Interesting idea. Not to mention the colonialization of resources that goes with war (to the victors...).

The new model seems to be investment in R&D (cough... AI, cough...) to increase efficiency (which also corresponded with America's manufacturing dominance), but that has taken a backseat to profit taking and hype.

And so we are back to the prospect of war.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/0...

Best,

but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.

LK

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK

Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.

Can we?

It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

Not to mention the whole driver fiasco complete with lawfare.

And now you come, hat in hand, asking for money?

Fuck you, you fucking fuck; fuck fuck.

It's the 24/7 data mining from the providers of those devices. I have enabled a number of "smart devices" in my home, but I won't use anything that requires internet connectivity to function.

HomeAssistant has been great to get the benefits of home automation using a raspberry pi class device to manage it all and store my data locally without sharing the details of my life with 3rd parties or paying ongoing subscription fees.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Should we apply that same standard to any public servant that can adversely impact a citizen's life? A school principal? A teacher? A judge? A Congress critter?

If that is going to be the standard for police, then it should be a universal standard with an enforcement mechanism that has teeth in addition to potential financial ramifications.

Wake me up when Alphabet's advertising activities (hoovering up all of our data for sale to the highest bidder) drops to less than half of its total revenue. It's slowly dropping, but still about 75% of their revenue.

Same. I trust Google and Apple a lot more than I trust car manufacturers to keep my maps updated and respond to bugs. I also carry my phone on with me and it can transfer from car to car with a consistent level of quality and consistent interface. AND I won't pay for these features twice.

Not that I'd be eager to buy a GM product anyway.....but this takes them off the menu for me entirely.

Best,

Part of the zeitgeist. Self-congratulatory for every little thing. Used some childhood references for your artistic endeavor? New genre. Rephrased a tired trope as a meme? Biting cultural criticism.

Likes are the new participation trophy.

And now- bring a different distraction because you are finally sick of the dead internet? Analogue bags.

> I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude
> just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

Yeah, the problem is the school administration doesn't believe in it, so they undermine you. For example, if you send a misbehaving kid to the office for discipline, they'll generally be given candy or other treats. Yes, really. Every time. Which means every kid who has ever been sent to the office for bad behavior, is going to misbehave again and again, hoping to achieve similar results.

And you *absolutely* cannot punish them yourself; that would end your teaching career.

No, I'm not making any of this up. My sister is an elementary school teacher.

Honestly, at this point I think their population is closer to three times ours; though it's impossible to be precise at all, because death statistics are as illegal to report in mainland China, as any other politically sensitive thing.

We know for certain that their birth rate has been lower than one-child-per-woman and falling for the last couple of decades (and given their demographics -- most of the population being well past child bearing age for a woman -- this definitely implies that the population of domestically-born Chinese people has been shrinking), and we also know for sure that an abnormally large number of deaths went unreported or grossly under-reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022. (We've got satellite images of the backlog stacked up outside of crematoria for months at a time, and needless to say there's nothing in the official stats to correspond to that.) As for immigrants, expats have been leaving China like rats off a sinking ship for the last half decade or so. Estimates of the current population vary wildly; I've seen figures as low as half a billion, and as high as 1.5 billion; but realistically, I think on the one hand it's clear that there's been a significant decline, and on the other hand it's also clear that China is still significantly more densely populated than America. On the whole, I estimate that their population is about three times ours, give or take. And continuing to decline.

Whether this decline is altogether a bad thing (for China, I mean), is another topic for another day.