance system if they agree to the terms. Medicare for all could be a stepping stone towards a similar system, where the share of nationalized providers can grow over time.

My bad, I was reading the sibling comment to mine which was about nvidia specifically and replied to the parent one, which was not. RAM has indeed way more than tripled. A 5060ti is about 50% expensive, so nvidia’s consumer unit counts are up still, but my comment was aimed somewhat wrong lol.

The batteries aren’t cheap. That’s still the expensive part of an EV, even though it’s nowhere near as expensive as it used to be.

But overall, the same issue plagues all new cars. There have been very few great innovations in the last decade or so, so now they just have to cram more techy tech into cars to get people to buy a new one. I mean no real innovations aside from the electrification itself of course.

Go look at high-end cars in 2016. Carplay/Android Auto was already a thing, though optional in most cars, and not available in all yet. Safety features like automatic braking, adaptive cruise, lane keep assist were already available. Massage seats were old news. There was just nothing new to add to a car to differentiate it from others. Tesla had just come along a few years ago with a slick UI and over the air updates, and people were blown away with it. What do you do? You start imitating the success of Tesla, going too far (too much tech) instead of integrating only the good things (actually responsive screen, for example).

Hell, I maintain that you can get 90% of what you’d ever want from a car, if you’re willing to own ICE, from a well-equipped 2005-2013 Mercedes S-Class by upgrading it with a AA/Carplay module. There’s little in its 2014-2020 successor that makes it truly a better car - only a slightly nicer infotainment system, better transmission (even that only in the facelift) and different (some better, some worse) engine options. So in 2020, with the new model, they went crazy with screens, making the interior actually uglier than the old ones. The electric equivalent, EQS, was even more screen-focused, only because it came out a year or 2 later, not because it’s electric.

Once we get to cheaper cars, however, it’s even harder to add any real new innovations. MB’s Magic body control (camera controlled hydraulic suspension that knows when to soften up for a pothole) is super expensive. 4 wheel steering is expensive. A large touchscreen is not expensive. A sim card for online services is not expensive.

User inputs aren’t automagically part of the model right away without training. Whether or not they respect the “don’t train your models on my shit” setting is of course unknown (let’s be honest, they probably don’t respect it), but in either case, they need to add it to the training dataset either manually or via some automated process. And either way, it’s going to be processed by at least an AI sentiment analysis and data categorization tool, or some underpaid contractor, or both.

I suspect this is just yet another marketing move.

Sadly not. Their 2026 consumer revenue is the highest it’s ever been. 2020, they made 11 billion, of which 5.5 was consumer. FY 2026 was 215 billion, of which 16 was gaming.

Their 2026 gaming revenue was bigger than their total revenue for 2020, and it’s also irrelevant to their bottom line.

Prices have gone up too, but I don’t think the average gaming GPU has gone up significantly more than 3x and probably less, so unit count is either unchanged or increased.

I’d recommend openrouter or something over ollama cloud. Fuck giving meta money. Or a subscription, since those tend to give much more tokens per dollar if utilized properly, I’m going through so many GLM 5.3 flash tokens it’s not even funny, on the cheapest z.ai coding plan, nearly never running out of usage limits, and getting nearly as good results as Claude Opus just a few months ago (like 4.8 or 5, not some old version)

On an individual level: Yes. Even a thousand (median) retirees don’t own as much as one billionaire. But in total: All the old people together own an order of magnitude more assets than all the billionaires put together. Because there are so many old people. A large part of it will be their homes of course, but there’s still a metric fuckton of stock in there via retirement funds.

Go look at Amazon for a particularly egregious example of a corporation that abuses its workers. One would think Jeff Bezos owns a huge part of it, but actually he owns about 8% of it, being the biggest individual shareholder. 75% of float and 68% of all shares are owned by institutions. Then look at the biggest institutional holders: They’re all companies providing ETFs and mutual funds. Most of that (obviously not all) is retail investors and retirement funds, as a lot of rich people find such fund investments boring (average ~10% annual growth long term is not enough when line must always go up). Thus a large proportion of the wage theft by Amazon benefits people investing for retirement, or that have already retired.

Some economic systems fix this by giving every worker and every retiree an amount of money every month and not allowing anyone (retired OR working) to have any investments at all. This puts an upper limit on how much any individual person can own and spend. It affects retirees more than workers because retirees are the ones who have had time to amass wealth in their working years. There’s less inequality, but the downside is that no matter how hard you work, your retirement will be exactly the same as everyone else, including those who barely work.

There’s no perfect answer. Under capitalism, workers will naturally feel that the ownership class (mostly old people who were smart and prosperous enough to invest, or lucked into a job with a real pension) own too much. Under communism, retirees are likely going to feel they aren’t being rewarded enough for the hard work they put in throughout the years. But crucially, neither extreme, nor really anything in between, addresses the fact that most countries’ populations are aging, and the lives we’ve gotten used to, have been based on there being fewer old people than working people. That’s why I see only two solutions: We all accept that we have much less (and yes, there should be a wealth cap too), or enough work gets automated that not many workers are needed anymore AND the economic system accounts for it (doesn’t have to be communism, but it can’t be unbridled capitalism)

Hey you forgot The Sun

Unfortunately, Reuters is a mass surveillance company moonlighting as a news company

Not sure about the others you mentioned, but given that they’re all American corporations, I suspect they’re going to be problematic too. Associated Press at least is a non-profit

Medicare sets its own prices, at least in the specialties I’ve interfaced with. Doesn’t matter who the provider is. The whole thing saves money because there’s no more need for 3 separate national healthcare systems (Medicare, Medicaid, VA) and a ton of bureaucracy can be reduced, especially on the eligibility check front. Whether or not medicare pricing is profitable for the entities providing healthcare or not is their problem, not Medicare’s, but they’ll get to lay off a bunch of billing employees themselves, because there’s so much work with prior auths, benefit verification, etc that’s no longer necessary, so they should be able to reduce their own costs too (which they’ll kinda have to if they can only ever charge medicare rates and not private rates).

Right now, the US federal government spends more on health care as a % of GDP than many nations with single-payer healthcare. And then you add people’s out of pocket spending, private insurance premiums, etc to it… It’s ridiculous. Oh and I forgot state gov spending! They spend some money on Medicaid. Medicare for all isn’t the absolute most perfect possible solution, sure, but it’s going to save a ton of money.

I haven’t noticed models using power idle, just a ton of memory.

So shareholders are now a long way down the food chain? If that’s the case, maybe publicly traded companies aren’t as evil as we once thought.

With -10C you might keep it as warm as 20-22C inside, usually with -20C and lower and an air source heat pump, you’re probably going to keep it a bit colder to save on electricity.

I don’t disagree, but it’s twice as common among women. That’s why there’s a stereotype in the first place.

This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.

Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down, and corporate profits are where most old people’s wealth comes from (401k, pensions, etc).

Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me.

The boomers had to support their parents. We have to support our parents and some of their childless friends. Our children will have to support more like 10-15 people each. Unless we raise our retirement ages enough that we aren’t a burden on our children. In general, if you’re under 40 and thinking of retiring one day, you’re selfish as fuck. Personally I at least acknowledge to myself that my desire to retire one day, is extremely selfish, as it requires me to accumulate resources that other people could use.

It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.

While there are places in economic where zero sum game does not apply (e.g you get more out of education than the money invested into it), resources are largely a zero sum game, as is time (labour). Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time. Etc. When there are fewer people working, less work can get done, unless those people work more hours. To have enough resources for everyone, a big enough share of people has to work. As we have more old people, we need people working longer, unless we figure out a way to replace human labor. As you’re against AI, there’s little real way to do that.

The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth. There’s enough growth that you can tax young people, either via corporations underpaying them (corporations owned by old people), or via direct taxation and a national pension (where the old people benefitting at least benefit a bit more evenly), without it weighing down on them too badly. This worked great for a while because the population kept growing, but that has pretty much stopped in the developed world.

Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them.

I mean calling half an entire gender stupid is pretty bold

It’s free though? Kagi the search engine is paid, Orion the browser is free. There’s still no paid browser that I’m aware of.

The problem with YouTube isn’t that it has ads, it’s that it ran at a loss for well over a decade and THEN started putting ads everywhere, increasing the amount every few months. If your service is only profitable with a ton of ads, put those ads there right away. The enshittification once you have a captive audience through the network effect is what sucks. We could have competitors and that would improve the quality for everyone, but Google sank billions into making sure nobody is using anything but YouTube and THEN started bombarding us with ads. That’s quite literally billions of dollars spent on making the market worse.

Over 55 isn’t babyboomers anymore that’s gen x.

And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.

I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.

Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren’t rising, that they can’t afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.

Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).

Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it’s still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I’m trying to argue is that you can’t have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they’re enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else’s wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation’s wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They’re enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don’t know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.

People just aren’t having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn’t specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.

Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can’t have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that’s absurd.

Ironically the AI everyone’s fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly “communist” countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it’ll get worse when their demographics crises hit.

They don’t control, yes - the control (on the level of the individual companies) is being handled for their benefit though. Line must go up for the shareholders - aka old people.