So far no mention of the Chinese elephant in the room? Also curious about the European situation. Or should I report on the increasingly bleak Japanese situation as regards electricity supplies?

One thing about renewable power like solar and wind is that you may have "free" excess capacity just because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For a lot of the AI training stuff, that can be scheduled when the power is available and thus lower the electricity demand from the data centers for AI training... You don't need to worry about storing the electricity if you have some lower-priority stuff scheduled to use it immediately.

Why funny? Because I think it would be funny if someone made a special version of the Tesla logo. Look close and you'd see it's actually a starving child with extended arms. One version could be a plastic logo cover for the hood ornament on Tesla cars.

I also considered the option of a little note to stick under the wiper of a parked Tesla: "Are you pro-life? If so, why do you drive a car linked with starving innocent children to death?"

Of course I'm just joking and I'd never actually do such a thing. Or maybe I'm not joking and I just believe that no insurance company would cover a Tesla unless the owner has a parking place with surveillance cameras? But I don't think you could pay me enough to support any Musk enterprise now. No joke.

Just checking... Was that a coma joke? If not, then could you explain the context?

How fast can we make things worse by burning more fossil fuel? The answer may surprise your children, but not your grandchildren who will be sadly too familiar with the mess we've created for them.

In related news: Bears as in a plague of bears. Not a simple and direct relationship, but they have certainly become a massive nuisance in Japan. New record for human deaths, apparently because the beech trees had a really bad year resulting in lots of extra hungry bears. However what surprised me the most was an estimate of 4,200 bears already "culled" this year. I was checking on the base as the government announced new policies that essentially call for war against the bears and wondered how bad it could get...

Yesterday saw a "Funny" video of a big bear demolishing a bear trap. Smarter than the average bear?

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

He has a joke "You know I can see you" that he targets at live audience members who act like they are watching television.

Headline of the story is not helpful. Should have been "in-tv-cameras" or "cameras-with-TVs"...

But now I'm wondering if TikTok can watch back? Or is this just an idea for a fresh form of app perversion? You didn't notice that the ToS gives us the right to capture everything we can get from your front and back cameras, plus you gave us permission to use AI to search for the funniest bits and post those candid-camera videos online. I imagine a business model where people can claim 1% of the profits for their contributions, assuming they can actually prove the linkage... But of course such a highly ethical company will be laundering all of the money through various jurisdictions and it turns out there are no profits! (PROFIT!)

Topic certainly seems to have room for some Funny, though I'm not holding my breath waiting for today's Slashdot to deliver it.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/

"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black

Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.

Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.

Not sure how much I concur. There's also the possibility that he thinks there won't be any value in the currency after the coming crash, so there's no point in placing more bets. "Full faith and credit" may implode on the "faith" dimension? Or perhaps he thinks "legal tender" will implode on the "legal" dimension?

Except for that one time it was Lupus!

The future remains fundamentally unknowable, but timing still matters. He's been winning those market timing games, but now he says he can't go on?

I think the root of what destroyed the stock market (pending proof via implosion) is that the metrics became broken. Mostly that means the Dow Jones as the leading metric. Originally the idea was an index of "top companies" based on reality-based factors like sales and assets, but the Dow could always swap out "slower runners" for better ones, which is a fundamentally dishonest racing system. But recently they gave up on the reality and the primary considerations for getting into the index are just size and the delta of increase in size of profit. Whether any of it's related to the real world or is just based on magic juggling of imaginary numbers is regarded as moot.

(But the YOB's too-lucky timing may let him blame others, as usual...)

Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. My state is a bit of an outlier, in that our teachers ARE more lowly paid than national averages, but then my locality is one of the higher paying supplements to teacher pay.

Why do I say pay is a problem? I've seen what happens to many good teachers. They get burned out from having to deal with trouble maker kids who if they get disciplined or get bad grades the parents go ape shit with allegations of racism, sexism, abuse, whatever. They get burned out from dealing with helicopter parents. They get burned out from, in most parts of the country, being governed by elected shitty school boards. They get burned out because some miscreant has an IEP and a 504 plan and so his stealing from classmates and being constantly disrupted is considered a manifestation of his disability and everyone else just has to deal with it.

Good teachers have job flexibility. I've seen multiple _great_ teachers go to work for companies like IXL where their starting salaries are always higher than what they were making as seasoned teachers. Others go the administrator route and become principals, superintendents, etc. Others go to teach at private schools where the pay is often better.

What I would propose is basically 3 things:

1. Get rid of habitually low performing teachers--every year get rid of your worst teachers
2. Increase pay for high performing teachers
3. And the kicker that I have no idea how to do--allow schools and teachers to apply standards and discipline without fear of lawsuits.

Mod parent funnier for a version of the joke I was looking for? But maybe more on the level of "simplest algorithm" for "song"?

Today, country music, tomorrow rap!

Now if I was an actual comic writer, then I would know the funniest punchline. Pretty sure "rap" isn't it, and "classical symphonies" is worse, but "jazz" would be going in the wrong direction. Or maybe "jazz world" would work? How about "K-pop" or, or... Dang, I seem to have run out of music genres.

(And I'm still waiting for an updated version of "Anything you can do, AI can do better." AI can do anything better than me, but I chose not to ask for help with this attempted joke.)

Yeah, and the air stinks, too. Does it help to complain a problem that is fundamental to Slashdot's notion of time?

There are many stories that should last longer than it takes to scroll straight down the top page... Doesn't help that the real world is also uncooperative about scheduling when new stories will arrive. And substantive discussions are hard work, too.

The advantage of fiction is that all the noise can be trimmed away. The real world is full of noise without meaning, no matter how primed we humans are to see patterns and meaning in everything. Why you'd think the AIs might have learned how to hallucinate from us!

That's the joke I'm looking for on the story--and the obvious answer is that cunning and evil hackers can use it to get cash. Or maybe no hacking will even be required?

Of course any old examples are obsolete, but I'll mention one that I heard about recently. The crooks contacted real estate dealers and arranged for a "private showing" of a house. They got the keys from the realtor and then went to the property and waited for a delivery that was carefully scheduled to arrive at the time of the private showing. Can't remember what stuff they wanted delivered anonymously, perhaps drugs, but it's pretty obvious how the approach could be adapted for this.

And I was already convinced that Robinhood is another criminal enterprise, but just part of what the stock market has become. Dow Jones is actually at the root of the problem with the fake race that constantly replaces "members of the relay team" with faster runners at any random point in the race. The only requirement is that your alleged company produce bigger profits faster until Dow Jones adds your scam company to replace some value-based-on-sordid-reality company. I'm "pert' shure" Enron could have made it if they had only been able to keep the crooked books hidden another year or so... (That would have been a "Shocked, shocked" joke.

I can actually buy the Subject: theory on the grounds of "cheap training" for "hackers" at the "script kiddy" level. Some of them may learn and graduate to higher levels of hackery, while the others will "serve the cause" by creating more noise for the "good guys" to try and filter out.

I'm not trying to scare anyone with all the scare quotes. It's just that so many words and ideas are under attack these days that I'm feeling like I should try to get in front of the mostly likely points of (mostly deliberate) misinterpretation.

Then again, I also think you have to look at the sources these days, and this story's focus on the Chinese "state" fits the ol' "axis of evil" style of thinking. Too bad I can't remember who the old axes were and I'm not sure who to nominate as the two "magic number" partners for today's axis. Traditionally I think a good "bad axis" is supposed to have three members, but there are way too many candidates just now, even including a few bond villains with capacities comparable to many states.

The criminal noise levels are getting overwhelmingly deafening, however. Perhaps the greatest problem of our day is that the criminal AI slop seems to be of higher slop quality than most of the AI slop? It's almost as though the biggest liars welcome their AI overlords because they can lie more loudly, faster, and with more reps. And even PROFIT (from the ads on the side).