...and Amazon finds itself in a perfect position to sell pickaxes and shovels. Can't blame them.

I guess if there's any place to point out that forums worked fine over 300bps connections, it's here. Although the upgrade to 1200bps was admittedly a welcome change.

I'm sure the "national security establishment" already knew about this and was already using it. Using targeted ads for this purpose is old news.. He just wasn't cleared for it.

I'd rather be held accountable for my speech than not be allowed to speak at all.

The problem is that these are the same, because the process is the punishment. Even if it's eventually decided that whatever statement you're being "held accountable" for is fine, just being sued is ruinous to an individual. And if that can easily happen for every statement you make, you'll have to not speak at all just to have a chance at life outside a courtroot.

There are many sorts of places you can get educated, and only one sort of place you can get a college degree. The degree is of great value; for would-be employees, it's either a minimum requirement or a way of separating yourself from others when jobs are scarce. For an entrepreneur it conveys to would-be investors your seriousness and/or competence. Though "chosen by Thiel" is probably a decent stand-in for that second case.

And I don't like the way it's been putting up AI-generated results in a box and making them look like actual search results. Then you click on it thinking it will take you to a useful article and instead it gives you AI-generated bullshit. Basically when they've managed to do is create an AI which can figure out the form of the thing you're looking for and present it to you, but not the substance; they're SEOing themselves.

If you're over 40 good luck getting another job.

I was well over 40 when I got my last job. Yes, I had to pay for medical insurance out of pocket for a while in between jobs.

If you're a nerd there's a good chance your lack of social skills and probably useless family (nerds aren't born, they're made) probably means you don't have a lot to fall back on either.

What I had to fall back on, being a superannuated nerd, was savings. It doesn't care about your social skills.

has it led to a conviction of an American citizen who otherwise would not have been or any other consequences we can point to

When they use that data to obtain convictions, they produce a falsified chain of evidence leading to the conviction. It's called parallel construction. So you can't point to it, because they've been hiding it.

Are they going to disclose when they are sending my call record data to the NSA? No, of course not, but they're doing it anyway.

Cost of money (i.e. interest rates) are up, controlling spending becomes more important.

As for overlap between AI and efficiency, doesn't seem very significant... if both are in fashion at the moment (and they are), there will be overlap.

Your distraction is irrelevant, it still takes more water to wash out your bin than to make a plastic bag to put in it.

Just because bags are used to hold things doesn't make the plastic bag you buy for trash the same as the plastic bag you load your shopping into.

Don't make stuff up. Trash bags are usually made of LDPE, just like most single-use grocery bags. The exceptions are usually made of HDPE, just like other single-use grocery bags. The big difference is the trash bags are thicker.

It takes far less water to wash out a bin than it does to make a bin liner.

Not according to Columbia University. 1000 plastic bags use 58 gallons of fresh water, which works out to about a cup of water per bag. It'll take more than that to clean your unlined bin.

Here in New Zealand we banned single use plastic bags about a year ago and it has been very successful. I was wonder what is different that it didn't work in California?

California made the mistake of measuring the thing they claimed would be reduced, rather than saying "Look, see, disposable bags banned, fewer disposable bags used, success".