At least Rockstar have generated some value 'themselves' compared to the union which presumably generates value by capturing large proportions of the employees from companies then extorting the companies.

Yes, I'm aware that this isn't the way unions are presented but if we could somehow extract the true motivations of union leaders, would we find a desire to fix the power balance between employees and employers or is that simply a claim used to attract a block of, what are essentially troops in a financial war?

Or perhaps the motivations don't matter if they do actually deliver on the promises of increased balance - although who should decide what is a fair balance?

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

Awesome - hopefully you're posting from the Googleplex :-)

At last, if I have three stops to make and know the rough duration at each location and the starting time, there may be some hope of an optimized round trip taking into account traffic.

Welcome to the future!

> And bigger government is the last thing anyone needs
When asked for comment, a government spokesperson said

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us.

Let's play "Correlation is not causation".

*Beautiful assistant spins the wheel* whilst the audience claps enthusiastically.

In today's session we'll once again be grilling CEOs whose staff attrition curve looks as though it was copied from their use-of-AI curve but who didn't report losses due to AI.

*First contestant steps forwards*

Host beams at the audience

Host: Ladies and gentlemen, our first contestant is Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna!

Sebastian, your headcount fell 22% to 3,500 as AI adoption surged, with AI now handling core work equivalent to hundreds of roles. But you claim it's all due to natural attrition, not AI-driven losses. Correlation or causation?

Audience murmurs

Sebastian: Pure coincidence! We stopped hiring to embrace AI efficiency, but the drop is just people leaving on their own. Productivity gains will boost salariesâ"everyone wins!

Host: Riiight. And those 700 agent jobs AI took? Not related?

Sebastian: Absolutely not. Attrition happens; AI just fills the gaps.

Audience boos playfully

Host: Spin the wheel for our next griller? Or explore Klarna's later AI backpedals in 2025?

Streisand moment? Anyone who's not heard of the site before, now has and so google's search results become irrelevant - surely?

> Credit is a solution to a problem
The problem is "we have a bunch of money and want to grow it with zero (or lower) risk to ourselves" not "how can we buy a house we cannot afford now". Credit exists more for the lender - that's why they have all the power in contracts but it's presented as an problem encountered by suckers, I mean home buyers :-)

When Thatcher died, it was also celebrated quite a bit.

They're not trying to tell you that you the customer can't have an agent act on your behalf, they're saying:

we can't cross-sell you a bunch of useless shit you don't actually want because perplexity are allowing your will to be expressed in the most direct manner and not giving our psychologists a stab at your attention - which is obviously 'not good'

a looming debate over how to handle the proliferation of so-called AI agents

Pretty sure this has already been solved in the US - check who has the most money - they get to decide for everyone - nice and simple - no long-winded investigations into morality, side-effects, greater good - just a nice, simple comparison of floating point numbers. So efficient. What's the emoji for ironic envy?

I'd be curious what the breakdown is between 'addicts', in the compulsively-does-thing-despite-knowing-it-is-contrary-to-their-interests sense, and sad but locally reasonable behavior from people with tepid options.

'Addict' is a comparatively easy call to make when people are getting fired because they no-showed to play WoW; or spending all their time scrolling tiktok despite having a school or college worth of peers to socialize with; but if you are retired, less physically able to get out and about than you used to be, and at the age where your friends and peers are starting to die off, it seems like a much more open question whether having an engaging if ultimately rather hollow hobby is an 'addiction' or just a kind of depressing local maximum.

It's obviously not some ideal of perfected human flourishing; but if you are doing it because you don't really have things to do, rather than at the expense of things you have to do, that's not really classic addict behavior; just a mediocre hobby.

Perhaps there's a future where 'in Communist Russia, big business gets ass-fucked by powerless 'electorate'" to help them understand the problem and thus be incentivised to fix it.

I'm so sick of this shit - every day <yet another person or group with power fucks everyone else to demonstrate how not to do civilisation>

What the fuck is wrong with people? Seriously? How can these people be in charge of anything more important than which sandwich filling to add when they have empty space where their moral compass should be?

Could you help me understand the 'irony' here? Is saying impolite things about a dead guy the moral equivalent to being perhaps the most pivotal figure behind a war with an estimated half-million dead and a causus belli that was transparent bullshit; not to mention the elevation of extrajudicial torture to official policy? I'm not sure I follow.

And, if you'd like to expand on the 'political leanings' thing; I'd be more than happy to call anyone whose politics involve thinking that Cheney did a great job a monster as well; especially when it's so hard to argue that any of Cheney's ugliest aspects even paid off. Flirting with more expansive theories of the ends justifying the means can be a dangerous business; but, bare minimum, you can attempt to rank means by degree of atrocity and ends by degree of effectiveness; and on that score Cheney's work was honestly pretty shit.

Remember the 'Pax Americana' that the neocons assured us could be bombed into the fractious elements of the middle east? Lol. Bin Laden? Dude was chilling in an upmarket suburb in Pakistan while we were pissing away blood and treasure on hitting a mixture of hapless civilians and 'insurgents' who had the temerity to suggest that our puppet government was not the legitimate local administration in one peripherally involved country and one uninvolved one.

So, go ahead, please, explain your other level of irony. Tell us whose political loyalties are to this grade of not-even-effective violence. What'll it be?