Apparently the North Koreans were actually doing the jobs. Sure, the money ended up with the North Korean government, but when your own government takes your money that's taxation, and only libertarians call it theft.

Uh, you realize the Federal Reserve already does this with the dollar, right?

Google reported using 32.11 million MWh in 2024. Average cost per megawatt hour for industrial customers in the US was $87.50, so we can estimate (with wide error bars, but the right order of magnitude) about $2.8 billion in electricity cost for the year. Google's net income in 2024 was about $100B, so electricity costs are a small fraction of profit. Electricity expenses are included in their cost of revenue, which was a total of $146B.

I believe the second-order effect of being able to scale faster will easily swamp the first-order effect of saving money on electricity.

Google makes so much money even their enormous electricity bill is probably only a small fraction of profit, yes. But if they can cut the amount of power they use, they can add more compute without having to increase the amount of electrical capacity in a data center (or build more data centers), which not only means less capital expense but also means they can increase compute in less time. So it's definitely a concern.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

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.

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.

"Quantum Leap" was RIGHT THERE! How could you miss it?

Once they've got all electric vehicles and a grid reliant on rainbows and sunshine, they'll not only be shivering in the dark but they'll be stuck where they are. Well, France will be OK with its nukes... this is one way for them to move ahead of Germany.

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.

Then you've found Sir Thomas More's Utopia. As the name implies, you haven't.

Welfare and "universal basic income" mean that there's still work being done; it's just that the people not doing the working are getting the benefit. As with Russell's hereditary landowners, "their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others".

The answer to the headline is, atypically, "Yes". But in fact every age has been the golden age of stupidity. When the microcomputer revolution was occurring... most people were idiots. When the transistor was invented... the world was full of morons. When Einstein and Bohr and Heisenburg and Planck and Maxwell and Schroedinger were revolutionizing physics... yes, they saw stupid people everywhere. When Newton was publishing on gravity... yep, dumb people everywhere. When Aristotle was teaching promising young Greeks in the Lyceum, or Plato the academy, the general populace (hoi polloi) were as dumb as now.

You're leaving out an important element, and you can't even really start discussing it validly until you include it. This element is that the union is itself another firm. It is not the workers exercising power in their control; the union exercises the power.

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.