Why would they use real doctors at all?

China’s idea of free trade is unilateral: it’s them being free to export. They’re massively protectionist within China, mainly through non-tariff barriers such as arbitrary regulation.

Leave your phone at home. Ride a bike or walk, don’t drive (defeats giar recognition, ANPR and in-car tracker software). ANPR cameras can also be disabled with black spray paint. Wear a hoodie. Use a VPN and an adblocker when you are online. Practice skeet shooting so you can shoot down drones. Also jam them if you can.

An ankle weight is less damaging. I doubt if gait recognition is all that valid anyway.

the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line

They’re aligned with the Liberal party, which is a centrist party which is seldom if ever progressive. The Guardian does put up some articles by progressives, on occasion, but they also publish articles by conservatives. When the Labour Party was led by Corbyn, the Guardian was consistently critical of Labour policy and bought into the rightwing press’s phony accusations that Corbyn was antisemitic. Overall, the Guardian’s core politics are those of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, as can also be seen by their lifestyle and media commentary, as well as their general smugness. And on economic matters, their coverage is utterly useless. On that, the Economist and the FT are far superior, despite their occasionally odious politics in their editorial pages.

I still read the Graun, though, since the rest of the British press is far, far worse.

A couple of years late, but OK.

An even better alternative is to replace it with nothing. The Twitter-like messaging paradigm is only good for trivia and rumor-mongering.

Ryanair has always had a culture of gleefully abusing its customers for arbitrary reasons.

Because the standard for Democrats is perfectionism, but the standard for Republicans is “That’s just Trump being Trump.”

In other words, they didn’t think it through, they got suckered by propaganda.

Some people are going to die-- mostly women. More people are going to have their lives turned upside-down, especially immigrants and ethnic and sexual minorities. Many immigrants, even legal ones, are going to be expelled. Corporations are going to run wild as regulation is abandoned. People are going to be bankrupted by predatory healthcare firms at a much higher rate than now. Every form of corporate pollution, adulteration, cheating and chicanery will be tolerated. The judiciary will be further corrupted. The US will not only withdraw from NATO, but will try to shut it down. Ukraine will be handed to Putin on a platter. Taiwan, the Baltics, Moldova and Poland will be left to fend for themselves. The ethnic cleansing in Gaza will transition even further to a full-scale genocide. Every aspect of government will be handed to corrupt, incompetent fanatics: kakistocracy all the way down. The impartiality of the civil service will be destroyed and the 19th-century spoils system reinstated. Social Security will be privatized and gutted. Obamacare will be eliminated. Congress will hold show trials of Trump’s perceived enemies. Terrorist acts and sabotage of critical infrastructure will massively increase, and the clampdowns that follow will be used to further degrade what few rights we still have.

But at least you won’t have Kamala’s pantsuit to complain about.

They’ll kill off the filibuster as soon as it gets in their way. They don’t care about tradition or institutional continuity. And anyway, the Democrats seldom resort to the filibuster, they just bend over.

Trump and Musk will have a power struggle within a few months. Trump hates the idea that someone’s richer than him, and will want to humiliate him. Trump will dump RFK Jr too, as soon as Jr gets more publicity than Trump. What will be semi-permanent are the careerist shitstains like the Speaker, the God-botherers with their crusade against women, and the anti-immigrant scum.

If you have infinite time, you don’t also need infinite monkeys.

It’s more a “yeah, but…” than a refutation.

A less than infinite number of simians have already done it once.

And how likely is it that it’ll be done again identically by a finite set of simians?

If the monkeys’ probability distribution function can be transformed to a uniform distribution by a continuous function, the outcomes are equivalent enough for this exercise. (There are probably some discontinous functions that’d also work). So, unless there’s some genetic weirdness in monkeys that prevents their ever hitting certain keys, they’re adequate RNG engines. But at that point, you’re really tweaking the assumptions based on how realistically you think monkeys are portrayed in the thought experiment.

And I don’t believe “quantumly random” is a necessary condition here.

Once you factor in the infinite number of monkeys, every novel in existence will not only be written, it will be written an infinite number of times.

You don’t need an infinite number of monkeys to ensure that. The cardinality of an infinite collection of 2-tuples (monkey, char) is the same as the cardinality of an infinite sequence of characters, just as the cardinality of the rational numbers is the same as the cardinality of the integers.

And in a countably infinite sequence of uniformly random characters, there is no assurance that any particular finite sequence will occur only a finite number of times.

The idea is that given an infinite truly random output of text by the nature of infinity the text of Shakespeare will be outputted in its entirety eventually

Only for a certain kind of randomness. For example, it’s possible to construct a random process that at each step emits a uniformly distributed character, but which also includes a filter that blocks the emission of the string “Falstaff” if it occurs. Such a process cannot ever produce the complete works of Shakespeare, since the complete works include that string, though it will still contain (for example) every lost work of Aristotle, as well as an infinite number of false and corrupted versions of those works.

But yeah, an unconstrained uniform-random-distributed countably infinite sequence of printable English characters and whitespace cannot be proven to not contain the complete works of Shakespeare, or any other finite sequence. I believe it’s also impossible to exclude any countably infinite sequence, but I might be wrong on that part, since my mathematics education happened a very long time ago.

You know it? That’s nice. A lot of people think they know a lot of things that aren’t really true.

Now prove it.

Which is not what the common saying said.

So the researchers didn’t refute the assumption “given an infinite amount of time,” and instead chose to address the long finite-time case, which is fundamentally different.