What you’re describing is Clarktech, technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. We don’t know remotely how to create an AI artist that can actually create original works of art with their own perspective, critique, and soul. A system like any we know how to design has to create art from what is essentially the averaging of the work of many artists. Everything they make is a work by committee. Any individual perspective is washed out in the generating process.

We simply don’t have any idea how to create an AI that would exhibit the kind of individual perspective of a human artist. Until we at least have some plausible pathway for that, we might as well be arguing about what happens if it turns out magic is real.

Exactly. The supply chains of a company like that are incredibly opaque, even if it’s a publicly traded company. How are we, the consumers, to know what a fair tariff price offset is?

It’s one thing if the product is made entirely in one country and imported whole by a seller. Someone in China makes a widget out of entirely Chinese parts, packages it in a China-made box, and sends it to the US, ready for store shelves? Well if the tariff goes up by 25%, no reasonable person could fault the import seller of that product for raising their prices by 25%.

But a big consumer company like P&G? They’re a multinational conglomerate. Even simple products like clothes detergent may have a dozen different ingredients from a dozen different countries. Some of those compounds have to go back and forth across borders multiple times as they go through various stages of chemical refining. And the tariffs the chemical precursors will be hit with may vary based on the chemical involved. It’s hard for the company itself to estimate what the fair break-even amount they should raise prices by to offset tariffs. What hope does the average consumer have?

So companies, being heartless monsters, see an obvious opportunity. Maybe after a thorough analysis of their supply chain by people with very fancy credentials, they conclude that they need to raise prices by 17% to evenly offset the tariffs. That’s the fair number; that’s just what’s needed to break even. But it took a whole team of business and logistics experts to come up with that number. No consumer will be able to check their work. So…what’s to stop them from using this as a chance to reap some profit? Tell customers that you need to raise prices by 25%. How will they know the difference?

And this is how you end up with corporations making record profits. Supply chains are too complex for consumers to determine what a fair price increase is to offset tariffs. So companies can figure out that fair number, add some additional profit margin to it, and just blame it all on the tariffs. Never let a good crisis go to waste!

At that point you call your member of Congress.

Instead of going after Steam for NSFW content, payment processors need to crack down on AI customer service traps. If your company doesn’t have a meaningful way of getting a hold of an actual human and disputing a charge, your company should be shut off from the payment processor networks. After all, the process of a chargeback normally asks if you’ve first exhausted their customer service options to resolve the dispute. Companies that don’t have any meaningful customer service simply shouldn’t be eligible for Visa/Mastercard payments. The chargeback risk is just too high.

Yes, but the point of this isn’t to win in court. The point is in the fighting. It is a stage performance. The actual outcome of the trial is predetermined but irrelevant to this whole political exercise.

It doesn’t matter. This is all about optics and red meat for the base. Trump can’t do anything for the egg prices, so he needs to find a scapegoat. He can now point out that his administration is taking concrete actions to address the egg prices. Scratch the surface and the whole thing crumbles. But that’s the case for most of the Trump cinematic universe.

Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

There is a reason white supremacists like Steven Miller love this definition of antisemitism. There’s a reason most white nationalists are also Zionists. They fully support the idea of a Jewish homeland…so they can have somewhere to export all of America’s Jews to. They dream of a white ethnostate, and Jewish people do not fit anywhere into their vision.

I don’t think the current White House is going to go this far, but it’s absolutely part of their long term plan.

The test will ask how old the Earth is. Any answer over 6000 years or so will be marked false.

Columbia has decided to adopt the Hitlerian definition of antisemitism, one that embraces despicable ancient tropes of Jews being forever foreigners in whatever land they occupy.

Think about the actual philosophy behind this. The only way that criticism of Israel can be considered identical to antisemitism is if you believe that all Jews, regardless of nationality, beliefs, and personal character, have some innate tie to Israel. You can be a Jewish person, only a citizen of the US, with no interest whatsoever in the Israeli state, but it doesn’t matter. Simply due to your ethnicity and religion, you are forever tied to the state of Israel.

Columbia has fully embraced the antisemitic belief of the perpetual foreigner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner

Columbia admins believe that no Jewish person can ever be a true full American. From birth, every Jewish person has innate ties to Israel. They cannot escape this tie. Thus any criticism of Israel is innately an antisemitic attack on Jewish Americans. To be a Jew is to be an Israeli, and to be an Israeli is to be a Jew. They are one and the same to the antisemites running Columbia University.

Notably, this was the belief also shared by the Nazis during WW2. Jews were considered perpetual foreigners in Nazi Germany. It mattered not how they lived their lives. They could never truly be fully German. They could have lived in Germany down ten generation and personally served Germany in WW1. It didn’t matter. Jews were always foreigners, and thus it was justified treating them differently from other Germans.

This was the logic of the American Japanese internment camps. Japanese were considered forever foreigners. They were interned regardless of their actual personal beliefs and loyalties. Their own character mattered for naught. If you were ethnically Japanese, you had innate loyalty to the Japanese emperor, and thus even Japanese American citizens were treated as suspect foreigners.

There is a reason the white nationalists currently running the White House have embraced this definition of antisemitism. If it is normalized that being Jewish and being Israeli are truly interchangeable, then why can’t American Jews be forcibly deported to Israel? If all Jewish people are essentially Israeli from birth, then an antisemitic administration can justify deporting any and all Jewish citizens “back to their homeland.” After all, they can be treated as suspect foreigners with dubious loyalty to the US. And this is ultimately why the right wing is so fond of this Hitlerian definition of antisemitism. Currently it’s being used as a cudgel to attack Palestinian rights protesters, but it can just as easily be wielded against Jewish Americans to justify their involuntary deportation to the state of Israel.

When this is over, we are going to have to try, convict, and hang thousands of ICE agents for crimes against humanity.

So…is he single?

Honestly I wouldn’t mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we’re not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don’t pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.

The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper’s subscription prices assume that they’re going to your primary information source. But my main information sources is news aggregators.

What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.

I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They’re still pricing their newspapers like it’s 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.

Can I introduce a dilute form of it into the water supply and then have an easy path to elected office?

Seriously. I remember Digg. My life’s social media path has been slashdot->digg->reddit->lemmy.

I was there! I saw it all! <shakes cane>