The Nauru article linked also points out that the large amount of mining has done away with most of what little arable land there was, making traditional garden culture impractical at scale. So, they sort of have to be dependent on foreign food imports, largely the kind you mention.
An acquaintance of mine has basically been doing this for years in the form of slop code written by the cheapest outsourcing firms on earth who cannot comprehend rudimentary requirements and have no concept of coding standards. But management insists this is the most cost effective way of doing things, rather than just having a competent group of qualified people do it right from the start.
It seems as depressing as you’d think.
Ohio has lost its relative population and economic significance in recent years, but historically it was a pretty significant state. To give an idea in terms of # of representatives in the House:
Ohio had more/equal reps compared to California until the 50s, Texas until the 60s, and Florida until the 90s. Its numbers have been very close to Illinois for the past century also.
The collective cultural awareness of cities in such a state holds inertia for a while, and Ohio still has a decent population despite some decline.
I don’t have a Boston accent (RI) and say Wusstah, as does everyone from the area (including surrounding MA) I’ve known.
It’s more Wusstah than Wooster in my experience.
It starts when the popcorn begins to cool enough that both it’s safe to ram mouthfuls and it’s a race against the clock to finish before it becomes cold.
McDonald’s stopped using beef tallow for fries in 1990. I suppose that might be relatively recent if you are an elf.
I dunno about that. I bought a house well within what I could afford. The bank actually thought we made a mistake and reminded us they would approve a loan double the size of what we asked.
All it takes is two or three really expensive things needing work at the same time to blow your budget out of the water. And often there’s no clear answer on what’s truly urgent.
Water is entropy manifest to constantly remind you that anything you do is temporary and laughably futile on geologic timescales.
Gotta love having an old house. It’s simultaneously reassuring and deeply stressful when a professional looks at something that seems really bad and just says, “Well, I can tell from the layers of paint that’s been there a long time. So if it hasn’t become a problem in all that time, it’s probably fine. But give me a call if your house starts falling apart.”
It doesn’t surprise me. With how much focus there is on issues like trans athletes in the media and politics, people incorrectly assume the actual number of people “at issue” is in proportion. This is how we get state legislatures spending huge amounts of time creating legislation that will impact like three people.
Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.
To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.
I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.
But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.
Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.
They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.
For agencies that are “funded” by the companies they regulate, they sure give them a hard time and cost them a lot of money. Even the biggest pharmas spend a significant amount of resources erring on the side of caution over even minor details, so as to not have a regulator throw out their results and tell them to do it again. Which does happen sometimes.
Of course no research review is flawless. If your standard is flawless, you’re deliberately setting an impossible standard for no discernable concrete benefit. But it’s rigorous, public, and the regulators have the authority to pull treatments off the market if post-approval research has troubling results. Which they do sometimes.
This sort of asinine concern trolling is a serious danger to public health. It would be one thing if it was valid criticisms, of which there are plenty, combined with realistic proposals for alternatives. But it never is, and now we have nearly or previously eradicated diseases making a comeback.
FDA, EMA, and PMDA to name a few. Do you not know the basics about the thing you seem to have a very strong opinion about?
What did you think was going to happen? Another company or university would graciously fund and conduct a trial of Moderna’s product for no reason?
If conducting a regulated clinical trial and having the results independently reviewed by government agencies in each market they seek to enter is not sufficient, I think you’ve already made up your mind.
There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”
I worry that people who rely on AI will become skilled in making it seem like they aren’t. Fortunately a lot of them don’t seem very good at that yet.
I’ve done a few job interviews where it was very clear the interviewee was using Chat GPT or something to answer almost every question. But there may soon come a day when it’s not obvious, and then we waste time hiring someone incapable of critical thinking who types proprietary company information into an LLM prompt.