That's a 'gray market' key. It's 'gray' because you don't know the provenance, and so in the worst case, you might end up with the key being deactivated, theoretically.

But I've sold computers with gray market keys on them for years and never once has a key been deactivated. I have had keys come up as not usable, in which case I typically ask for my money back.

Most of the time, from what I've seen, it's the first case - a volume key being resold.

Personally, I typically use gray market Windows keys. I have a hard time moving machines with Linux on them.

But I think you are doing a really good thing!

Really fun, thank you!

You can have as much fun in a car that costs a tenth of the price and where the gears actually do what you think they do.

Also, the average doctor's salary is around $386k/year, and is heavily propped up by extremely rare specialties who make much more. The average primary care doctor makes around $240-280k/year. It's true that the US pays doctors much much more than the rest of the world, and is also facing a historic doctor shortage which drives up costs - but your numbers are still way, way off, probably because you eyeballed instead of doing research.

In 2024, insurance was 31% of national health expenditure: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

That's a third of the whole system just spent on middlemen whose whole job is to make access to care harder. The single largest proportion of our expenditure was on the most useless part of the system.

Private health insurance costs more than physicians, hospitals, prescription drugs, or Medicare or Medicaid.

It used to be that the Davis Monthan AFB offered tours, but sadly, those have ended for security reasons.

In the United States, pharma companies make money when insurance companies (and the government, but less so than in many other nations) buy their product to give to patients. In practice, very few people are paying for vaccines out of pocket.

Insurance companies in particular hate, hate, hate giving anybody money for any reason. They will not pay for something unless you beat them over the head with how well it works. And if they don't believe you, they'll do their own analyses. Better to blow a few million on a study than spend a few billion on unnecessary treatments. (This is the same reason that there's a car-insurance funded highway safety institute crash-testing cars.)

And yet, every year, they insist on making the flu and COVID vaccines free and pushing it on as many people as possible! I guarantee you if you call your insurance company and ask if they think you should get a flu or COVID vaccine, or any vaccine, really, they'll say, yes please.

Why would they do that if these vaccines were going to cost them money by a) being useless or b) being harmful? There is simply no incentive!

The reason everybody wants you to get the damn shot is that the shots work, and the downside risks of them are smaller and cheaper than the downside risks of the things they prevent. Capitalism would make it very difficult to repeatedly sell vaccines that don't work, or hurt you; you might get away with it once, but after that, the reward's just not there.

I don't know how one responds to that, if one distrusts vaccines, other than to suggest a much larger and more complex evil conspiracy than is plausible to most people.

I would generally advise against buying an HP in this day and age, though.

Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies.

With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done.

Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.

Uh, then what is it? We should not take the words of the leader of the company published on the company's website to be the official stance of the company??

Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday devices are dangerous and should be regulated.

The Doomsday Device Company then says they have the world's best doomsday device. (They don't, but they claim they do.)

The US Government hates the Doosmday Device Company for various political reasons, but also has a vested interest in there not being a massive proliferation of doomsday devices.

The Doosmday Device company spends a great deal of time and money telling everyone: "Our doomsday device is the most doomy of all time!" (though it probably isn't) and "Everyone can use it!" (for a lot of money)

It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No, everyone cannot use your doomsday device, because doomsday is bad. (While also meaning: Only we should be able to use it, and you shouldn't be able to tell us how.)

If you do not want to be in the business of having your doomsday devices shut down by the government, well, it would help if you didn't so loudly and aggressively proclaim how doomy they are. It doesn't matter how trustworthy you claim to be, given that your business is making evil doosmday devices. You still won't be trusted!

That would probably make it very difficult to maintain and develop if there's even a small number of such employees, and I suspect Anthropic, who pays large sums of money for what they perceive as the best talent wherever they can find it, has quite a few.

Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.

I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric.