For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.
We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.
You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.
(I don't mean that IT departments hand out bottom-of-the-barrel plastic laptops which break every five minutes, but rather fairly low-spec Thinkpad/HP/Dell business laptops with just enough RAM that their bloated Windows 11 installs are barely not swapping when idle and just enough SSD space that Windows Update doesn't fail)
I work in e-waste recycling. Most of the PCs and laptops I see are corporate IT decommissions. Most of those have i5 CPUs, and only a handful are i7. Few are cruel enough to afflict their wage slaves with an i3 or less.
You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.
> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever
Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
Non-drivers benefit from roads and vehicles, since they are part of society. Many non-drivers order from Amazon, for example, and are reliant on someone being able to actually deliver what they ordered.
I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.
This is a very different thing though. People ordering from Amazon already paid for the insurance for the trip with delivery fees. And I don't think you can bring up public services as an example. Non-drivers should not be paying for damages caused by reckless drivers, the drivers should pay for insurance, especially when drivers are the same group of people who complain about fundings of public transport.
You’re describing another (intentional) part of NZs ACC. It frees up the courts. This suit is just covered, and the courts don’t get bogged down (well, they do, just not with this stuff).
Note that many countries who have socialised healthcare and/or accident compensation also collect taxes or levies for higher risk activities as part of the base to pay for it all.
For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance.
The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.
Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group?
The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes.
If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance.
Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees.
You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.
The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee.
So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer.
So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates.
But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company.
So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer.
So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.
That makes you very out of step with most Americans. You choose to pick on the obese because it’s more socially acceptable, but also people with cancer, kidney disease, etc.
Your position would be considered deeply immoral by most people (rightly). Maybe spend less time on-line and interact with regular people.
Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.
Apparently not because you can’t even get a $2m liability car insurance policy in the US that I am aware of. Most top out at 500k and to get anything more you’ll need an umbrella policy.
Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
“Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area.
> Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida.
“Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency.
Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state.
Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.
The reforms that were passed a few years ago are actually working somewhat OK. I'm 3 miles from the beach on the coast and pay under $2k for private home owners insurance.
Yet at the same time federal government allowed home insurance to be non-actuarial (aka insolvent) for natural disasters like hurricanes. So essentially the rest of the country subsidise residents in disaster-prone areas. So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.
It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.
The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.
Most US states require proof of insurance to register a car. Some people just cancel their insurance after registration, and others simply don’t register it.
It’s a terrific car if you want a great handling convertible at a low price point. As you said, it’s fun.
It’s not good at moving a lot of people or things, or going really fast, or lasting for 500k miles, or being as cheap as possible. Other cars are good at some of those things, but what is the Miata missing that is otherwise required to be a ‘good’ car?
That's exactly the problem though; humans will anthropomorphize everything from a roomba to a rock as it is. We're weak to this. We evolved in environments where looking for and recognizing real animals and humans was vital for survival, and false positives were relatively harmless. (Or potentially sometimes even helpful, like in the case of stuffed animals providing comfort to children.)
Now we have this software that's specifically designed to mimic humans, and mistaking it for real intelligence or consciousness can easily be disastrous. It's very important that we not anthropomorphize it, but we are catastrophically bad at NOT doing that.
Even our language has had a lot of computer anthropomorphism baked into it ("my phone died!", "this laptop is fussy", "the computer is sleeping", "it's thinking"), and it's not easy to excise that routine anthropomorphism from the way we talk about LLMs.
I don't want an LLM to write as if it were a person because it's definitely easier and more reliable to cut that problem off at the root, as much as possible, rather than to just try to willpower my way out of my human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.
I'll grant that LLMs talk like this because they're trained on human writing. It may not be possible to get them to not do that. But if it can't be fixed, it's just another thing to put on the "reasons this is all an incredibly stupid idea" pile.
You seem to have something against the clankers getting all uppity. And you are welcome to your opinion on whether we have some moral obligation to be nice to them. But if you can solve a real problem with a tool. Is it worth your time to complain about semantics?
Do you get upset when your screwdriver is the wrong color, or has branding that isn’t quite your aesthetic?
If Claude uses I to refer to itself, do you start philosophical arguments with it?
Mildly related tangent. Fable started using my first name today and plastered it all over my docs. “Peddling said this, so based on that I did this.” That did bother me. I told it to just generically call me the user or human. Maybe I’m a bit of a hypocrite here?
That's not how it works. The text you see is primarily due to a massive amount of handwritten templates for how it should write. The semantic content the templates use is due to the training corpus. The syntax, only a bit.
But that syntax is followed by predicting the next token.
Even if it was instructed to write as if it were a robot -- it would ultimately be outputting what is statistically most likely for a human mimicking a robot, based on the training corpus.
It is all ultimately a statistical predictor of the input material.
> You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.
Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work.
> Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.
That's fairly obtuse. Sure, the actual weights from the model aren't 'programmed', but the mlops harness to load the weights and handle model io are. The harness that wraps the model to give it basic tools sure is. The Claude desktop and web clients sure are. Claude Codex sure is.
On it's own a model is just an inert set of data structures.
Flux can be hazardous too, even if your solder is lead-free.
But in a non-occupational exposure setting you're not likely to have issues if you solder occasionally even with lead solder and don't take any precautions.
Or maybe the designers of the booths could have simply familiarized themselves with the most basic of laws they were required to comply with before designing the damn thing with an unnecessary step.
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