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.

Congrats to you as well! :) Baby is only slightly premature, being induced at 2.5-3 weeks early due to size.

Nice idea.

If you pinch "imply" hard enough you can make it mean "infer"

That statement itself is enough to pinch all the linguists out there. :P

What makes that the "correct" version? It seems the line has quite the history and has taken on many forms. Fwiw, Wikipedia justifies "implies".

I ought to be jealous of you. But i'm much too lazy.

I lost a lot of weight after reading "The Hackers Diet" He was a real help to me.

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.