Does Netflix still have that pretty cool feature where they paused your subscription if you didn't use it for a few months? It was very cool seeing it happen when I had my Netflix account!
I think most of these services should just not charge you if, during any given payment period, you don't use the service. If I go to the trouble of canceling I'm likely not coming back; especially since the friction for re-subscribing is higher than just logging in and it automatically being 'unpaused'. I'm also more likely to cancel a service if I haven't used it for three months and see its cost me $60 just to have.
Back in dvd shipping era I found myself with netflix subscription that I didn't use for a very very long time. I asked if they can give me some credits or discounts or anything really. The answer was no. They never got another cent from me since.
they stopped my neflix streaming, because I didn't use it as much.
And just recently they stopped my dvd service because there's no market for people like me. 9I was actively using - it had access to all the good movies)
I can't help but think of temple grandin and comfortably guiding cattle to the "endgame"
Presumably by competitors and alternatives, you aren't strictly referring to streaming platforms. What of it? People still want to stream film and tv, and among legal platforms Netflix is still tops.
Netflix feels like they made a very bad bet that their technology was some sort of leading advantage (which was silly because if BitTorrent exists then fairly obviously...no it wasn't).
The point is that if an ad hoc distributed network of unfunded peers can do it, the barrier to entry is not that high for any well funded major enterprise which wants a slice of the pie.
Basically I'd be curious to know if they felt internally that they'd transition to a service provider or something if they had to.
The article doesn't mention AI at all, as far as I can tell. It's just the typical boilerplate screed about how the government is hiding aliens and flying saucer from everyone and they need to tell us. Same "Roswell! Roswell!" song and dance the UFO crowd has been doing for years.
But many people have been arguing that the most likely form of life to spread across the stars would be some form of AI for years, usually in the form of Von Neumann probes. That isn't deliberate, disingenuous obfuscation of anything, it's just speculation. Which is of course all anyone has, because this is all just folklore and grift.
People aren't ready for it, but we should be eating bugs.
Boca-bug-burgers would be an infinitely renewable 'meat' and farmable on massive scales, without destroying forests or watersheds. Without subjecting users to antibiotics.
Along with crops grown and fed to bugs, after all, they need to eat to grow.
There will also be crowding, bugs feeding a country aren't going to be wild harvested, how would you even do that, and we'd need massive quantities.
So disease would be a thing.
And we'd need massive amounts of water too, and we'd have massive amounts of leavings, just as with cattle.
Any "but we can just" scenarios, like using their leavings as fertilizer, can also be done with cattle.
Some bugs are likely smarter that the cattle I've been around, and they feel pain, so what of the bug activists? What of the queen, and the hive mind?
Are we going to claim we know that they aren't feeling pain from crowding, or their situation?
What happens when we harvest in the same area over and over, a massive building just for this? Bugs excrete chemical warnings to communicate, and poison during stress, will these all build up month after month of harvest?
There are endless questions to be resolved, but all I hear is "well we can just...." eat bugs, with no other validation or justification about scale, safety, etc.
The funny thing is, we already do eat bugs, we just don't call it as such.
Lobster, crab, shrimp, crawfish, mussels, clams. If you go to very small bugs- the yeast that ferments beer, cheese, kimchi, pickles, saurkraut, yoghurt. We also eat honey made by bugs. In some places spiders are eaten as are scorpions.
Also of course, every time you eat bread, pasta, rice or any grain product you're also eating small amounts of bugs that were ground up in the process.
It's an arbitrary cultural thing. Is it weird to eat the flesh of a mammal? Weird to eat a fungus growing off a decaying log? Weird to eat seaweed? Weird to drink milk from a lactating mother cow? Weird to eat a cricket?
> …2019 on deaths in three areas that have previously been linked to cannabis use but are still poorly understood: motor vehicle accidents, suicide and opioid overdose.
For each cause of death, the researchers compared trends in deaths in states with legal markets with those in states that had comprehensive medical cannabis programs and similar trends in death rates prior to implementing markets…
The study did not link cannabis use with traffic fatalities.
The study linked trends.
Cannabis use was not a factor in those deaths. Not listed as a cause. Not listed as intoxicated at time of accident.
There is a significant difference between the narrative being schlepped versus what data was actually accumulated.
Findings show that meta-analyses and culpability studies consistently indicate a slightly but significantly increased risk of crashes after acute cannabis use. These risks vary across included study type, crash severity, and method of substance application and measurement. Some studies show a significant correlation between high THC blood concentrations and car crash risk. Most studies do not support this relationship at lower THC concentrations. However, no scientifically supported clear cut-off concentration can be derived from these results. Further research is needed to determine dose-response effects on driving skills combined with measures of neuropsychological functioning related to driving skills and crash risk.
I’m understanding here that cannabis is linked to a higher RISK of crash fatalities not linked to crash fatalities themselves? That’s a very important distinction.
No it’s really not, the same thing is true of alcohol use and car crashes because sober people still crash or lung cancer from smoking etc.
Suppose you have a study of 10k people split 5k:5k between smokers and non smokers. In the non smokers group you get say 10 cases of lung cancer and the smokers group you get 200. It’s really tempting to say the individual smokers got long cancer from smoking, but the base rate isn’t 0 so you don’t know who was screwed either way. Perhaps if nobody smoked in that total population there would have been 19 cases of lung cancer or perhaps 22.
Thus only thing you can say is smoking increases RISK of lung cancer not link it to specific cases.
Medicine can be explained fairly simply, and the why of how it works as it does is also explained by this:
Imagine a very large room that has every surface covered by on-off switches.
We cannot see inside of this room. We cannot see the switches. We cannot fit inside of this room, but a toddler fits through the tiny opening leading into the room. The toddler cannot reach the switches, so we equip the toddler with a pole that can flip the switches. We train the toddler, as much as possible, to flip a switch using the pole.
Then, we send the toddler into the room and ask the toddler to flip the switch or switches we desire to be flipped, and then do tests on the wires coming out of the room to see if the switches were flipped correctly. We also devise some tests for other wires to see if that naughty toddler flipped other switches on or off.
We cannot see inside the room. We cannot monitor the toddler. We can't know what _exactly_ the toddler did inside the room.
That room is the human body. The toddler with a pole is a medication.
We can't see or know enough to determine what was activated or deactivated. We can invent tests to narrow the scope of what was done, but the tests can never be 100% accurate because we can't test for every effect possible.
We introduce chemicals then we hope-&-pray that the chemicals only turned on or off the things we wanted turned on or off. Craft some qualifications testing for proofs, and do a 'long-term' study to determine if there were other things turned on or off, or a short circuit occurred, or we broke something.
I sincerely hope that even without human understanding, our AI models can determine what switches are present, which ones are on and off, and how best to go about selecting for the correct result.
Right now, modern medicine is almost a complete crap-shoot. Hopefully modern AI utilities can remedy the gambling aspect of medicine discovery and use.
The more important point was that medications that do work still come in two forms: ones where we have a good idea of the mechanism of action that makes them work, and ones where we don't.
For example, we have a good idea of why certain antibiotics cure tuberculosis - we understand that tuberculosis is caused by certain bacteria, and we know how antibiotics affect the cellular chemistry of those bacteria to kill them. We also understand the dynamics of this, the fact that the body's immune system still has to be functioning well enough to kill many of the bacteria as well, etc. We don't fully understand all of the side-effects and possible interactions with other diseases or medications in every part of the body, but we understand the gist of it all.
Then there are drugs and diseases where we barely understand any of it. We don't have for example a clear understanding of what depression is, what the biochemistry of it is. We do know several classes of drugs that help with depression in certain individuals, but we know those drugs don't help with other individuals, and we have no way of predicting which is which. We know some of the biochemical effects of these drugs, but since we don't understand the underlying cause of depression, we don't actually know why the drugs help, or what's the difference in individuals where they don't help.
There are also widely used medications where we understand even less. Metamizole, a very widely used painkiller sold as Novalgin or Analgin and other names, discovered in 1922, has no firmly established mechanism of action.
There can be regulatory bodies, which ideally should be self governing the media instead of executive of the elected government, which regulate some of the media attributes. But a blanket ban on a media house, for criticism in the name of national security? No. That is the failure of the civilian leadership to provide the security to the nation. Admitting that you are naked should the norm, not blinding the population from seeing you.
I disagree. The temporary ban is due to the platforming of violence. It's the same ban that the US, UK, and EU have in place and for the same reasons. You can't give terror a voice or it gives terrorists an incentive to commit terror. If AJ wants to broadcast they need to stop airing interviews with terror groups.
Other broadcasters critical of Israel seem to have that part figured out.
When Whatsapp was released, free text messaging was not a thing for most of europe. The USA had long since ditched charging for sms messaging by that point, so the attractiveness of a free communications app wasn't there.
Also, there are carriers in europe that offer bundle discounts and better data packages for opting out of sms altogether.
First we discover, then we research, then we implement, then we assess the implementation.
Sometimes the assessment shows us that the implementation was incorrect. Sometimes the assessment shows us that the original discovery or research was incorrect. Sometimes the assessment shows us unintended consequences for our actions and implementations.
Ever see a city that closes down roadways to vehicular traffic, so that bicycles and foot traffic are more prevalent there?
Those words have been with me since I was 8 years old. The truth of them resounds throughout history, and well into the distant future.
Ignore them at your peril.
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