private healthcare is getting more and more expensive due to private prices available to bulk insurers but not for private person
even if this is not completely deliberate, effect is that you are "serf of whomever pays your insurance" or go bankrupt the moment you have any kind of emergency
in europe some private healthcare providers are showing their colors from different perspective, they outright refuse or cancel private contracts when you are above certain age
> effect is that you are "serf of whomever pays your insurance"
That's why in normal countries public healthcare is a thing and it competes with the private healthcare sector, forcing it to offer relatively affordable premium services.
It’s not connected at all in the US since 2011. The only thing employer provided health insurance gets you is the ability to pay for it with pre-tax income (which is a significant saving). Otherwise, you can go to healthcare.gov and buy it without an employer.
We don’t describe shelter, food, entertainment as being employer provided, even though those are also acquired with money obtained from an employer.
The distinction in the US before 2011 is that couldn’t buy health insurance as an individual, hence it was a benefit dependent upon being employed. Post 2011, health insurance became attainable without an employer.
What are you basing that on? The ACA did not make individual insurance legal, it was already legal and widespread, it was not dependent on employment. The ACA made improvements, the ACA made individual insurance more accessible.
I’m basing that on reality. While health insurance for an individual was legal, it was basically inaccessible. Also, there were pre existing condition clauses and benefit maximums that made the insurance pretty worthless without a well funded employer willing to pay the costs.
ACA made it so anyone can get it, with standardized metal levels to make comparing plans possible, and out of pocket maximums and the inability to use health risks to deny insurance coverage to ensure one can actually buy and use it as long as premiums were paid. There were even generous tax credits to help pay the premiums.
Obviously, it is still very expensive, but the situation is far different than pre-2011. There would have been no “bank a few million at a tech company and be financially independent at 40” people without ACA.
You're just flat out wrong, it was not "basically inaccessible". Tens of millions of people had individual health insurance prior to the ACA, over 30 million in 2010, averaging 10% of all insured people from 2000 to 2010. The ACA, while very important and valuable legislation, only increased the number of individually insured people by around 25%.
But that was not the same "health insurance" that was sold post-ACA. The product itself was completely different, due to the pre existing condition clauses and benefit maximums. Paying $x premiums to only receive a maximum of $y of healthcare and only in certain cases is not what people refer to as the health insurance available in various European countries, which is ostensibly what the situation is compared to.
Even now, when I write health insurance, I mean "ACA complaint health insurance", because the limitations in other kinds of products labeled "health insurance" are useless to the point of not being worth discussing.
> The distinction in the US before 2011 is that couldn’t buy health insurance as an individual, hence it was a benefit dependent upon being employed. Post 2011, health insurance became attainable without an employer.
More than 30 million people had individual health insurance in 2010. If it were useless, 30 million people would not have paid $5k - $10k per year for it out of their own pocket.
in simple terms closed models are rugpull waiting to spring at unsuspecting users, it's like you take all worst components of terminal capitalism (including price cartels), subscriptions relying on almost monopolistic dependency and microsoft/uber models of hugging competition to death to remain only provider and dictate all conditions
it's a real paradox, that chinese models are what guards democratization and private use of ai while us models are moted castles with "kings" crying that you are stealing their legally stolen goods... what times we are living in...
It blows my mind that these two companies are going to mint billionaires, meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz was bullied to death by the state for sharing academic papers which were at least in part, if not largely, paid for by tax dollars.
ethics and other details are for humans. AI companies just proving it, even highest IQ teams are against ethics because they want more, even several millions is not enough for them.
AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.
I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.
If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.
AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.
Or we could build on and enforce the 300+ years of thought and trial that went into copyright law so that individuals are re-empowered.
But nah, let's do the most radical, least thought out thing, and absolutely destroy small scale creators. I'm sure Amazon will be benevolent and continue to pay writers in your scenario.
What is with 2026 and just conceding civilization to the worst actors, and then adopting the worst tactics/thoughts/concepts?
Writers will be forced to go on tour like musicians in order to get anything from their work, and they may not release the works to the public until after their death. So much for the last of the troubadours.
> AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
Even this isn't quite right. Publishers unambiguously have been screwed.
What has happened is if you can give the political/investment classes enough upside opportunity in the entities doing the IP theft then you're golden, and they increasingly have no problem with even pretending to hide it.
You are on to something. The extensive copywrite terms have ensured that the work of everyone except the oligarch corporations vanishes into the ether since it cannot be reproduced for over a century if the author lives another 30 years.
There will be no one debating the great minds of the twentieth century because the corporations made it illegal for people to republish critical editions of any such works.
The greats were recirculated every twenty or thirty years for centuries.
The smaller authors will vanish into the nothing and Western Civilization's 20th century onward will vanish and be almost forgotten forever because of that mouse. There will be more ancient literature remembered than literature after the invention of the printing press because they made it illegal to share printed materials for nigh on two centuries if an author was young when they wrote it. There will be more ancient scrolls preserved for the future than books of 20th century philosophy and science because the latter is a crime.
Only the oligarchs who pirated the books will have a cultural memory. They have cursed our era to oblivion when it comes to intellectual property because they can generate billions now for the mouse's henchmen.
The technique is called "accusation in a mirror". By accusing the enemy of doing what you are doing, when they call out what you are doing, they look like they are just weakly repeating your own accusations because they don't have any truth. And the anger that should be directed against you (because of your practices) gets directed at the enemy.
Thank you for this, I've noticed this often in politics and didn't know it has a name. Some politicians do this so often, that any accusation to me reads a confession instead.
I'm sure all those stackexchange experts will be getting their checks for helping launch countless software projects over the last 20 years any day now...
You're basically saying that since open source projects can be reused by others, the people making closed source projects shouldn't complain when the same thing happens to them.
Everyone posting on Stack Overflow knew it would be public and free. Book authors put an explicit copyright notice, which includes derivations of their work.
It’s not their IP, they never created data they were training on in the first place, at best they derived existing data without asking if they can commercialized it
It is also good for the technology itself, just image if there would be just one company that does "just well enough", they will be unmotivated to improve their ai models
this exact trick is used in some drm schemes (to protect either text or font file, or both), where codepoints are either mixed up or font is converted to vector curves and assigned random indexes
It depends on how big/dense is your screen, high frequency message is actual text while low frequency message is decoy text. Probably so that it shows when frames are averaged together without checking actual motion vectors. It is similar effect like that image showing either young woman or old man depending on distance you are viewing it from (or other one with either Einstein or Marylin Monroe)
private healthcare is getting more and more expensive due to private prices available to bulk insurers but not for private person
even if this is not completely deliberate, effect is that you are "serf of whomever pays your insurance" or go bankrupt the moment you have any kind of emergency
in europe some private healthcare providers are showing their colors from different perspective, they outright refuse or cancel private contracts when you are above certain age
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