Yeah but are they web scale?

Ah, just commented on your post about ACs earlier, but also notice that you clearly have at least one psychotically obsessed stalker who posts AC. Yeah, I can see how that could certainly color your opinion about ACs. Of course, even without the AC option being available, they would almost certainly just use a revolving cycle of the sock puppet accounts they use to mod stalk you to post anyway. They might need to use more accounts to accomplish it though. Actually, that's one thing I'm not sure of in the Slashdot moderation system: whether you can downmod ACs and have those affect the actual account that posted AC. It really should now that ACs have to be real accounts, but I'm not sure offhand.

AC posting is a natural consequence of the moderation system and the ability to easily create an account though. If there were not ACs, people would effectively post AC by just creating new sock puppet accounts all the time. If people have lots of sock puppet accounts anyway, it's a gateway towards abuses of the moderation system, etc. Plus new accounts get the benefit of the doubt in terms of posting level, ACs, both back in the past when they did not need an account and now, when they do, are already automatically downgraded. Basically you can't really run any sort of online forum without making some sort of compromises about how people can communicate. My daughter was watching me post the other day and was wondering why there was no edit feature for posts. I explained that it can be like rewriting history, especially if people have already replied, but also if they have read it and are contemplating a reply, etc. While it would be nice if there could be a mechanism to update a post (without removing the original, but to add corrections or updates) without having to create a sub-post, obviously Slashdot made a specific compromise for that. Basically, for the features available for posting, Slashdot picked a certain set of options and, while imperfect, it is hard to say that another choice would have been objectively better.

They are the plaintiff in this case. They're still stuck in the steam age of media technology and royalty mechanisms. Rulings and concepts from the 50ies and 60ies. Super annoying. You don't want to get pissy with them because they have a de-facto government mandated monopoly on collecting royalties. Quasi a semi private semi official body for that exact purpose.

I would love for you to tell me what of my post represents a thought terminating cliche and for you to actually debunk anything in my post.

And I would love even better for you to explain a path forward for humanity that doesn't involve guys like you getting the shit all over people beneath you on the social ladder. I'm not going to bother pointing out again that you will be at the bottom because there is no way in hell your mental facilities could imagine or envision that happening. You are simply too amazing and too glorious to end up as one of the many billions stuck on the reservations occasionally being fire bombed by drones...

Say hi to the world leaders at G5 this year for me.

And it's actually even worse then you think it is. Foreign students can and do get the same loans or sometimes better loans and better government assistance then locals. There are entire programs at major colleges that exist to bring people in from overseas who are basically already trained and ready to go, give them a little bit of specific skills that corporations want and then hand them over to the corporation to make money for that corporation.

If the corporation decides they want to keep the H1B then yeah the loans do get paid off by them or the corporation.

But if they don't keep them here which is not uncommon then the taxpayer just eats it

Meanwhile as an American you simply cannot apply for these programs. I mean technically you can but they're not there for you. I have had H1B coworkers ask me why us Americans aren't taking advantage of these programs only to have to explain that we can't because they're not for us.

You're also missing the point. These programs don't exist to educate those people it's just job training. The actual expensive education is done in their native country. That's typically where they get their bachelors and or masters degrees. That is billions of dollars worth of education spending that happens overseas where American billionaires don't have to pay for it.

That's the real cost savings. They can completely do away with 90% of education funding in America and get other countries to pay for it.

Which is a great deal for the billionaires getting tax cuts but for anyone who has kids and now has to come up with an additional 40 or $50,000 to pay for tuition because your kid is competing with somebody from India or even China good luck with that.

And if you bring this up the left wing will scream at you for being racist and the right wing will try to bury you in the algorithm and the centrists will tell you that it's fine because GDP go up and so line go up and line go up is always good.

IPad Jock...for when you need a place to protect your iPad and junk.

$250 sports team edition - unwashed and signed
$230 personal - might be washed.

And, there is the MacBook Jersey.

Someone will surely want to buy one of these items.

So they end up living in slums. Cities have slums we just don't like to think about them. Occasionally right wing media will talk about them because there's a lot of Filth and crime like you would expect when everybody is dirt poor and being abused. Although honestly they don't even really bother with that anymore because they found they can just make shit up about actual nice cities and right-wing idiots will believe literally anything.

I mean they had a guy on Fox News pretending to be antifa who literally is the same guy who was pretending to be a violent black lives matter protester a few years ago. That is the level we are at people.

The hilarious thing is that the suburbs aren't sustainable. Even though people in the inner city make very little money and get treated like shit there's a lot of them because of how well, population density works and so the poor people in the inner cities subsidize the well-to-do people in the suburbs. Without the subsidies the suburbs can't pay for their roads in schools and cops.

It's basically an elaborate way to keep some form of slavery going even though we're not technically allowed to do that anymore. But again it's not sustainable because we are gradually breaking down the economy so much that there just isn't enough money to go around anymore. Capitalism is being dismantled in favor of a weird feudal system that benefits the very very top 10,000 or so people on the planet

It's no coincidence that we began the slash funding to higher education and actively attack higher education as soon as widespread Visa programs existed to bring in trained workers. Why would you as a billionaire want to pay the taxes for local citizens to be educated in college when you can just have another country pay that and pull those people over?

So when I was a kid the government paid 80% of tuition and now they pay about 30%.

Again, this is not a coincidence.

This of course creates enormous amounts of social instability from vast swaths of people who are cut off from middle class living and higher education. So yeah let China have that social instability.

The trade off is that America doesn't get those patents but I don't get anything out of those patents they are owned by billionaires. I can pretend that the companies owning those patents will somehow pump up my 401k but thanks to you multiple economic crashes and a handful of layoffs following those crashes I don't have much in the way of savings and I sure as shit don't have the money to go out buying stocks or the ability to risk buying into a startup that might go tits up.

Now would I like to live in a country where immigration increasing the GDP directly improves my quality of life instead of cutting me off from middle class employment? Yeah I would love to live in that world. I don't. I live in a hyper-competitive world where your entire quality of life is based on the job you get.

If somebody wants to suggest a viable way of changing that I'm all ears but every time I seriously bring it up I get modded down into pulp by people furious at the prospect of paying somebody to not work. Or I get a handful of libertarians talking about Ubi replacing all the other government programs and need to stop and explain, uselessly, why that is not going to work and solves nothing.

So if you don't have a third way I don't want to hear it.

There will be winners and losers but a lot of people are anticipating that when the winners come out on top there's going to be a huge amount of infrastructure that we get to take and use for things like heating and cooling our houses.

But those winners didn't go away and they are still going to be using those data centers to replace White collar jobs which is the entire point of this exercise.

That means we're not going to get all that free cheap electricity capacity. All we're going to get out of this is a massive Wall Street crash where they start firing Us in Mass to boost their stock prices.

We need to do something about that but we're paralyzed by stupidity, bigotry and an overwhelming urge to prevent anyone from having a happy life without being miserable a minimum of 40 hours a week.

I'm open the solutions but when I've asked the solutions people just bring up Ubi which is a pipe dream. You don't have the political power to push it through and if by some miracle you did the payouts would just be absorbed by monopolies jacking up prices.

Ubi is a classic example of a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. And I have not seen a single other solution proposed.

I do still see a lot of thought terminating cliches though. Although I think everyone is given up on yelling buggy whip at me.

If we spend $5 trillion dollars on new cities and houses and roads instead of replacing as many white collar workers as possible?

Remember folks the product here is not funny little videos. The product is replacing trillions of dollars worth of wages. The funny little videos are just there to get you to interact while they train up the AIs.

We are literally going to shift our entire civilization to one where a small group of people have their every need and want satisfied to the limits of human capacity while everyone else lives in abject poverty commonly associated with the worst of the American Indian reservations or parts of Africa.

That is at least the current plan. A return to feudalism. And I really don't see anything that stops it.

This isn't like when you lost your job at the buggy whip factory and went to work at the car factory. There is no car factory. It's entirely run by robots.

And as a added reminder 25% unemployment was enough to trigger two world wars. Yeah we don't have the same colonial militaries anymore like we did back then but we have a lot of economic colonialism that's going to break down. As it does countries will switch back to military imperialism to get what they want. Only this time we have nuclear weapons.

It's nonsense to get us talking about Apple and it worked because here we are talking about apple. It's a silly marketing campaign.

This is what's called outrage farming. And it's a huge part of why our civilization is collapsing.

Outrage farming should be an occasional bit of funny nonsense which to be fair this is but it's not just an occasional bit of funny nonsense anymore it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

Remember all those videos of people getting into altercations on airplanes? Several of them were staged. I don't mean staged in the airplane I mean literally on a set.

We really need to start teaching critical thinking in schools directly but we're not going to do that because critical thinking skills get used against elites and actual elites not the imaginary ones you hear about that run the women studies departments in community colleges. Like billionaires and wealthy bishops and those kind of assholes. Those guys are not going to let you teach kids how to think critically.

And it can be taught and learned. You don't have to just blunder into it by sheer luck.

Seriously if you don't connect your TV to the internet all of this AI smart bullshit is irrelevant.

Honestly I have an old Vizio because I have old game consoles hooked up to it and they work surprisingly well because lots of people were still hooking up old game consoles to flat panels back in the day. I'm not trying to recreate moment 37 of evo or 1ccing Mushihime-sama so a frame or two of lag isn't noticeable to me.

I'm sorry, simply calling this crack-pipe dream of a "project" "poor design" is an epic understatement. A few examples:

- Building the line would eat up 60% of the worlds entire steel production for decades on end.

- The "chandelier stadium" is so l00ny and physically impossible that it might as well be dreamt up and squiggled on a piece of paper with crayons by a 5-year old. Advisors told the deciders this and they still chose to ignore them.

- The basin planned for the cruise ship docks at the west end would clog up due to lack of flow.

- Basic stuff like sewage treatment isn't even considered, as is way to common with these people I have to say. As with this stupid ultra-high sky-scraper, sewage management is/was intended to be done with trucks. Every day 200 trucks line up to empty the sewage tanks of that skycraper, then drive to Bahrain and simply dump the sewage into the ocean where it then get's carried right back to the coast of Dubai to stink up the beaches and that palm-tree island thing.

I could go on and on.

The list of inane and flat-out retarded decisions surrounding this and other projects is endless. These are infantile pipe-dreams by badly educated Arabian dimwitts with too much money on their hands and too many yay-sayers around them who are too greedy to ask them to stop being silly. Everybody with two or more braincells to rub together knew that this wouldn't go that far if at all anywhere. Perhaps the deciders should take things down a few notches because right now they actually _do_ have enough amounts of money to really make a change for large portions of the population in those regions and get themselves independent from oil. Perhaps let some smart people present some realistic ideas?

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)