It would work a lot better if Cloudflare and any competitors would adopt a model that allows companies to easily use any of their services and rather than subscribing to one company's service to implement a pay-as-you-go option. That way if Cloudflare gets hit websites can flip to using something else on a temporary basis. Companies could even load balance across the different services so that all of them are always getting a little bit of use. This isn't particularly good for any one company (who would much rather prefer to be a sole contractor and get all of the business) but it makes it practically impossible to take out websites by taking down Cloudflare. If any one provider has problems everyone temporarily switches to the other providers on a temporary basis until service is restored and then they can move some or all of their traffic back. This makes for a far more resistant Internet as a whole.

What does it matter. The CIA will just step up their cloud seeding efforts to offset anything the Iranians try to do instead.

I have no knowledge of any such plan by the CIA to use any kind of weather manipulation techniques to cause droughts in Iran, but you all have to admit that it sounds like exactly like the kind of thing they would do and based on what they've done to other countries historically is not outside the realm of possibility for them. I'd be more surprised if they weren't doing this as it's a great way to destabilize an enemy country.

You may want to source numbers for your claim. I looked at unemployment rates for the U.S., the UK, and Germany in the lead up to WWI and none of them had unemployment rates near 25% or any higher than usual. The Unemployment rates prior to WWII were much higher, but as a result of the Great Depression as opposed to any kind of mass unemployment resulting from advances in technology.

As another poster already pointed out, no one can perfectly foresee the future of the economy. If they could, communism would actually have worked as the central planners could predict where the economy will move. It doesn't matter that no one individual can predict this every time. All that's required is for someone to have an idea and a need for human labor and it will create jobs that previously never existed.

The genie is already out of the bottle. Nothing is stopping developers where from using AI and they will do so if it gives them an edge. Unless countries are going to start banning content (good luck with that in the U.S.) this won't matter. Nothing can force people to play games they don't want to anyway so if these human developers can't make something compelling they'll be out of the job regardless. Right now the AAA industry seems over saturated with people who shouldn't be there. They only drag down more qualified developers and waste everyone else's time and money.

There's a difference between being able to run a AAA game and having 120 FPS 4k with ray tracing and other bells and whistles. The integrated graphics on mainstream Intel and AMD CPUs can run most titles at low settings. The 30 FPS that you may get isn't considered acceptable these days, but back in the day that was something that often required a high-end setup. The integrated graphics are good enough that the low end of the GPU market no longer exists as it did two or even one decade ago. The built-in CPU graphics became good enough to eliminate those cards.

How many of those games need to be connected to anything? Unless it's an MMO or a strictly multiplayer FPS, I can do without the online component. It usually only exists to make the experience worse in my opinion. It's also often less functional than online capabilities of prior generation titles which allowed for LAN play or custom servers. Some games still use that model, but they seem like a dying breed.

Equating AI with Pac-Man isn't really the intellectual flex you probably think it is.

I don't think you read the article at all as none of this is due to loans from China. It's people acting in their own economic interest because these products replace more expensive alternatives. Part of it is funding through carbon credits which is a separate sort of idiocy, but the companies involved have built a viable business model around supplying something people want in a way that they can afford. The only involvement China has is that they manufacture much of the hardware and it's not some government directed effort on their part. To them Africa is just a customer buying what they're selling and both sides are engaging in commerce out of their own benefit from it.

Unless you have some direct evidence to refute the claims in the article, you're just talking out of your ass.

What's a metaphor? And before you respond I'm not inquiring about the usefulness of Facebook or any of the other products Zuck is pushing.

While a similar setup makes sense in many places in the U.S. there are too many parties (private and public) invested in maintaining the status quo who will never allow it to happen.

It's good to see Africa figuring out solutions to their own problems. No one else was going to solve them for them without getting more in return.

I own several Apple products and wouldn’t take one of these if it were free. This is for the sort of people who would buy a Gucci bag or something like that instead of this. The people who bought this are the people who only bought an iPhone for the same reason: it's a status symbol.

No one would play in the sandbox if they didn't think it was valuable. You may as well ask why there aren't more people trying to scam others out of Koolaid points. No one bothers to try to steal anyone's NFTs anymore for similar reasons.

A basic income isn't a magical fix to economic woes either. If poorly implemented it may do more harm than good. The best arguments for implementing one now is that it would be less expensive to administer than the current welfare state / social safety net.

Except for that one time it was Lupus!

Why do I get the feeling that it will be just like the last time where all of the people who were acting irresponsibly will get bailed out while the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill? Until the irresponsible actors are held accountable for their own behavior, they have no incentive to change.

It's inconsequential for the most part. If it went to Apple instead it would be spread out to shareholders through dividend payments. Large developers that are publicly owned companies may do the same themselves. Either company may invest the that money in something else which pays it to some third party that now has it. This only changes who is doing the distribution and who might be on the receiving end of that. There can be further downstream effects from this which may be more or less beneficial than some alternatives, but these can't be accurately predicted with any degree of reliability.

If the desired goal of the legislation was to reduce prices for consumers then it failed to achieve that goal. Saying that it's still good anyway just for other reasons is only shifting the posts.