I remember when almost all glass bottles were recycled. Milk came in glass bottles that were refilled over and over. Soda came in glass bottles which were refilled and used over and over. These bottles were worth money to retailers, not because the government put some sort of tax on them, but because they would resell them to the distributors who would wash them out and reuse them.

This system lasted much longer in some parts of the world than others. Recycling soda bottles was the norm in Latin America clear into the 90s, maybe longer. I moved back to the United States and I stopped paying attention. Of course, they weren't melting the bottles down or anything crazy like that. They simply washed them out. After a while the bottles would get so worn that they would get hazy on the outside. The still held Coca-Cola just fine.

I suspect that even the most granola of today's customers would be put off by this sort of recycling. And there is no question that gathering and washing glass bottles is definitely more expensive than simply manufacturing brand new plastic bottles. Before plastic, however, that was simply the world that we lived in. Even 30 years ago recycling glass was still economically viable in locations where the packaging machines hadn't been upgraded.

Part of the reason that I am so skeptical of any sort of recycling program is that recycling proponents always seem to gloss right over the history of what societies did before plastics were widespread. Humans have already solved how to package goods in a world less reliant on plastic. But instead of pushing for well known solutions to the problems of plastic we would rather point the finger at Big Oil and blame them for our plastics problem.

The license that Youtube has content providers agree to is incredibly broad. Youtube can basically use that content however it would like, including sublicensing it, monetizing it, and retaining it after you have deleted it from the service. People uploading stuff to Youtube give Youtube an incredible amount of rights over their work.

Github's license, on the other hand, does not grant them extensive rights. Heck, they treat most repos as private. Worse, many of the Free Software licenses that they probably could use to train the AI might potentially create derivative works that would also be copylefted. The lawyers at the FSF has definite beliefs about this (here's the link), and their beliefs just happen to line up with the beliefs of most content creators. I suspect before too long we will have either legislation or case law that will spell this out concretely. To this point the folks training AI models have just moved forward under the impression that they could train their AI with whatever content they wanted, whether it was licensed to them or not. That's unlikely to stand long term.

Either way, however, Youtube has direct access to the motherlode of data when it comes to video, and it is all licensed to them under a very lenient license. That advantage actually is likely to be hard to beat.

I personally don't want to pay for everyone to have the ability to stream at 8K. I don't even see at 8K. Why should I be paying taxes to guarantee that my neighbors can watch their sportsball at ridiculous resolutions? What's the other use case for such ridiculous amounts of bandwidth?

There is a certain amount of broadband that I feel that we should subsidize, but I think that it is very easy to get carried away.

Believe me, I would be upset if I found out that my auto maker was using my driving data against me. That's part of the reason that my daily driver is a 96 Honda Civic. I drive carefully (as evidenced by the fact that I have been driving the same car for nearly 30 years), but that doesn't mean that I want anyone keeping tabs on how I drive. I especially don't want someone keeping tabs on how I drive without my knowledge. Worse, the automakers are profiting by sharing that information and I don't get a cut.

That being the case, if what you are upset about is that your insurance agency doesn't know who is actually driving your car, then I can't sympathize. They don't care who is driving the car. They simply want to know how badly the car is being driven. If you loan your car out to someone that is a terrible driver then I actually think that the insurance agency should get to know about that. After all, they sold you insurance based on the risks they perceived from you, not someone else that might be driving your car.

As an example, I have a 16 year-old daughter that just started driving. I made it very clear to the insurance agent that she wouldn't be driving my wife's car (a late model Honda Odyssey), and instead she would be driving the 2006 Kia Sedona. Mechanically the Kia Sedona is still sound. It has new brakes and tires, and it has been well maintained. It's a big vehicle with ABS brakes and side airbags. When (not if) my daughter gets in an accident she will be as safe as I can make her. I still got a discount from specifying that she wouldn't be driving the Odyssey. Insurance companies just want a reasonable idea as to how much risk they are taking on. Personally, I think that is fair.

I would consider using a telemetry app for her when she drives. It would have to be phone based, and not based on the information from the vehicle, as there is no way that I would put her in a vehicle new enough to support telemetry. The biggest reason that I wouldn't want to share her driving information is that I have driven with her and I suspect she is in the lowest quartile of new drivers. In fact, I suspect that if the insurance agency knew how terrible she was they would charge me more to insure her. On the bright side she is getting better with practice, and she is cautious about driving places that she isn't already familiar with. That makes a big difference in practice, but it is unlikely to show up on any sort of telemetry app. Hopefully she can avoid any accidents and improve her skills to the point where I don't feel like I am taking advantage of my insurer.

They don't care. They aren't trying to prosecute you for bad driving. They are simply trying to charge you more money if the vehicle that they insure gets driven badly. If you let knuckleheads drive your vehicle then you probably should be charged more in insurance.

You are lucky then. I have an another location 10 miles away where I sometimes watch Netflix and now every time I do I have to adjust my household. I am on the Ultra Premium account, and I am supposedly able to watch 4 streams at a time, but only if we are sitting in each other's laps.

I just did the math and my family watches less than 20 hours of Netflix a month (I have 6 kids). It turns out that I haven't watched Netflix since November. It's not that big of a deal, but getting a message from Netflix every time one of my kids wants to switch where the household resides is just enough of a pain that it makes me want to stop using Netflix completely.

Per hour they are definitely my most expensive service. We can definitely live without them.

The whole point of audits is to at least put a finger on those individuals who knowingly cooked the books. Properly done audits would make it easy to know precisely who to prosecute in the case a criminal trial is needed. The easiest way to make sure that the audit is done to a certain standard is to make the auditor liable for mistakes that they failed to uncover. Audits should be comprehensive enough that the auditors should either find the problems in the books, or, in the case of more comprehensive fraud, make an airtight case criminal case against individuals if fraud should go undetected.

Eventually fraud comes to light. These schemes always unravel.

This ruling is definitely a step backward for that level of transparency in our financial markets.

This is precisely it. An auditor that doesn't share in the civil and criminal liability is a complete waste of time.

In an ideal world investors would come to recognize quality auditing firms in the same way that we recognize quality manufacturing firms. These firms would demand a significant portion of the fee up front and would not sign off on the audit until they were satisfied that the company was, in fact, clean. The company being audited could then rest assured that their books were clean (internal embezzling is definitely a thing). More importantly they could attract more investment because they could show that their business had received a quality audit by a well known auditing firm. Failure to pass an audit, or an audit by a less well known firm would be met with skepticism from investors in the same way that you are skeptical of random misspelled brands on Temu.

A quality audit would simply the part of the cost of doing business for companies that wanted to be publicly traded. The reality is that investors already expect that to be a thing. This is witnessed not only by this case, but by the fact that the Tingo Group was able to raise billions in the U.S. stock market on the strength of an audit by Deloitte Israel. The proper response would be for the auditors to be held liable for those things that they should have uncovered with a proper audit. In the long run this would probably be good for the auditing firms. Sure, they would be on the hook for poorly done audits, but publicly traded companies would basically be required to pay for comprehensive audits. Quality auditing firms, with good reputations, could charge more for audits, and could do the work necessary to guarantee that the books were clean (or at least that the fraudsters were consistently fraudulent). Misleading auditors should carry criminal penalties so that if companies did trick their auditors the auditors would be able to hand over their books to law enforcement to allow for easy prosecution in criminal cases. These quality audits would be worth the effort to companies seeking the greater capital that the market gives.

Companies that didn't want to pay for quality audits could get the amount of auditing that they wanted to pay for, but investors could see this as a red flag. At the very least auditors could serve as an insurance backstop. Before investing you could take a look at the company auditing the company you wanted to invest in to make sure that they had the resources to back up their audit.

None of this is even remotely controversial actually. In fact, it is the only reason that auditors should even exist, and it is definitely what investors expect from an audit. What is the point of an audit where the auditors can't be held liable, or at least if the audit can't be later used to show who acted in a criminal manner. Almost by definition audits should show that the books balance, or should at least point the finger at the responsible parties in the case of fraud.

In recent times there have been a string of huge frauds perpetrated against companies where the fraud could have been caught with a minimum of proper auditing. As an example, Trafigura had to write down nearly half a billion dollars as they found that a significant number of their nickel shipments were just useless rubble instead of nickel ore. You can be sure that company will be more careful in the future.

Proper auditing definitely is worth the money spent on it. Investors need the information provided if they are going to make informed choices. As fraud mounts companies that do their due diligence will stand out in the market. If the law doesn't require proper audits, then some auditing houses will almost certainly take it upon themselves to guarantee proper audits as part of their service, and auditing insurance will become a thing. It will then be up to the investor to prefer properly audited companies. Unfortunately, in a world where Sam Bankman Fried can trick people out of billions of dollars by promising ridiculous returns I am afraid that stolid businesses will always have a hard time getting the investment they deserve.

I bought a /. T-Shirt back in the heyday. "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." I would occasionally run into people that recognized it for what it was. A little later I worked at a major hosting company, and even though /. had already declined significantly we still regularly talked about stuff that came up because someone had seen an article here. That was a pretty cool place to work.

I definitely miss Usenet, even though I didn't really get involved in that until after Eternal September. It doesn't help that I still read my email with Emacs/Gnus, and I still have an ISP with a workable news server. Because of that I still read some of the programming mailing lists via their news gateway. I still have the tools that turn those cesspools into workable sources, so I read them their for old time's sake.

I am old enough that I could have been on Usenet before Eternal September, but at the time I was too interested in meeting girls. Looking back I feel like I made the right choice.

You have clearly never raised a horse. Nor do you have any idea of the time and effort that went into building and maintaining the infrastructure required to move people and cargo around using horses and wagons. To give you an idea a light working horse likely eats 20 pounds of hay and 5 pounds of grain per day, and you likely to have to worry about removing roughly that amount of waste per day as well. On top of that horses need to be shod, cared for, and you need the tack and equipment to make them useful. There is a reason why automobiles replaced horses so quickly. Despite all of the problems of early automobiles they were still much less expensive to maintain than horses, especially in urban environments. Even before the mass production of cars with the Model T, automobiles had displaced hundreds of thousands of horses in the cities in the United States. When the inexpensive Model T came out people literally couldn't get rid of horses fast enough. Cars replaced horses because the economics were ridiculously clear.

This is why vat chicken is such a hard place to start. First of all chicken is basically the least expensive meat available. Chickens are easy to grow and care for, they require very little space, and they eat just about anything. Heck, I live in the middle of a fair sized city and I still have neighbors on either side of me that raise chickens in their tiny yards. In a factory farm setting you can already raise chickens with so little space that I suspect that the vat growers would have a hard time competing. Some of the farms only give the chickens 2 to 3 square feet of space per chicken. Chickens also eat just about anything. You can raise chickens on whatever happens to be inexpensive at the time. Even with decades of improvement I would bet that vat grown chicken will still take more space per kilogram of usable meat, and you will almost certainly have to be more careful with what you use for food.

If they could make vat wagyu beef they would be on to something. From a price/utility standpoint chicken is ridiculously hard to beat.

Of course, I suspect that the real reason that they started with chicken is that we already eat a lot of chicken that has been blended into a paste and formed. Recreating something as simple as a chicken nugget is easy. Recreating a steak with its marbling, and other structures, is a completely different proposition. The problem with a chicken nugget strategy is that it puts them up against other chicken substitutes including vegetable chicken substitutes that are already pretty good and relatively inexpensive.

There is literally no way to win replacing chicken. What these venture capitalists have created is a pretty cool science experiment, but it is about as commercially viable as shredding perfectly good plywood to make sawdust. Sawdust has some commercial value, but you would be better off with the plywood and the money.

Heck, I moved to Lima, Peru from the state of Washington when I was 16. The biggest cultural shock of all was the fact that I was now expected to greet every woman in every social situation with a kiss. There was a lot of craziness in moving to Peru as a gringo at the height of Sendero Luminoso. I was threatened with guns, I saw buildings that were demolished with explosives, and I even saw people who had been slaughtered and nailed to posts for the crime of voting. Nothing was quite as disconcerting as walking into a party and realizing that I was now going to have to kiss 20 females all of which were at least a full foot shorter than I was. My brother and I referred to it as "running the gauntlet."

Eventually you get used to it. These days I sort of like reconnecting with my Peruvian friends. Gringos are decidedly cold. We could use a bit of loosening up.

That being the case, this isn't really a marketing problem. Meta simply thought that there would be more demand for their VR stuff. Meta put it in retail locations because they thought that the devices weren't selling because people couldn't try them out. It turns out that people aren't buying VR gear because they aren't sufficiently interested.

I didn't read the fine article, but I suspect that it could easily be argued that if she did not come forward that she was an accomplice to any fraud that he committed. After all, they were married, and she stood to benefit from any financial gains that he made. If your partner steals tens of millions of dollars you probably want to get ahead of that.

Heck, generally speaking, I would like to think that I would report any felony that I personally witnessed, even if the victim was someone that I didn't like. That's just the right thing to do from a general ethical perspective. I don't like the world that we end up with if we each only care about the crimes that are committed against ourselves. I can understand if someone feels differently, but, for obvious reasons, I would rather not be neighbors with that person.

I suppose the true test would be how you would feel if it was your money being stolen. I would bet that if it was your money being stolen you would be grateful to hear that you were being defrauded, no matter who the person was that gave you the information. This is especially true if the warning came soon enough that you could protect yourself.

I recognize that some people truly believe that the most important thing that you can do is to not get involved. However, in this case, Mr. Rinsch had clearly gone off the rails. He needed help, not someone that was willing to cover up his problems. It could easily be argued that turning him in was not only the right thing to do, it was the loving thing to do.

The FSF, GNU, and the GPL have always been about software freedom, and they have always used copyright law ironically to protect that freedom. The catch has always been that you can use the software however you want, but you don't have the license to distribute the software unless you are willing and able to give that same right to the people that you distribute software to.

Along the way they have various legal tools and licenses. My favorite example of this is that Debian's digital RMS program, that was used to warn people about non-free software that I had installed on my system, would warn me about the manual to Emacs, which is published using the GFDL with some unchangeable bits that makes it technically non-free according to Debian's definition. I personally believe that these restrictions make sense for documentation, but Debian had other priorities, so I would regularly get emails from my system from Digital RMS warning me about packages that the actual RMS had helped to write, and using a license that RMS had helped draft.

Technical people like black and white, or at least very straightforward branching, and the rules for software licenses tend to be a little more tricky than that.

It does feel that a repository for reusable boilerplate legal documents should be a thing though. Hackable law, if you will. I wonder if such a thing actually exists.

No doubt. If only there was a device that didn't have battery and required you to be connected to the network with a wire!

I have no problem paying people for services rendered. The real problem is that billions of dollars of VC money was poured into this particular industry subsidizing the price of delivering goods to the point where it was ridiculously inexpensive to have hot meals delivered to your door.

This money has dried up, and now this same service is going to get considerably more expensive. People will either pay the higher costs associated with these deliveries, or there food will not get delivered. It is as simple as that. In some markets DoorDash is already seeing more demand for their services than they have people willing to drive. The only way to fix that issue is to pay the drivers more money, and DoorDash doesn't really have that money to give. It is going to have to come from customers.