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Comment Re:How about the unbanned? (Score 1) 118

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon.

I care about the kids, and I don't think this is treading on them, I think it's pushing them to have IRL relationships, and that's a good thing. I say that as a nerd who had few friends when I was a teen (in the 80s), but even normal, social kids today have far fewer real friendships and many of the geeky kids like I was now have none at all.

We're a social species, we need and crave socialization, but social media is to real relationships like drugs are to the normal joys of life; a false but massively-amped substitute for the real thing, addictive and harmful. It's perfectly possible to get high or drunk from time to time and still enjoy real life, but you have to use the artificial happiness in moderation and control. There are really good reasons why we try to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol, and keep adults away from the really powerful and addictive stuff, and get them into treatment when they get hooked (well, in the US we mostly just put them in prison, but some parts of the world are getting smarter and focusing on treatment).

The same logic applies to social media. We need to figure out how to tame its effects on adults, especially those who are for some reason especially vulnerable and get very warped by it. IMO, it makes perfect sense to just try to keep kids off of it entirely, especially since we don't really understand it yet.

Comment Re:meanwhile in the US (Score 1) 118

huh, I did not know you where allowed to leave prison every day at (this time ofc varies from place to place) at lets say 14:00, don't have to show up in weekends and holydays. So no school is not like prison at all, allso you don't end up with a permanent criminal record when you've finished school ( not from going to school anyway) as apposed to prison. Your comparison is at least somewhat flawed

Comment Re: Hope that those kids (Score 1) 118

Well notallowing under 16s to drive on public roads probably has more to do with peiople not deaming them responsible enough to operate vehicles of 500KG+ moving at speed, and no driving scools feels comfortable in certifying them. Drinking age is a whole other cattle of fish, and it gas more to do with colture + tradition than anything so let's not start down that rathole

Comment Re:Not enough to make a difference (Score 1) 26

The poiling frog is a myth, frogs (unless drugged or otherwise compromised) will jump out of the put no matter how slowly you raise the temp (well at least try to, if the pot has sides that are to hight for them this will ofc fail, but that has more to do with physics than survival instincts. We need to find a better example

Comment Re:If you have access to a MSFT store account... (Score 1) 26

so dump exchamge in favor of OSS groupware/email solutions, thwere are even oss SaaS offerings if you don't have the skill set in house, I'm not certain but I think they ae generally cheaper then hosted exchange, and certainnlu cheper than running exchange and windows server on prem if you're a small shop

Comment Re:If you have access to a MSFT store account... (Score 1) 26

Because you might not be the target audience, you seam comfortable wit running your own nas. One drive is I suspect more geared to folks that don't want to worry about the tech stuff (just pay the bill an you're "safe"), the "we sell nits and bots, we don't do IT " croud.

Comment Priorities (Score 1) 126

The top priority of the administration was of course feeding USAID "into a wood chipper".

https://www.newyorker.com/cult...

Once they "finished the job" it was time to paean the worlds dictators while systematically and illegally dismantling every lever of US influence they could get their hands on.

https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...

Then they came for "hope" itself.

https://www.belgrade-news.com/...

Finally they came for the fonts and there were no typesetters left to speak for the fonts.

Comment People are cheap (Score 4, Insightful) 24

I worked for a farming automation company over 20 years ago now. There were a few things I noticed:

The first was that much of the low hanging automation tasks had already been automated a long time ago. People think automation is replacing a field full of 100 workers with 100 humanoid robots. But the reality is that we replaced those workers with a tractor and pesticide sprays. It's this observation that makes me skeptical about the whole humanoid hype fest.

The second thing is that people are damn cheap. I mean, a human can pick a lot of tomatoes in an hour. If the human breaks down, you just fire them and hire one that is in better condition. There is no capital cost for a human (perhaps a little to train them) - the farm doesn't have to pay to 'build' them. Even if a tomato picking robot was a few 1000's of dollars (not going to happen) that would still be higher than the cost of just getting another human. Further, if markets change you just fire your humans, or get them to pick something else instead, but if you've invested significant capital in tomato picking robots you've got a big problem.

I'm not saying that there isn't a point at which an automatic tomato picking robot wouldn't be viable - there definitely will be. But ultimately it's just an economics question. At the moment, making such a robot that can even perform that task well, let alone be cheap and, importantly, reliable, is a very difficult problem. I definitely think we could solve it - we could have solved it a decade ago - but there is very little investment for this stuff because the low price of humans sets a limit on the value of the resultant product, and that value is very low.

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