Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.

The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
“Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.

On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.

Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.

We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations.

99% agreed, but I’d increase the number a bit. With inflation and rising costs $10 million in net worth isn’t always an obscenity.
It’s unquestionably wealthy, but still in the realm of attainable by an individual without being a bastard. Owning a single family home and a gas station in the San Francisco region and planning for retirement could put you in that realm.

I don’t begrudge someone who worked hard having nice things. I don’t even begrudge luck, inheritance, or nepotism getting luxury. It’s when it’s beyond luxury and no one could get it with any amount of work.

Tie it to the consumer price index or some such.

Right? I work for an actual megacorp and our policy is almost the exact opposite on every point.
Sick workers make more sick: don’t work and feel better faster. Distracted workers makes mistakes and cause problems: don’t work and take care of your kid. Rested workers work better: take the time around the holidays off entirely. Productivity is crap then anyway and with so many vacations it’s easier to plan around a block where nothing happens than to deal with random teams having unpredictable delays. Car broken? Expense a Lyft. We have a corporate account and your ride to work is a rounding error compared to the sales visits.

If you’re going to invoke money you should actually understand how big companies function and view money.

We’ve actually figured out that that one is basically a “stutter” in your memory encoding system. Consciousness isn’t as continuous as it feels, and so you can get a situation where your memory says it just put some stuff in working memory and consciousness thinks it means your current thoughts or observations. So you end up with a feeling of a past recollection of a current awareness. Because it’s tagged “past” you can’t do anything other than understand it to be in the past, even though you’re actively experiencing it.
A related phenomenon is how you “always” wake up just before the loud noise. Even though you’re asleep you still hear things and process audio. A loud noise happens and your audio processing tells you to wake up. Conscious you wakes up, creating that new memory, and then processes the noise that woke you.

Consciousness is a process that takes place over a duration, not an instant.

Oh, they totally will. It’ll be another website boom. A lot of the big web presences will be damaged by the bust and hosting costs will fall through the floor. Less barrier to entry for making your little website and some portion of those will become problematicly large due to cheap cost driving bad design and we’ll go through the third or fourth round of this.

Or, for deepest irony, some of the most optimally located datacenters could be converted into steel mills and industrial bakeries.

Based on what I recall of the explanation by the person who figured it out: spinning makes fluid near the edge spin faster than fluid near the middle. The difference in speed creates a wave. Since it’s finite and moving, the wave interferes with itself and because of math, makes a hexagon. Something about how the wave pattern changes density and brings different glasses to the surface on the planets.
Then they showed an example by spinning a bucket, and it kinda fell flat because they had to explain that a bucket isn’t a sphere so you have to spin it just right to get it to work, but it did work in the end.

Oh, I was just joking around. What my water system is missing is molten salt.

Although for the sake of preposterousness, I’m going to suggest we use the molten salt to turn a giant water wheel.

Molten salt. Lower pressure, higher efficiency, and I believe less reactive in the event of an uh-oh.

Insurance, benefits and labor expenses. Even in places with little worker protections there are costs that scale with the number of workers instead of the number of hours.
A brief look indicates employers in India can expect to budget on the order of 18% of an employees take home per year for those expenses.

There are some circumstances and places in the US where you don’t need to provide as many benefits to employees who work below 40 hours. Then you see employers hire more people and schedule them for just under the threshold to give them benefits.

The answer is always because it’s cheaper for them somehow.

Entirely agree. Personally most of what I would want done would be better handled by a macro system that was easy to setup. Most of what I want is pretty usually the same so “remember this setup” is basically good enough.

If they hadn’t jumped the gun so badly and tainted the launch with crap results, Google would have been well positioned to do something profoundly useful.
If it could actually extract useful information with citations and pointers for next steps and work as an interactive search, that would actually be really really useful.
The whole “hallucinating health advice” and “being terrible” thing really set them back, even if they’ve improved.

Like you said, I don’t really need help creating. I do need help remembering things or finding information: that’s why I’m using a search engine in the first place.

At work, there’s a person who knows everything about the job. He regularly gets questions where the answer is just the correct way to find out for yourself.
That’s what I want. “Oh, you mean X? Try looking at YZ. Oh, you wanted X, but in G conditions. That’s over in FOO. It’s confusing because reasons written down here…”

Some people do want to talk to their computer and would love it if it worked right.

The problem is that it often doesn’t work right,cans they’re setting it up as though everyone has that as their top priority for their desktop.

Instead of baking it in to the os, expose the bits needed so it can be an installable program. Now people can have it or not, and you open the door for different non-ai tools to also work on the computer.
It’s almost like a proper, consistent API would be better than a bot you try to convince to use a dozen bad ones.

We have a code of conduct training at work that includes and anti corruption segment (nothing weird, just stuff like “a vendor buying lunch at a sales meeting is fine, but no gifts or having lunch at extremely expensive places”, and “some places give small symbolic gifts around holidays, usually a pastry. That’s fine. Do not accept a $500 pastry”)

A couple years ago they updated the module and the person engaging in non-obvious corrupt business practices became gay in passing. The overwhelming response by a lot of the company was “yay! We made it guys! They realized that we like bribes too! I feel so seen”.

And one of the first steps in artificial insemination is giving a guy a handjob.

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I think we’re just at a point where a company not constantly trying to find ways to squirm out of every single thing is a breath of fresh air.

“Hi! We’re valve. We’re mostly following the law without fuss, mostly make money by getting people to buy things they want, and our excessively wealthy owner acts like a preposterously rich person, not a comic book villain: Fantasizing about living his life isn’t deeply concerning. The hardware we sell isn’t deliberately worse for consumers to no benefit to ourselves” – Hands down one of the best “big” companies out there.

The annoying thing is that the credit cards fully support authorizing for some amount likely to cover the transaction and using the same transaction to capture so no lingering auth sits around.

If a merchant has captured the funds and still has a hold sitting around the someone has implemented something wrong.

I didn’t say that’s what you think, I said it’s a mistake you could be making. He had a particularly strong accent and it was something that coworkers commented on.
I’m not trying to prove you wrong, I was offering an explanation for a different interpretation. If two people watch the same interview and one sees aggression and the other sees a perfectly normal interaction there’s probably a reason one of them sees it differently.

Well, to each their own. I think you might be mistaking a loud speaking voice and a strong queens accent for hostility. He’s smiling for most of it, answers the question in several lays of sophistication, connects it to other physical phenomenon and explains why it’s difficult to answer directly.
I went back and watched it since it’s been quite a while and I didn’t recall hostility and I still don’t see it.

Why do you assume the magnet interview wasn’t flattering? His legacy is more complicated than he conveyed, and he definitely has some dark portions, but he actually was an extremely gifted mind, a renowned educator and acclaimed scientist.