I did notice that my yahoo horoscopes have gotten oddly better and I have to wonder if someone did a little extra by ingesting cookies and so on when serving content.
FWIW, I just tried on chatgpt4o and the results were surpringly good ( in a sense, that I feel validated, it was somewhat surprising, and I want to return to use the system ).
> it's illegal to take private insurance if you also take public insurance.
This seems like an odd excluded middle. In the UK, you can have private health insurance if you want, but you can always fall back on the NHS; the one wrinkle is that you may not always be able to take a prescription from the private to the public system without getting re-evaluated. (e.g for ADHD)
It's a slippery slope and we really don't want a 2 class system. If you start allowing doctors to bill for things that public insurance covers, you're 30 seconds away from a losing the egalitarianism that Canadians value. You can pay out of pocket for whatever you want, you can tell the doctor not to bill any insurance, and in some clinics (in my experience not many) that will get you seen faster, but it's not really common and it's very expensive.
Drugs aren't considered healthcare for whatever reason. If I got an ADHD pill in a hospital that's free, but if I wanted to get the same at an outpatient pharmacy it'll cost money in most cases.
Ditto for dental.
So while there isn't any overlap between public and private, there's still a gap. Though our drugs cost 10% of American prices.
"recording obtained unofficially" and "doesn't have rights to the recording" are separate things. So they could well have got a license to stream a publisher's music but that didn't come with an actual copy of some/all of the music.
Hit factories have been a thing since the 19th century. Before SAW there was the Brill Building in the US, which was a descendant of the hit factories around Tin Pan Alley.
Electronic production and distribution made the job easier in some ways - harder and more competitive in others - but the music factory system is not a new phenomenon.
I think "fictional band" is mildly clickbait when really it's "movie soundtrack". One of which goes into the charts every few years.
The film is somewhat interesting because although the premise is very anime, the animation style isn't at all. Combined with the massive resources of Sony and Netflix that makes it pretty accessible to a Western audience.
"Fictional band" is pretty apt considering it's a band that appears in a work of fiction. I think it's just that with the rise of AIslop, one might think that it means a completely made up band that's just computer-generated, and not real voice actors performing in character with professional musicians composing, arranging and performing the music.
Yes this is what I thought, that it was AI fake bands basically. This sounds a bit more like Sugar Sugar by The Archies, which is a made up cartoon band with a number one hit.
I briefly thought "oh yeah, mixins, shame we can't do that in C# with single inheritance" and then realized that's what extension methods are for (and slightly more general).
I have some C# code which relies on calling an extension method on a null instance, which is mildly naughty but saves a lot of refactoring.
You can call an extension method, because it's just fancy syntax for calling a non member method with the thing before the . as the first argument. If you then don't reference it at all, it doesn't matter that it's null.
It's helpful to remember the history of how they got here. Commodity producers (farms, oil) need to make investments before production, but want to reduce their exposure to changes in the spot price in the future. Hence futures: the ability to sell oil or onions six months in the future at an agreed price, rather than wait until the day to find out spot. This is genuinely valuable to them in terms of shifting risk to the finance industry in return for a price. It's like insurance.
Options are then futures where you don't necessarily have to close out the position. They are a means of insuring against price changes .. or to get paid for providing such insurance.
However, in things like farming and oil exploration much of the risk is real and physical. The further away you get from that to derivatives of other financial instruments, the more it becomes just a mix of what the other market players are doing.
Then there's "we priced these risks as de-correlated but actually they're correlated", which blew up a lot of people in 2008.
Helpful comment, but it's also mildly amusing you picked one of the few agricultural underlyings you can't trade futures on (Onion Futures Act). Not sure if that was intentional or not!
I'm reminded of how the UK financial regulator banned "binary options" trading, since this was nearly always a scam run against unsophisticated retail investors who wanted to gamble and lost the majority of their "investment".
(one of the Yes Minister irregular verbs: I am providing liquidity to the market, you are long vega, he is a degenerate gambler)
It's a question of priorities, really. America does not like using public policy to prevent deaths.
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