You are vastly overestimating the number of people with the same surname. Like, comically overestimating it. The 100 most common surnames only make up 15% of the US population. If anything, 500 surnames is insanely conservative. I should have said something like 2,000 surnames if I wanted to have a serious estimate.

His most excellent unimpeachable Imperial Majesty, Donald John Trump by the grace of God: Emperor, President, and Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America and other insular territories, Governor of the Fifty-One States, Deporter-General and Supreme Arbiter of Justice, Protector of Greenland, Conqueror of Iran, Chief Servant of the State of Israel, Viceroy of Venezuela, Governor of Gaza, &c. &c., Chief Executive of the Trump Organisation, Chairman-for-Life of the Board of Peace, Dictator of Maps and Namer of Waters, Protector of Paedophiles, Conqueror of the British Empire in North America in General and Canada in Particular, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea.

As an aside, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have a system where the combination of someone’s name and birth year had to be unique. This would make identifying unique people a snap. Your full name and your birth year would be enough to find your file at the doctor’s office, bank, or literally anywhere else.

Even assuming people only choose to pick from the 500 top names, this allows 125 million unique combinations every year following the English trinomial naming convention. It rises to 62.5 billion combinations if one follows the tetranomial Hispanic naming convention. The issue of running out of names or duplicate names would almost never come up. And parents could just reserve a name for their child if they were so bothered.

Yes, I believe the proper title for Xi is 主席

Not sure about India. In the US, a lawyer being caught filing an AI generated submission will generally be held strictly liable for any misinformation in it. If it is just poorly argued, the judge will just treat the lawyer as incompetent and the client could complain to the State Bar against the lawyer for malpractice if this hurts their case. If it hallucinates cases, that is grounds for a disciplinary referral. Recently the Court of Appeal in my state fined a lawyer US$10,000 for submitting an AI generated brief and referred it to the State Bar for disciplinary sanctions.

The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.

Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.

Don’t judges normally have clerks to write this stuff? Why is there a need to ask AI?

This is why I think the Democrats could have run a cardboard box or Vladimir Lenin’s ghost in 2020 and still won.

Rule of thumb: economic issues beat social issues almost 100% of the time with US voters

Compared to not having insurance, where you have to pay for everything.

Stale bread is better than no bread at all

Most desk jobs in the US are salaried. Salaries are quoted typically in annual terms, although payroll is processed typically fortnightly (meaning salary payments are transferred into your account every two weeks, usually on Thursday or Wednesday).

The US Bureau of Labour Statistics collects salary data across hundreds of job descriptions and reports this information regularly. Here are some median annual salaries (along with the monthly equivalent in euros) for various corporate jobs:

• Human Resources Specialists: $75,940 (€5,500 monthly)
• Buyers and Purchasing Agents: $77,710 (€5,630 monthly)
• Budget Analysts: $91,640 (€6,640 monthly)
• Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists: $78,760 (€5,710)
• Paralegals and Legal Assistants: $62,890 (€4,560)
• Lawyers: $159,670 (€11,580)
• Securities, Commodities, and Financial Service Sales Agents: $78,660 (€5,700)
• Real Estate Brokers: $73,220 (€5,810)
• Billing and Posting Clerks: $48,500 (€3,520)
• Secretaries and Administrative Assistants: $47,540 (€3,450)
• Computer Systems Analysts: $105,850 (€7,670)
• Network and Computer Systems Administrator: $99,130 (€7,190)
• Software Developers: $135,980 (€9,860)

Some notes before comparing salaries:

• Office workers work 40 hours per week, and lunch breaks are typically 1 hour. The most common working schedule is 09:00 to 17:00 with a 1 hour lunch break. Two weeks paid holiday is the minimum for most office workers, but three to four weeks is more common. Extra paid holiday is considered a bonus for loyalty. People who have worked for the company for a few years will gradually be given more.
• Sick days in the US are protected by law, but unpaid. Some companies offer paid sick day policies, others do not and force you to use paid holidays if you want to be paid for those days.
• Increasingly, companies offer 12 paid “floating holidays” per year which are used to cover public holidays. But there are only 11 public holidays leaving one extra to be used however the employee pleases. An employer that doesn’t offer floating holidays will instead typically just pay the employee for those 11 public holidays.
• Tax in the US is typically less than in Europe. A person making $100,000 annually would pay $13,200 in federal tax, and between $0 and about $10,000 in state tax, depending on where they live. The US also offers various tax credits and exemptions. For example, putting money into a retirement account means that the money deposited isn’t counted as income.
• The US, famously, does not have a taxpayer-funded healthcare system. Most office workers have decent to excellent healthcare coverage provided by the employer, and typically the employer pays for the majority of the cost. This ends up costing a few hundred dollars a month to the worker out of pocket for their family, typically.
• Everyday expenses in the US tend to be cheaper than in Europe due to lower consumption tax. This also varies between US states, with sales tax (comparable to VAT) ranging from 0% to 10%. Sales tax over 10% is uncommon. 7-8% is typical.
• Energy is cheaper in the US than in Europe. In my area, a gallon of Midgrade 89 gasoline, equivalent to Europe’s 95 E10 petrol, costs $4.50 per gallon (€0.96 per litre), which is not far from average in the US. My electricity costs 10.8¢ (8.7 Euro cents) per kWh, but this is considered low nationwide because my municipality owns its own power generation; on average electricity costs around 18¢ per kWh (15 Euro cents).
• The US is less dense and therefore commute times are longer. Most people drive to work. A commute of around 20-30 km is considered average for most people. A commute of 40 km is not super uncommon, but 50 km and higher is rare.

You have a pay cheque, don’t you? That’s something that they would try to go for.

To be clear, I don’t defend the broken system, but I am trying to see what you can do to make the best of the crummy situation that it is.

If you go to a hospital and the hospital bills $100,000, let’s consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You have a high deductible health insurance place with a $10,000 deductible. The health insurance company pays $90,000 and the hospital asks you to pay the rest. Hospital bills have a lot of wiggle room and all of it is negotiable. You tell them you’re broke. In this case, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they’ll do something like “Okay, pay us $50 a month for a year and we’ll call it good”, because they already got the vast majority of what they were asking for from the insurance company. They have already made most of their profit. It is totally not worth it for them to even send this to collections, let alone hire a lawyer to sue you.

Scenario 2: You have no coverage. Hospital asks you for $100,000. You tell them you’re broke and will declare bankruptcy. They might offer you a plan like $200 a month for the next three years, because nobody else has paid them anything. And here’s the thing: they have leverage over you, because they know that a bankruptcy lawyer is going to ask for a $10,000 retainer paid upfront. You can’t just go up into your local courthouse and shout "I DECLARE BANKRUPCY!” in the style of The Office. Nope. You’ll just get 25% of your pay cheque garnished for the next eight to ten years because you couldn’t afford a bankruptcy lawyer to stop it. The hospital knows that they can juice $9,000 out of you or more, because you being broke also means you can’t afford a lawyer.

Anyway, you do the maths. I don’t know your financial situation and how much the insurance companies want to insure you. You make the right decision based on your situation. I’m just providing information. Maybe the maths nonetheless points you to Scenario 2 being a better bet. But it’s not as clear cut as one might initially think, so at least give it some thought and punch in some numbers into a calculator. And if you already have, more power to you.

If you are young and fairly healthy, look into high deductible plans. Those should be significantly cheaper but won’t cover any routine health services at all. You’ll pay out of pocket for those (possibly at a much lower cash rate depending on provider). Then plan will, however, cover you if something catastrophic happens which requires expensive care.