> Here 25 years later, the market is flooded with
>"compact SUVs" essentially the same as the
>Aztek, and just as ugly.

That's not fair.

The modern ones don't even *approach* the Aztec's level of ugliness! But they *are* painfully bland.

the first time I saw an Aztec, my immediate reaction was surprise that AMC was making cars again. It didn't occur to me that anyone else could make something so hideous!

Not really. Diamorphine is a precisely described drug. Heroin might be nearly anything, down to crushed up Draino. Many reports describe it as being cut with fentanyl, which is also a highly useful drug, but the "heroin" that's been cut with it frequently kills people.

You are incorrectly generalizing. There are lots of use cases where AI improves medicine. (Possibly at excessive cost, but still, improves.) But don't expect a generalized ChatBot to provide that improvement.

Whether it is done by "the State" or not may depend on your definition of "the State". If it's done by a corporation, and the government has access, then I feel it's done by "the State". Claiming it's actually done by "a private corporation" if petty word-play, when the government controls which corporations are allowed to exist and what they can do (and how profitable they are ... see tax law).

FWIW, "The power to tax is the power to destroy!", so corporations are not independent of the government.

I strongly suspect that the criteria that you claim to be present are only in effect when the person accused has a decent lawyer. There have definitely been multiple cases where a "public defender" has acted in collusion with the police to the detriment of the person he was ostensibly defending.

What makes you believe that people aren't being thrown in jail for crimes they didn't commit? There's absolutely no way to quantify that statistic, but there are absolutely SOME people thrown in jail for a crime they didn't commit. Sometimes on the basis of faked evidence. How often? Nobody knows. It sometimes gets proven, and that kind of evidence is clearly hard to access.

FWIW, it does *seem* to be a rare occurrence. But whether it actually is rare is...unproveable.

I used to think that, but now I believe that BOTH things are going on at once, and they act in a reinforcing manner. With different people, different motives are dominant, but as an aggregate, they are mutually reinforcing.

FWIW, my profession was computer programmer. I was also an artist using various traditional media. (Not professional grade, but not bad, either.) I didn't like it for itself, but only for social reasons.

So....
Artist is an ill-defined term, but since any piece of garbage text is (automatically) copyright, I see absolutely no reason that a cleverly manipulated bunch of pigments shouldn't be copyright, no matter WHAT tool was used to create it. And no matter how *I* rate it's esthetic appeal.

OTOH, what this really means is that I think the copyright laws are a foul mess, and should be repealed. But with the laws as they are currently implemented, there's no reasonable justification for refusing to grant a copyright.

That's "would be legal under this act", but if, say, ChatGPT collected non-public data (I believe it does, but probably not about rents) then iwould it be legal? And if it merely collected "a wide span of data in various formats" it could plausibly have the same practical effect. So some would be inspired to write an additional piece of legislation.

AI will probably add some interesting twists to this. Will it be illegal to ask ChatGPT "What should I rent my house for?"?

worse.

They were forced to eat a bland cereal that turned soggy before the milk even hit it!

> Most of the very populated parts of Norway don't get too cold,

methinks that we have very different notions of "too cold" . . .

("Above" and "below" should never be part of a temperature!)

hawk

that, or you might be eaten by someone who identifies as a cat . . .

>A regular bank can't magic up $1M out of thin air,

uhmm . . . historically, this is *exactly* where paper money comes from, and why they are called "banknotes"!

Banks issued paper notes promising to pay the bearer a sum of money (i.e., an amount of gold or silver) upon presentation. This was a matter of convenience, the paper being easier to haul about. This led to the practice al matter that a bank could issue more paper than it held money, as long as it was careful enough not to issue so much that too much would come in to redeem.

This isn't fundamentally difference than the practice of lending deposits back out to other borrowers (which is generally how this new money created by the banking system was disbursed, anyway).

In time, government stepped in to regulate how much a bank cold lend in this manner (reserve requirement).

Until WWII, the majority of the paper money in the US was *not* issued by the government, but by banks and some other companies (e.g., Railroads printed $2.40 bills, as $2.40 was a common fare).

Even today, some cites print a local currency, generally (universally) backed 1:1 by federal money. It circulates and shows the effects of buying locally as these local bills start showing up in cash registers. (In the same vein, the US Navy used to deal with local discontent and calls for removing bases of rowdy sailors by paying in $2 bills. Once merchants noticed just how much of their registers were full of that uncommon note, attitudes changed quickly!)

The federal government has the exclusive power to coin money--but this means coining metal; it doesn't stop states or other entities from printing paper money.

doc hawk, displaced economics professor

I don't really think you can trust everything they say to be a lie.