The main problem I have with the article is that the author mentions google, yet doesn't put two and two together that what they're criticising has been taken directly from google's play book. Seeing that it's vice, one can safely assume that it's some hipster author who thinks they're in "tech" because they write about it, just regurgitating some crap that probably got fed to them by a google employee.

In any case, the cat's out of the bag, chatGPT is far from perfect, but definitely done a decent enough demonstration that there's something worthwhile there. There's no going back now, so becoming a luddite with respect to predictive models, isn't going to solve anything. Time to reskill, and change course, because a lot of jobs are going to change or disappear, and no one has been preparing anyone for it.

That is exactly what I wrote in the second sentence that you didn't quote.

This is just another part of foreign policy, just like warfare. Those countries who can be coerced and must do as they're told, do so. Those who feel they can hold their own, and don't need to comply to another nations whims and demands, won't, and in this, we have all the enemies of the US; those countries who feel they don't have to subject themselves to the US's foreign policy. The smaller nations got acquainted with the US military, while the larger ones like Russia and China, well they get the evil eye while the US tells all its "friends" to not play with them.

Scale plays a bigger role than you suggest. Sure you can look at GDP per capita, but you lose the scale, such as number of millionaires in China is around 7 million. That's about one third of Romania's population. Similarly the USA's high GDP masks that by its own definition, there are around 40 million people living in poverty, or about twice the population of Romania.

The fact is that the slice of the pie may be very small in comparison with a country like China, but the pie is absolutely enormous.

It's a short term profit, when a business outsources to a cheaper region when all their competitors are still stuck with the higher cost of production. Once the market has adjusted, and all are back on the same playing field, having all moved to the cheaper region, it's back to square one.

Ryanair calls it priority but rather it's more about optimising boarding. Priority boarding is for those who have extra hand luggage, they go in sooner, so that they get a bit more time to place their luggage in empty overhead lockers. Non-priority doesn't get extra carry on luggage, so they should be quicker to get in the plane and go to their seat.

This is all because airports sort of demand that air lines run a tight schedule on how long boarding goes for, so Ryanair is trying to speed up the boarding process, and have less delay with people just bumbling around.

I can think of friends who probably will pay up. They're the sort of people who have to advertise their lives on social media in order to be seen by their peers. They're the sort of people who absolutely lap up all the timelines, memories, anniversaries, all that sort of stuff that FB for instance throws at people.

My thoughts are that if the free tier would get more advertising, and less likes and comments from their friends, then they'll probably pay up to keep getting their bit of joy every time someone exclaims that they're jealous of the activity they're doing, or the food they're eating.

It's because of bread and circus. Unfortunately politics runs on the knowledge that a large portion of the population just doesn't care, and will not hold anyone to account, as long as their basic wants and needs are satisfied.

Yea, you could tell Louis was really deflated, after all that excitement that something was happening, the politicians can now say, they got the bill through, but in reality nothing changes. Legislating improvements that will have teeth will be just that much harder now, that a "right to repair" bill, in name only, has been passed.

You can sort of see the process of how "people power" gets undermined at every turn. First they resist in legislating at all, if that fails, then they water down the legislation or add loopholes to make it ineffectual, if that fails, then the courts get abused to find some sort of technicality or strange interpretation to change the intention of the legislation or to find that some treaty overrides the legislation, making it ineffective, and if that fails or is undesirable, then it becomes a state secret and rendered illegal to disclose any malfeasance because "national security".

Germany probably did cry though, and that's why I think the Russians blowing it up, make the best case. Considering how Germany has been stalling and delaying any action against Russia, ever since the beginning of the war with sanctions, up until recently, with not granting permission to export tanks, at every turn, I think the Russians have been trying to twist the arm of their number one business partner in Europe. People shouldn't forget all the excuses Germans made, in order to deal with Russia; wandel durch handel after all...

Depending on your view of things, it makes some sense to me why Russia would blow up all but one pipeline. Germany has made itself reliant on Russian resources, and one can argue, that there is plenty of forced bureaucracy and undermining Ukraine, probably in order to not overly offend Russia. I think the case that Russia did it was probably more to twist Germany's arm into deciding 'who's side are they on...'

While ultimately I have no clue who did it, there's lots of motives around which make sense, but I tend to think that one, because it kind of fits the best, with taking into account how Germany has been stalling and blocking, from the beginning of this war, being the last to agree to sanctions, up until recently, by withholding permission with sending tanks.

It always is a race to the bottom. One title strikes gold, so then all of a sudden, everybody is trying to jump in and just saturates the market, meanwhile, the original game still ends up persisting. I can't think of a situation where a competing game has been able to dethrone the 800 lb gorilla.

This is one of those areas, where my only thoughts is, as workers are the ones who generally carry out the work, and are ultimately left with the risk when the strategy goes wrong, the only reasonable response to CEO's and top brass essentially reaping all the benefits, is just increasing worker entitlements, and just make it much more costly for a company to start retrenchments. My idea is just start increasing notice periods and statutorily requiring garden leave and legally nullifying any non-compete clauses. Otherwise, I don't know, I don't think they'll ever get taxed appropriately on such obscene earnings. They're rich enough that all sorts of devices and loopholes will be found to minimise their tax in the first place.

I suspect that the tech companies want to upset the labour market with oversupply and drive down some wages. Yes, my thinking is conspiratorial, but it wouldn't be the first time tech companies colluded to put downward pressure on wages.

Funny though, EU tends to block any other country from doing that sort of stuff, but I guess when you run the EU, you can do whatever you want...