I mostly agree with you, but I think it might be unfair to the average American voter. Imagine that you live in West Virginia or Missouri, and you're struggling to get by, as many people are. Your wages haven't kept pace with inflation. You can't afford a house, and the price of houses seems to be rising faster than wages. Big companies have left your town to setup shop overseas, and your neighbors are out of work. Your health insurance sucks and is anything but universal. One big illness could wipe you out. When your wife had a kid, she got 6 weeks(!) of maternity leave, and had to be back at work.

Then you look at the US armed forces... there are 13(?) aircraft carriers that outmatch everything else on the ocean. Stealth bombers that look like spaceships. NASA launching huge rockets at enormous expense to go land people on the moon, when they already did that 45 years ago. A huge nuclear arsenal. This is all to be the world's police, and to provide a security umbrella to Europe.

And then you look at Europe, with their two years of maternity leave, and worker protections, and way more paid holidays, and universal healthcare, and they all like to look down their noses at Americans, while they benefit from a massive security umbrella that the US provides, which frees up the funds to spend on social programs.

Everyone thinks the MAGA crowd are traditional conservatives. Sure, there are some, but the core group of voters used to be democrats. They were union workers, laborers. They saw their savior in Bernie Sanders, and when the dems wouldn't let him run, they decided to follow the other populist voice. Is Trump lying to them? Absolutely.

I don't relate to MAGA at all. But I get it. The security arrangement might have been good for the US in general, but it hasn't been good for the average American worker. That's why we're here.

And there are going to be austerity measures coming to all of Europe. Those social programs are going to shrink. Right at a time when everyone's arming themselves to the teeth. How do you think that's going to play out?

I appreciate the average American's sentiment who want Europe to pay for its own defense. However, there's a lot of American history in the 20th century and before which brought us to this point deliberately. After being drawn into two huge world wars, started by member states of a continent that had continually been at war with themselves, the United States came up with a plan to prevent it from happening again. They invited everyone into an alliance structure where anyone could trade with anyone else, and the US would guarantee free navigation of the oceans so they didn't need big navies, and would provide security guarantees so that the countries of Europe didn't feel the need to arm themselves to the teeth. This arrangement is expensive for the US, but not so expensive as a world war 3. And it worked to prevent WW3 for many decades. Now that the generations who fought those wars are gone, we've forgotten the lessons, and I'm afraid we're doomed to repeat them. European have not evolved. Their geographic and political reality encourages wars among their own states. And as much as the US wants to stay out of it, they invariably get dragged back in every time.

If you apply "old school" industrial automation to a partly manual process, then getting 40% more worker productivity is hardly surprising. China, despite its rapid growth, is still in the final stages of industrializing. There's still lots of efficiency to be had. The US has been putting robots in factories since the 70's, so most of the low hanging fruit is already automated.

Also, beware what people are calling AI. In the industrial automation space, every vendor has been calling their product "AI" for the last 5 or 10 years. When you press them on it, it's often no more advanced than a PID controller or a few if/then statements. Our plant is more willing to take on new ideas than most, but the only real AI that I've seen installed on a plant floor over the last decade were some advanced vision-enabled picking systems. I'm sure someone has hooked an LLM to a plant-floor system somewhere, but I've not seen it yet. Nor have I seen a humanoid robot or a robot dog pay for itself. Even cobots only have mediocre uptake (but we are using them).

And finally, take stories out of China with a grain of salt. Yes, there's massive industrialization going on there, and the engineers working there are smart and motivated, but the government interferes heavily in the market. For instance, I've heard first-hand accounts from people on business trips there, where a truck was offloading several brand new CNC milling machines at a manufacturer, and the story was that these were just machines that the government had purchased and provided the company with the idea, "here, put these to good use." There's constant top-down subsidies being handed out, and it results in huge over-production problems. There are parking lots full of brand new EVs that dealers have written off because they can't sell them all. There are fields of solar panels producing power that can't get to market because there isn't enough local demand, and the power lines to the major centers aren't big enough to support the whole load.

Please check your reading comprehension. I specifically said I was "in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway." As in, your odometer reading. No need for a GPS at all.

Thanks for replying to my post without even reading it. I appreciate it.

Not surprising at all. This was a concern that was raised over a decade ago, even in discussions here on /.

The fact is that road maintenance needs to be paid, and it was long thought that charging taxes on gasoline was a good way to fund roads because it was simple to implement, it scales with how far you drive, and it also scales with the size of your vehicle (larger vehicles do more damage to the roads). So it was relatively fair. It also didn't require invasive data collection, such as how far or where you drove your vehicle.

When it was first discussed here on /., the consensus opinion was that if you drove an EV, you should have a GPS tracker installed in your car that measured how far you drove. We used to have big discussions here about privacy, and the privacy advocates thought that a government mandated GPS tracking you everywhere you went would be an overreach by government. I was generally in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway.

Of course now we voluntarily GPS track ourselves and send the data to our corporate overlords, so that all seems like a moot point.

Will this new law also apply to those crazy guys that power their diesel cars off used french fry grease they get from restaurants?

I think this view gives the crypto bros too much credit. They might now be thinking about taking advantage of the opportunity to wrestle the system away from the Wall Street bros, but there was no such plan.

To intercept them you still have to identify them, which you can't do until after they perform the sabotage. Given that, what's the benefit in sinking them rather than seizing them? Sinking them gains you nothing, seizing them gains you the sabotage vessel. It probably won't be worth much, but more than nothing. I guess sinking them saves the cost of imprisoning the crew, but I'd rather imprison them for a few years than murder them.

Very much unlike an intern (the doing-over part).

You ignored his core point, which is that "rocks don't think" is useless for extrapolating unless you can define some procedure or model for evaluating whether X can think, a procedure that you can apply both to a rock and to a human and get the expected answers, and then apply also to ChatGPT.

Heh. It says a lot about the pace of AI research and discussion that a paper from last year is "old".

This is a common thread I notice in AI criticism, at least the criticism of the "AI isn't really thinking" or "AI can't really do much" sorts... it all references the state of the art from a year or two ago. In most fields that's entirely reasonable. I can read and reference physics or math or biology or computer science papers from last year and be pretty confident that I'm reading the current thinking. If I'm going to depend on it I should probably double-check, but that's just due diligence, I don't actually expect it to have been superseded. But in the AI field, right now, a year old is old. Three years old is ancient history, of historical interest only.

Even the criticism I see that doesn't make the mistake of looking at last year's state of the (public) art tends to make another mistake, which is to assume that you can predict what AI will be able to do a few years from now by looking at what it does now. Actually, most such criticism pretty much ignores the possibility that what AI will do in a few years will even be different from what it can do now. People seem to implicitly assume that the incredibly-rapid rate of change we've seen over the last five years will suddenly stop, right now.

For example, I recently attended the industry advisory board meeting for my local university's computer science department. The professors there, trying desperately to figure out what to teach CS students today, put together a very well thought-out plan for how to use AI as a teaching tool for freshmen, gradually ramping up to using it as a coding assistant/partner for seniors. The plan was detailed and showed great insight and a tremendous amount of thought.

I pointed out that however great a piece of work it was, it was based on the tools that exist today. If it had been presented as recently as 12 months ago, much of it wouldn't have made sense because agentic coding assistants didn't really exist in the same form and with the same capabilities as they do now. What are the odds that the tools won't change as much in the next 12 months as they have in the last 12 months? Much less the next four years, during the course of study of a newly-entering freshman.

The professors who did this work are smart, thoughtful people, of course, and they immediately agreed with my point and said that they had considered it while doing their work... but had done what they had anyway because prediction is futile and they couldn't do any better than making a plan for today, based on the tools of today, fully expecting to revise their plan or even throw it out.

What they didn't say, and I think were shying away from even thinking about, is that their whole course of study could soon become irrelevant. Or it might not. No one knows.

So... no, you don't have any links or other evidence. Got it.

Cite?

What conflict of interest? DCar Studio has money and wants advertising, the influencer wants money and can provide advertising. I see an alignment of interests, not a conflict.

DVD-R? DVD+R? DVD+RW? Single or dual layer? Gold metallic layer? Silver metallic layer? How are they stored?

Depending on how you answer those questions, your 25 year-old media may be past due and you've just gotten lucky, may be just entering the timeframe where it may die, or may have decades of reliable life left.

DVD-R single layer disks with a gold metallic layer are good for 50-100 years. Other recordable DVD options are less durable, some as little as 5-10 years.