That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

Yes, that is true, but the grandparent perhaps was referring to the fact that the user interface on phones is excruciatingly bad for anything other than entertainment and communication. Sure, you might be able to use it in a pinch to do actual work, but for general-purpose productivity, a modern phone would be left in the dust compared even to a laptop from 25 years ago. CPU and memory in a device are not the only factors for productivity. In fact, I'd argue for general use (e.g., writing, spreadsheets, light computations), screen size and keyboard will be the primary factors driving productivity. For anything specialized (e.g., photo / video editing, data analysis, visualization, CAD, etc.), there's no question that the screen size of phones is crippling.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

I believe you have that backwards. UBI is exactly about creating dependence; that's why the B stands for "basic", and not S for "standard". UBI is about creating a new version of welfare, larger and more extensive, that will keep even more of society placated in servitude.

I'd normally ignore such a bone-headed comment, but as my career is focused on improving the lives of people with a specific disability, I find I cannot sit idly by.

People in positions like the ones described are not the part of society that can increase their skill set. As a segment, they typically have very, very high unemployment. The particular demographic I work with currently has 75% unemployment in the US. Their disability fundamentally precludes an increasing of their skill sets.

So, instead of assuming that every person can be trained to the New Reality, please seek out products created by or with people who are disabled in one way or another. In doing so, you are improving the lives of people whom the rest of society has quietly forgotten about.

Real 'Muricans don't leave the ol' US of A. Anyone who regularly travels beyond driving range of their home town is suspicious, frankly.

(Meanwhile, I got the extra-thick passport booklet and have made a good try at filling it with stamps.)

It wouldn't be cost-effective in China either were it not for state support.

There is no doubt that global free trade in commodities, in the absence of any government support, would be the most economically efficient thing to have. But China -- probably correctly -- identifies dependency on foreign supply chains for critical materials as a *security* issue. So they have indirect and direct subsidies, as well as state owned enterprises that operate on thin or even negative profit margins.

Since China does this kind of support on a scale nobody else does, China produces more rare earths than any other country, even though it is not particularly well endowed with deposits. This solves China's security problem with the reliability of the supply, but creates a security problem for other countries.

China thinks like Japan did before WW2, like empire building European countries did in the 1800s. Control over resources is a national security weapon, both for defense and offense.

The behavioral model you have isn't supported by data. When you raise the standard of living and food security of population, the fertility rate goes down. When you have nothing, children are economic assets whose labor can support the family. It's not a great option, but some people live in conditions where there are no good options.

I don't know what what means?

But the OP says the 32GB was "Not used. Not allocated. Leaked." It's a little hard to parse, but if true, then maybe the actual effect is truly negligible.

The car owners could be out of pocket for all sorts of reasons; will they be paid ?

* Did not get to the theatre, so unused tickets - not just the owner but others in the car.
* Missed a flight, so:
** booked & paid for hotel accommodation lost
** missed cruise ship leaving port
** missed your 60th birthday party to which 100 friends attended, most having travelled a long way, stayed in hotels, ...
* frozen food spoiled as it thawed on the way back from the shop
* 5 y/old daughter stranded at school, she was traumatised, money will not help - what will they do ?
* missed a child's wedding, how do they compensate ?

Jeep will do its best to avoid any compensation and will not pay anything to third parties who lost because of their blunder.

I live in Utah... I wonder what effect this will have on my power prices.

One example is AlphaFold an AI program which predicts folded protein structures "with near experimental accuracy" from amino acid base sequences. This ability is going to have a huge impact on many practical problems like pharmaceutical development, agricultural science, and engineering custom proteins. For example, since the human genome has been long since sequenced, the program means we now, with a fairly high degree of certainty, know what all the protein coding sequences make.

I'd say that's a pretty significant result.

If you work in technology long enough, you see this over and over. Every time something new comes along, it's actual usefulness gets buried in the breathless media response by a mountain of bullshit. But that doesn't mean the uses aren't real.