Surely you covet our delicious American healthcare, that is so beloved that a man became a national hero by murdering a health insurance CEO in broad daylight?
Kind of. There are some measures that are assessed to do a declaration, like # of houses impacted, or critical infrastructure damaged. It's not incredibly rigorous because all disasters (and all state/local capabilities) are different. If there's a tornado, and dozens of houses are gone, and the local capacity is zero and the state asks, that's kind of a done deal. For a hurricane, it's almost a guarantee, in part because we'd rather pre-stage stuff in anticipation. Once the threshold is crossed, they stop assessing. In FEMA speak, it's a "preliminary damage assessment" and there's some publicly available data on it. It's not a comprehensive assessment, because they stop when they reach the threshold. The issue is assessment of disaster impacts is stupidly complicated, in part because of a Congressional stipulation that you can't get assistance for the same thing twice (or from two sources). Ie, if it's insured, FEMA won't pay for it, and if FEMA pays for it, the state doesn't, etc. So, you can count how many houses were flooded on a street, and you can even mobilize inspectors to assess how deep the floodwaters got, and give a rough estimate as to how bad it is. But it's a far cry from "how much will it cost to fix" because each of the payers (state, local, charity, FEMA, insurance) has a different mandate. FEMA's household assistance is to get you stable, and get the home habitable from a shelter standpoint, not full restoration. SBA's disaster loans are just to get as much work done as you want to pay back, full restoration or even more. This was explained to me as: you either have insurance beforehand and pay premiums, or you take out a loan afterwards and pay interest (acknowledging the loan won't cover everything, but then neither would insurance). State assistance varies wildly, as does charities, grants, etc. Insurance is meticulously spelled out from "here's $8 and a coke, to 'we will cover the cost of the hotel while your toilet is shined up", and lawyers argue this in the state of Florida like no place else on Earth. On the public assistance side, anything of "value or utility to the public" is theoretically eligible, and almost none of it carries insurance. How would you insure a road or a bridge or a hospital against a hurricane? There's some stuff, but the state is almost always under-insured, it's just too easy to cut. The idea of doing it via "heaping chunk o money" is based on the assumption that a lot of FEMA (and the Stafford Act) is unnecessarily complicated and a bunch of back and forth to "decide" on what the DRRA made very negotiable. The states just want the money and as little oversight as possible. The reason the oversight (and the Agency itself) exists in the first fucking place, however..... Boss Hogg works disaster recovery these days.
It hasn’t been a week and I’m already sick of this motherfucker and everyone who thinks he’s wonderful. As I told my wife, this country deserves whatever it gets.
It seems like he’s set more fuckery in motion in one week than he did in his whole last term. I’d agree with your sentiment if I wasn’t going to suffer also. Call me vindictive, but I have several family members and friends who are likely to be absolutely screwed by the policies Trump wants to put in place. If they come to me for help they can go pound sand.
The photographers picture is brilliant. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/...ilt-dangerous-holocaust-memorial-c-rcna189316
So…Trump makes some grand announcement that the US is gonna be the absolute best at AI, and we’re gonna make so much money, by throwing billions at it now… …and then China just says “hey guys, we already have it, and it’s cheaper.” Did I get that right?
Nah, Larry is all about government data storage. He smells a huge contract to store all the results and data associated with the use of all this AI stuff. Minority Report back end data lake type shit.
Do you actually believe China, though? They are about as believable as a meth-head who just ran out of crystal.
Larry doesn't have a creative bone in his body. He's all about extracting maximum profit. He's not the guy you want if you're trying to push cutting edge tech.
I head up an AI org. Their stuff is all open sourced. We’ve got teams digging into it, and other than a few areas of training that have been censored (because China), it’s legit. They have changed the approach to things to remove or reduce the dependency on brute force computation, aka GPU’s that Nvidia makes. That’s why Nvidia dropped in their valuation over the weekend.