It's still better to take a stand even when there is a risk of being wrong because there is always a risk of being wrong. Don't let fear of being wrong or not knowing everything (which is impossible) stop you from standing up for your beliefs. Instead, stand up for what you believe, but be open to having your mind changed. If new information comes to light which changes your position that's perfectly acceptable.
It's a lot easier to live with yourself when you act according to your best understanding of the situation than when you allow fear to paralyze you into inaction at a time when you should have done something.
Not really. A huge number of players are on consoles that have little to no support for mods and games today have too many centralized online servers and companies who keep insisting on control over your local PC which means that game companies can decide what mods you can and cannot have on your system.
There was a time when the concept of "banned mods" only ever applied to a specific server out of countless other servers and locally you could do anything you wanted, even run your own server.
This is the truth of it. If you can unlock all the on-disc DLC or create and use your own maps, mods, skins, etc. it risks the money companies want to take from you after you've already paid the $60-$80 for the incomplete game itself.
Anti-cheat is about protecting DLC profits as much as it is anything else.
It's a shame too because we got so much good content from random people who just loved the games and wanted to create neat things for them. It was one way that some people started their careers in the video game industry and it spawned a lot of other websites and communities around sharing, reviewing, and creating all that free content.
> but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper.
I doubt it. Hospitals charge $15 for a single pill of Tylenol because they know insurance will pay for it, and that includes private insurance.
The best thing we could do is ditch the private healthcare industry to the extent that the rest of the first world has and cover everyone with government plans. Those plans can then negotiate for much better prices and refuse the kinds of insane charges we're seeing. The cost of plans would also drop because prices would be spread out over every taxpayer. Having primarily a single provider for insurance would make everything easier and less expensive for hospitals and doctors offices too.
The billions in profits private healthcare companies rake in all comes at the expense of everyone else one way or another and they have every incentive to make as much money in profit as they can. Without that excess fortune in profits being skimmed off and stuffed into pockets a government funded insurance plan which covered everyone could get the job done taking in closer to what it actually costs to deliver the services we want and no more.
You don't need the insurance industry sticking their dick in most of the business they do. Insurance is for the foreseeable but unforecastable, not for routine things.
The additional overhead is substantial and adds huge marginal cost for routine things and say nothing of the principal-agent problem
You could zero out every dollar American insurers make and not materially alter consumer health care economics; their share of the health care pie is almost literally a rounding error.
The magic of the system is that it's structured so that people like you can say things like that and not even be lying in any provable way.
Sure, it's not the actual insuring that's costing that much but the massive breakdown of incentives from increasingly vertically integrated healthcare companies (some of whom are insurers, some of whom own insurers) owning increasingly large shares of everything is clearly causing cost to spiral. The industry is making work for itself at out expense. Whether that work happens in the insurer's office or the billing office of the clinic that's owned by the insurer isn't really material. And of course everyone in the process gets a cut so they fight for their bit of it. Doctors used to drive the same crappy cars and live in the same modest houses as the rest of us. Nurse didn't used to be the "made it in life" job for people who come from poor backgrounds.
Dial it back a bit. I just made an extremely banal and citable claim about US health care. I agree with you (trivially verifiable from the search bar at the bottom of this page) about the practitioner compensation racket.
> Hospitals charge $15 for a single pill of Tylenol because they know insurance will pay for it
It’s more they know insurance won’t pay for it, and negotiate discounts based off the “retail” price. Although at this point it’s gotten so ridiculously convoluted and cross-subsidized that I doubt even the insurance company or hospital knows what the actual paid amount for a Tylenol will end up being until months after the fact.
My point being that healthcare costs for pets are immediately calculable, where it’s a big damn mystery for months on end about how much equivalent human healthcare will end up costing. Clearly, if the former is possible, the latter should be too.
> I doubt it. Hospitals charge $15 for a single pill of Tylenol because they know insurance will pay for it, and that includes private insurance.
Did we discover a new kind of monopoly perhaps? It’s not quite full blown corruption as there still (for now) exists a somewhat adversarial relationship between insurance and hospitals. However, at the same time, they seem to be pulling each other into the abyss, and our society is the victim.
Considering they were aware of this on the 8th (who knows how long that was after it actually happened) it's a little disappointing that they'd wait until the day before such a major holiday to post about it. Unsurprising sure, but still disappointing.
> It was SMS Phishing, a.k.a. Social Engineering... it’s opposite of breach.
A social engineering attack that enables an attacker to gain unauthorized access to Mixpanel's systems and export a dataset containing names, user IDs, location data, and email addresses sounds exactly like a breach to me.
Only once have I seen anything like this. The room had a bathroom door, but also a giant hole cut out in the wall so that everyone in the room could peer into the bathroom for some reason. We demanded a different room with a complete wall separating the bathroom and got one (a nicer one at their expense too).
If you want to share a room get a bed in a hostel. Is sharing a room with strangers - or worse work colleagues - really that common in the US?
What do you do with the bed? Or are you happy lying asleep next to a stranger , but not having a shower in sight (even if the shower was really open to the room which I can’t think I’ve ever seen)
But I absolutely check out google maps reviews, and a single review saying that the hotel did not have a proper door on the bathroom would guarantee I would not stay there.
Even traveling alone it's a clear indication they have no respect for their guests, and it's a significant hygiene issue.
> Even traveling alone it's a clear indication they have no respect for their guests, and it's a significant hygiene issue.
I feel like if you consider lack of a door a significant hygiene issue, you probably just shouldn’t be staying in hotels. These rooms aren’t being sanitized between guests, they are pretty dirty.
All the more reason not to add mold from the shower and excess feces from every toilet flush to the list of things I have to worry about being on the mattress.
There are good reasons to keep bathrooms physically separated from where you sleep and hygiene is one of them, along with not wanting the bed to be a front row seat to the sights, smells, and sounds of whatever is going on in there and not wanting an expensive hotel room I'm paying for to be like a prison cell.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that, just because things aren't perfect isn't a good reason for the hotel to make things worse and doesn't mean I shouldn't avoid worse hotels on the basis that they are worse.
If there is adequate ventilation in the bathroom, most of the steam/moisture will go there. If there isn't, a door won't save you much, since as soon as you open it all the built-up steam is going to escape in the room anyway. Air conditioning generally takes care of it if it does happen though.
The extra humidity is bound to add to mold issues too. It's not a huge issue when it's largely contained to the bathroom where you can wipe stuff down, but mold in mattresses, upholstered furniture, curtains, and carpet make filling the entire hotel room with steam every day (if not multiple times a day) a very bad idea.
Not to mention that any bacteria thrives in more humid environments. They aren't so good at keeping moist. This is true for a lot of things, especially the smaller the thing is, including bugs. Higher humidity definitely makes good hygiene more difficult.
Why do you think bathrooms have fans? That'd be a lot of effort to deal with farts.
Considering this and your other comments I really think you need to think a bit deeper about your answers. I believe in you, just ask "and then what happens" and I'm positive you'll figure it out.
Yes. Though trapping humidity in the bathroom doesn't make it go away, and you have to open the door to get in and out of the bathroom, and that lets the humidity escape.
And until then they will milk as much money as possible. If there is outrage or they see sales dropping, a few thousand dollars per hotel will replace those rooms with doors leaving with net profit and steady shareholder growth. Some statistical analysis ppt made by some mid level MBA must have proposed this and got a promotion.
This is why it falls on us to not simply put up with what little they expect us to settle for. Ask about their privacy and bathroom doors when booking and if caught by surprise by a lack of an actual door or inadequate privacy demand a new room, or go elsewhere taking a refund if necessary.
I have to admit that I'm getting very tired of the unsustainable push for endless growth driving companies everywhere to jack up prices as high as people will tolerate and then also delivering the least and worst product/service they can possibly get away with on top of it. It means that everything is getting shittier unless you're willing to spend insane amounts of money to get what used to be standard and more affordable.
It's becoming exhausting maintaining a list of businesses I no longer want to give money to and products/services I won't pay for. This is especially true as companies change names, redesign products, and buy up one another. the list just grows and grows all the time.
> Some statistical analysis ppt made by some mid level MBA must have proposed this and got a promotion.
Not necessarily. Just like natural evolution doesn't requite its participants to understand themselves, neither does the market require anyone at a business to understand why they are successful.
> Until recently, you never had to think about it. But as it becomes more common it will become something you might want to consider.
This is closely related to a phenomenon I don't understand.
Pretty much every proposed regulatory change (for example: letting drivers pump their own gas at gas stations) meets a fierce counterargument that says "currently, no one considers this situation at all because only one state of affairs is legal. If that thoughtlessness continues after we legalize other possibilities, TERRIBLE THINGS COULD HAPPEN!".
But obviously this protasis† can never occur and so it doesn't matter what's in the apodosis.
You don't, because you expect there to be a toilet, a sink, a shower, towels, a mirror etc. there. There's nothing to consider, it's just expected to be there. Same for the bathroom door.
But if i got burned once or twice by a room without a bathroom door, i'd start checking that too and avoiding places that don't have them.
There is a website dedicated to it. It would take someone posting that to a few social media accounts and for hotel search sites to put "has an almost see through glass bathroom door" result category, and I think it could turn from a sneaky money maker into a reason people avoid the place.
Really? It's one of my main discriminators. The quality of the bathroom is the highest signal indicator of the quality of the hotel. I look for a stone shower basin, a rainhead, a bath tub, or at a least glass shower door... if it looks bolted onto a plastic box, I'm not staying there.
If they're cheaping out on the shower then I'm not going to trust the mattress is clean or the linens are soft.
Mine is as well. So far the only way I have found to locate such increasingly-rare rooms is booking.com followed by calling the hotel. For all their sins, Booking at least lets you search for hotels that have bathtubs in any rooms at all.
Aside from rinsing off after a pool or ocean swim, or when she is actually dirty (e.g., after yard work), I think I have known her to voluntarily take three or four showers in 25 years together.
It sometimes feels like hotels are taunting us: "we're behaving like a cartel, whaddaya gonna do? Regulate us!? We've already tricked you into thinking that's socialism!"
With hotels you're playing the lottery but there is generally a baseline consistent with the brand of the hotel.
With those two you're also playing the lottery but there is no baseline.
With a hotel, you're also generally paying when you check-in and can thus refuse a subpar room and argue with a real, mostly-reasonable person.
With those two, you get charged before you even enter the place and any arguments will be with a bot or a call center drone in a third-world country pretending to be one.
How does this have anything to do with 'public health'?
And almost any regulation gives a (relative) advantage to the people who can afford the lawyers and bureaucrats to furnish the documentation to show that they are in compliance.
Fecal particles are well documented as a vector for disease transmission, particularly an issue when travelling with someone who is sick but also just from the long term distribution of them into the room.
Going from no regulation to one does carry some of what you suggest, but there are already regulations about tons of things here (fire alarms, exits, building codes, etc) adding one more does not increase the need for lawyers and documentation.
I'm all in favour of opaque bathroom doors (and none of these stupid vertical slits American have between their public bathroom doors and the walls). But I wouldn't want to pretend it's about hygiene or health.
> . The average consumer is absolutely using ChatGPT for personal use
In my experience the "average consumer" isn't doing anything with ChatGPT except maybe play with it for a little bit before getting bored. They actively avoid AI when the apps and products they use try to shove it down their throats and they search the internet and ask their tech savvy family members for ways to disable AI in their stuff when they see it nag at them about using it.
Inevitably, AI ends up being used by people in some ways (like the AI reply at the top of every google search) but almost never because the average consumer asked for that or wanted it. It's a toy when they want to use it, and annoying when they don't but are forced to.
Eh I definitely agree this archetype is real but I disagree that it’s the one that constitutes the average consumer. My dad is a carpenter and my mom is a nurse. My wife is a hairstylist. None are particularly tech savvy. All three use ChatGPT quite a bit. Stuff they would previously google. How do I make an apple pie? Should I see a doctor? Stuff like that.
As another commenter stated, ChatGPT has over 700 million WAU. There are only 4.4 million SWEs in the US. I think it’s caught on
Yeah, but the report citing that number doesn't make clear how they calculate that. But maybe that's just a failure of my comprehension though I know some people like to spin words. So is 700 million unique users each week? Or is 700 million unique users that were active in A week, but not necessarily the same week, as in a creative way of saying weekly instead of monthly? The report simply states "in September of 2025", but September isn't a week. Or is it not even unique but simply distinct users in a week. Would the same person on Monday and Tuesday be 2? Or even Monday morning and night? Or any different session. The report citing the 700 million specifically seems to leave out word unique which is pretty key to any meaningful statement on visitor usage.
They go a bit more detailed in the end to say 2.5 billion messages a day.
Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
It's a lot easier to live with yourself when you act according to your best understanding of the situation than when you allow fear to paralyze you into inaction at a time when you should have done something.
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