Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.

Too dark? Too soon? Or too personal?

Again I disagree. Not that the moderation system isn't broken--I suspect we agree about that--but rather that I fantasize that a "constructive" moderation system could "encourage" more positive social interactions. In particular I'd mostly like to see more humor, but I don't do funny--and I also didn't get such a mod. But such anti-social behavior problems are certainly not merely local or confined to Slashdot.

The examples I can find where someone actually got in trouble were explicit calls to violence. The famous one is a guy who wrote for a British sitcom called Father Ted. He explicitly said that if you see a trans girl in a woman's bathroom you should punch them in the balls. The two that got actual jail time were inciting an attack on a hotel full of immigrants during riots. Even in America that's not legal we just very seldom enforce those laws.

The example in the article you linked to the police admitted they were wrong and paid the people in question 20,000 British pounds as compensation. In America the 20K would not have been worth it because every time you interact with police there's a high probability they are going to kill you. When police get something wrong in America the payout should probably be at least half a million to account for that. But as far as I know the cops in the UK don't just randomly murder people for shits and giggles like they do in United States.

I'm not saying that there isn't some abuse going on though. 12,000 arrests is insane.

But at the same time they're probably needs to be a middle ground between arresting 12,000 people and the rampant stochastic terrorism we've got going on here in the United States where we've got idiots running around killing people trying to start a race war.

As a daily user of these LLM tools, I confident they greatly overestimated the capabilities of the tools and there's no way this model is accurate or comprehensive enough to factor in the various complexities of all these jobs . If your value add was low enough that ChatGPT or Claude can fully replace you, then your job was automated already, or at the very least, shipped off overseas to the lowest bidder.. It is fair to say that if this AI actually worked, businesses could put more duties on a single employee, so departments of 12 could be reduced to 8, for example. However, it's not eliminating the job. It could theoretically slow expansion of headcount as well.

However, I am EXTREMELY skeptical of any business that says they replaced humans with AI. It's basically unheard of to quickly cut headcount based on productivity gains. Historically, when you introduce automation, it works in tandem with your humans to increase output. Marc Beinhoff is the posterboy of this fraud as he's the first major CEO I know of to brag about laying off people because of his mystery AI he refuses to demo. Traditionally, someone in his shoes would keep the employees and either expand the scope of his offering or ship things faster. Almost all publicly traded businesses prefer growth over cost savings and I am skeptical that salesforce.com saturated every market it is in and has no more growth opportunity. He clearly overhired and is cutting costs, but outright lying to investors.

Sci-fi AI?...yeah, Jarvis, the Matrix, HAL9000, Mother (Alien), etc could really take a chunk out of the labor market. ChatGPT? No fucking way. This study is just enabling this fraud.

However if these garbage LLM tools ACTUALLY worked, most employees wouldn't be replaced. They'd find themselves doing the same job, but with much much greater scope...for example front-end developers would be expected to be full stack developers...but really almost no software engineer is a pure coder. We're problem solvers. Writing Java? really fucking easy. It's my full time job..it takes about 10% of my time, at most. The other 90% is high level design, figuring out requirements, and troubleshooting issues...things AI either absolutely cannot do or is piss poor at....and given the stakes, no one is going to vibe code their way through a production issue when billions of dollars of revenue are on the line. Eventually? yeah, they'll cut headcount to accommodate for productivity, but almost no business in the world prefers cost saving to growth. Most want to get as much growth as fast as they can and worry about efficiency later. Most would rather crush their rivals than do exactly what they did last year, only 11% cheaper.

We have AI to summarize the AI slop articles.

I'm the same, always use a good credit card, but the occasional hassle is worth it. The prices are 1/10th the Amazon ones.

Used to be, but Trump has kinda ruined it for the rest of us. He complained that they were charging Americans more, so instead of reducing their prices, they just increased them everywhere else.

As an example, Mounjaro went from around £180 in the UK, to around £300.

I saw a YouTube video from a guy who bought a mini excavator from AliExpress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's surprisingly good. Japanese Kubota engine, everything else looks decent quality, especially considering the incredibly low price. I've seen similar videos from other people who bought heavy machinery like farm equipment and lathes.

On the one hand it's a shame that our domestic manufacturing is finding it hard to compete. On the other, they aren't doing themselves any favours with things like DRM to stop you working on your own tools. The price competition is a good thing for consumers.

Take Germany luxury/performance cars, for example. The Chinese ones are every bit as luxury and well made, and often exceed them for performance. On top of that, the German manufacturers can't resist screwing their customers with bullshit like subscriptions for heated seats and no owner access to the engine bay.

I regularly buy from AliExpress. Their customer service isn't as good as Amazon's, but the prices are 1/10th of the Amazon ones so even though the odd things gets lost or is of poor quality, I'm still well up on what Amazon would have cost me.

Occasionally I need to do a credit card chargeback. Had to do that on a computer case that got damaged. For small stuff costing literal pennies I don't bother with the maybe 1 in 20 items that is lost or no good.

As you say, it's the same stuff they sell with a hefty mark-up on Amazon, and in every other shop.

If chasing ratings is taken too far, you end up with Fox used to be, where shows would get cancelled a few episodes into their first season because they were not instant mega hits. Netflix is nearly as bad, cancelling stuff days after it premiers.

A lot of shows took a season or two to really find their feet. A lot of shows that struggled early on ended up doing very well in syndication, or started a long running franchise.

They will probably charge a much fairer price for their treatments too, which will be very welcome.

So you know when you see anyone or any organization using it that they are a fleecer or the fleeced.

Crypto has no real value. Just the agreement that that it has value among it's users. Which are mostly those who want to exchange value that is hard to trace. So Cyber Ransom, Pig Slaughters, and the Cambodian gang run prisons full of kidnapped people being forced to use digital communication technology to steal from other people in countries without mutual extradition treaties.

Can Texas citizens demand that when the money is lost those parties who made that decision replace it with their own money?

Learn about Crypto from experts not trying to steal your money Number Go Up.

The wealthy prefer a dystopian hell hole for 99.9% of the population and extraordinarily god-like opulence for themselves. They want to be able to control who lives and who dies on such a fundamental level that they are like the Pharaohs of old literally exalted to godhood.

You cannot as a regular person comprehend the kind of greed that a man like Elon Musk or Bill Gates experiences as their normal state of being. It is way past just wanting money or yachts or any of that and into the point where they want to be transhuman.

And you need to understand that they do not think of you as a human being. You are not at the same level organically or as a species in their eyes. You aren't even at the level that you for example perceive a chimpanzee as in their eyes. To a guy like Elon Musk you're more like a slime mold. An utterly alien existence that might occasionally be useful.