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Comment Re: Clean air is good (Score 1) 66

How exactly what I describe here is a Troll, when I am actually sharing my experience as a user of a technology? I luterally feel nauseous (wanting to vomit) when riding as a passenger in a Tesla. Rarely happens in an ICE vehicle, happens in electric vehicles, especially Teslas. No matter how much I get moderated as a Troll, doesn't change what I end up feeling as an EV passenger. There is something about the way these things ride, it makes me want to vomit.

Comment Re: Clean air is good (Score 0) 66

I already hate getting Teslas for my Uber drives and I do quite a bit of Ubering, so to speak. If the number of these Tesla vehicles goes up significantly and I feel like throwing up during *EVERY* Uber drive, I will no longer use this method of transportation. Teslas make me absolutely nauseous, especially when going up or down the hill.

Comment Re:I still don't see how there's a basis to compla (Score 2) 37

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Comment Re:Shouldn't have circumcised those babies (Score 1) 59

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

Comment If you don't like this (Score 2) 82

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

Comment Re:Unions (Score 1) 136

no doubt. Which is why I only have subcontractors, not permanent employees and almost all of them are in Ukraine. Also as I said, should something like that be attempted, I would shut down parts of businesses and get rid of the people who attempt it, I wouldn't run a business where I had to deal with this.

Comment Re:Unions (Score 1) 136

as someone who owns and runs a few companies, the largest having around 1000 people working in it, I can understand why some people, especually who never built a company, think that the people working for a company are underpaid compared to the people who buolt it. This misunderstanding is easy to develop, people (and many other animals) have a strong built in mechanism responsible for having emotions and feelings related to fairness. This expectation of fairness is easy to channel into a different sort of a feeling - expectation of equality, feeling that equality must be enforced because it may ne argued that it is unfair that there is inequality of outcomes.

So it is clear that there are political forces tbat use thw easiest pressure points in the human condition to achieve low hanging political fruits. The fwelings of unfairness become especially inflamed during harsher times, so an economic downturn can be easily used to pass various socialist, even Marxist agenda, which changes the power balance in the ruling elite (those near the reigns of political power). This is done at the expense of economic health, any amount of political power over economic forces misallocates scarce resources and decreases economic activity in the long run, while achieving short term pplitical goals.

On a personal level, I woildn't allow unions to take over my enterprise, I would rather see the business shrink and restructure than lose control over how it is governed.

Comment Re:Every military that cares about homeland securi (Score 1) 194

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

Comment Re:Every military that cares about homeland securi (Score 2, Interesting) 194

Military is made of people. They also burn coal, diesel, gas, kerosene. They eat, they need transportation even more than anyone else. If they cared they woild stop themselves first. Look at the wars, look at all of the world militaries. How much CO2 and varoous poisons is produced by them in proportion to the rest of the population? What do wars cost us in terms of CO2 and poisons and all other ways, that military destroys the environment? Will people of this planet stop fighting and disban all militaries of the world? Quite the opposite, the end of our civilization will be accompanied by the biggest acts of aggression, most destruction, largest conflicts on the global scale.

If bombing solved world problems we wpuldn't have any problems, we definitely have enough bombs.

Comment Re:Just speculating. (Score 1) 265

I just flew over half of the planet to the Maldives, these islands will surely disappear sooner than later due to the glaciers melting down. It is nice to be able to visit in the meanwhile.

That said, I won't buy an electric car. Maybe as my fourth or fifth, maybe, but I will keep driving a gas sedan for work and my sports car is just a fum toy, I don't care that an electric one accelerates faster, electric scales also go 0 to 200 in less than a second, doesn't make me want to drive it.

Teslas make me nautios, that is a strong no from me, some Chinese or Korean just are not interesting. Charging time is not there, it must be less than pumping gas, I don't want to plan my days around charging a vehicle. The batteries are too dangerous and the entire thing is too heavy. Cold degrades batteries, heat may cause a fire. No thank you.

I would switch to a nuclear powered car though, that would work for me.

Comment Re:Must have been a Musk AI. (Score -1) 50

LLMs are trained based on gradient descent, this optimizes data relationships. What this means is that this story is really talking about noise in the data. The history of the disabled is noose when compared to overall history, the LLMs show this clearly, it is just that there are people who really really want to present noise as if it was seriously important, that is their agenda.

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