Madison is exceptional for a midwestern city. It has a large and excellent state university. Epic is based there and most of FAANG has outposts there to draw the CS talent. Additionally, it is the state capitol which means a lot of companies providing services to the state. Aside from all that, it is a pretty picturesque location for the Midwest, with the two big lakes and surrounded by rolling hills. Something you won't find in Urbana-Champaign for comparison.
When people talk about low cost of living in the Midwest they generally mean more depressed areas. I live in a very low cost of living rural (15k ppl) community in Illinois, with half an acre on a lake in a 3000 sq foot house where the mortgage is only 250k. Of course, if I ever lose my remote job, I'd never be able to find work. Most of the people here work at one of 2 medium-sized factories or the hospital. The median household income is only $40k.
The town I live in is a far more common case for the rural Midwest.
This is very clearly an attempt to get government employees to quit. They are not shy about stating that. It is hard to fire civil servants, and this is an attempt to get around civil service protections.
Whether you agree or disagree that we need to downsize the government drastically and whether this is an ethical way to achieve that goal is a personal opinion. One every American has a right to have.
This has nothing to do with the standard "WFH is good or bad style" conversations on here regularly.
As a former smoker, who used patches and gum and such to quit, this doesn't seem surprising. The nicotine patch is far less satisfying than cigarettes. Cigarettes come on strong, immediately, and that feeling is amazing.
Patches are a slow release and the effect comes on very gradually.
There's no cue/craving/response/reward feedback with patches(Tiny Habits helped me quit too if anyones trying).
If I get irritated and have a cigarette, there is immediate relief and satisfaction. I can't immediately put on a patch and get that. Probably takes thirty minutes to really come on.
Not saying there is no addictive potential, but they are off by an order of magnitude or two.
There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is s*t.
One of Peter Lee's arguments in his AI in medicine book[1] is that the GenAIs (GPT4) actually excel at empathy. He gives a pretty compelling example where the GPT is able to empathize very well with a young girl who is having a medical issue. Empathy is part of the training set.
This strikes me as something that will fade over time, though. We will eventually learn to recognize fake empathy, just as once upon a time when a corporation said "Your business is important to us and we're trying to get a support person on the line for you as quickly as possible", it was believable and there was a good chance your customer believed it. Now of course we've all got a pretty good idea it's not true.
An AI can not empathize. We don't even really want it to; who wants to build an AI that "really" experiences losing a limb or losing a daughter? Not anyone I want actually building AIs. So this isn't even about whether they're "really conscious" or any of those somewhat tedious debates; even if they are human-level AI already they literally can't empathize. See the recent article where Meta's overly helpful AI yielded an answer as to how New York's public schools treated its disabled child. Even if the text was completely accurate it still had no standing to emit such text.
