> Because insurance would then just lowball the cost of everything.
They do. Many, many billable items are priced to the limit that insurance will pay. Insurance and providers have agreements on the prices they can charge for certain procedures or supplies.
It used to be the norm that insurance would pay their maximum and leave the rest to you. Sometimes the provider would waive the difference, sometimes it was billed to you.
The cost of healthcare is 100% an artefact of insurance price fixing and absolutely nothing else.
Drones that sound like, act like, or maybe look like whales, might be the answer. If the adversary can't tell if its a whale or drone, likely to force them to waste a lot of resources and/or ammunition.
It's a compelling picture, but it seems like it would be rather harmful for real whales, and if chances are it's a drone rather than a whale, several actors might choose to fire regardless and find out later.
Not that whales are the only option to mimic, but whatever is chosen had better be common enough to make the drones rare by comparison, and stay that way.
Jellyfish might be a nice option when conditions permit...
Your main challenge will probably be measuring the distance between neighboring drones as accurately as possible. AIUI you could recover signal from unevenly spaced receptors IFF you know precisely where each receptor is.
After that it's just a standard computational problem which is (IMO) far less interesting.
Well, I was thinking that for GHz level signals, you can't just beam your stuff down to a ground station due to bandwidth limitations, so your drones can't be just dumb ADCs, and there would need to be some compute on board. Time synchronization also becomes interesting.
Or they can't afford to sell the cards at consumer prices. If they take a loss in the consumer segmet, they can recoup by overcharging the datacenter customers.
That's how this scheme works. The card is most likely not profitable at consumer price points. Without this segmentation, consumer cards would trail many years behind the performance of datacenter cards.
You can theorize a million scenarios, but clearly no one here will know what really transpired for Nvidia to hobble their consumer chips. I really don't think consumer is loss leading, GPUs for AI is a fairly recent market while Nvidia has existed churning out consumer GPUs since 90s.
But clearly, lack of competition is one thing that supports whatever rent Nvidia seeks.
> I have the freedom to read what I want. You're telling me I don't
You don't. This is not a legally protected right in any US jurisdiction. Period.
> This isn't about freedom of speech
Correct, because this isn't speech and "freedom of speech" does not mean what you think it does. The right to freedom of speech enumerated in the US constitution is generally interpreted to mean that the government cannot punish its citizens for speaking out against the government. That's really all you're guaranteed. This has nothing to do with censorship, and in fact censorship in general is quite accepted in US law. You quite plainly do not have the right to unrestricted access to any information you want. No law even suggests that. Just for starters, we regularly ban books at the state level. In some places, you can be arrested for possessing certain materials. Perfectly constitutional.
Freedom of speech does not mean you can say or print anything with no consequences. See libel.
Freedom of speech does not mean you can read or posses any information you want. See classified materials, state secrets, illegal materials such as CSAM.
Freedom of speech means that the government can't put three generations of your family in a concentration camp because you tweeted once that the president sucks.
> The right to freedom of speech enumerated in the US constitution
The problem is people switch between this definition of freedom of speech and the the more general version found in "on liberty" and other philosophical works. If youre talking about what the government is allowed to do sure use the first definition but this conversation started by talking about the second. By subtlety switching from "is this something that is good to do" to "is this something the government is allowed to do" youve derailed the conversation.
Philosophical freedom of speech is much more than what is enumerated in the constitution.
The general rule is in fact that you can read anything you can get your hands on, which is one reason people like Prince Harry who come from different legal traditions consider the First Amendment to be nuts.
"Just for starters, we regularly ban books at the state level."
We really do not. We sometimes ban them from public school libraries, more usually at the local than state level. A bookstore can sell you any book you care to read including those with written depictions of child sexual abuse, with the limited exception that a locality might try to declare things obscene as being contrary to local standards of decency (but in practice in modern America rarely does).
"See libel."
Libel of public figures requires knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth and even then is a civil offense. There are vestigial criminal libel laws but it's doubtful they're constitutional and no one gets convicted. You can't go to jail for it and no one gets in trouble for reading it.
"See classified materials"
Unless you have a security clearance, you can read all the classified material you want if it's published. You can be punished for disclosing it if you have legal access to it, but not in practice for publishing it in peacetime (see the Pentagon Papers) and you cannot be restrained from publishing it before the fact unless doing so presents a clear and present danger to American public, a standard almost impossible to meet in peacetime.
"illegal materials such as CSAM"
In general you can read all the CSAM you want. You can't look at pictures or video.
They just read the title, not the article, then confabluate an entire world view from three words that are entirely untethered from the actual constitutional meaning.
Counterpoint: being useful to a more successful species is a staggeringly effective evolutionary strategy. Nature is chock full of symbiotic relationships and it's a perfectly valid ecological niche. Symbionts exist whether or not the host is capable of feeling bad about it.
By becoming attached to such a successful species as humans, any symbiont species has an extremely good chance of surviving for as long as the host species. Including long after they'd have gone extinct naturally.
Most species that humans like or find useful will eventually end up colonizing entire star systems along with us. Those species will continue to live on in their evolutionary descendants long after the sun exapnds and earth becomes inhospitable.
Personally I call that a successful species.
Or we could just leave the worms alone and let them be hunted to extinction by predators or die out in natural climate or ecological shifts over time. I guess that's nicer than species continuity into galactic time scales.
Very interesting take. However there’s some important difference between the species that express this behavior in the wild, free world (think pilot fish) and those that are breed, used, breed again then killed -all while in forced captivity.
I doubt the livestock would define itself as a "successful” if it could use language.
They do. Many, many billable items are priced to the limit that insurance will pay. Insurance and providers have agreements on the prices they can charge for certain procedures or supplies.
It used to be the norm that insurance would pay their maximum and leave the rest to you. Sometimes the provider would waive the difference, sometimes it was billed to you.
The cost of healthcare is 100% an artefact of insurance price fixing and absolutely nothing else.