That's: "Shouldn't be".

I do see you point about big and small players: the danger of looser copyright rules is that the big players are in a better position to steal your work and then just bankrupt you in court. But that is a failure of the court system rather than copyright.

That depends on how similar the movies are. There is more than one "work" in play here: the script / story, and the movie made from that script. Even if the new movie is in a completely different style than the original (a cartoon instead of live action, perhaps), different enough to make it a derived work rather than a copy, there's still the matter of the script / story being almost the same. The bar for something being a proper derived work of an original story should be rather high, it should be a new story... but it most definitely should be allowed to incorporate characters and lore from the original... Or write a similar story but with different characters in a different setting. The criteria for when something is a copy rather than a new work are not so easy to define... but the line should be where they are now, where you get copyright strikes for using a tiny sample of someone's song in your own, or for showing a brief clip of a movie in a review.

They are not appropriating anything, they are remixing and creating derivative works, something that people have done since the dawn of civilisation, something that has expanded the abundance of culture, and something that the original form of copyright was not meant to put a stop to (since copyright was invented to serve that abundance, not the creators). Why on earth should content creators get to control derivative works and levy a tax on them? It's absurd. You get paid for your own work, which is what copyright exists for. You should not get paid for someone else's work, even if that other person re-used some of your ideas. Even if (god forbid!) they make a buck with their work?

Screw these entitled content creators; copyright (and moral rights) have been preverted beyond recognition, and need a reform. Not gonna happen though... but I feel not a shred of remorse for authors whose work now gets remixed in AI.

Same. I am still subscribed to Prime, for the delivery perks, the free Twitch sub, and the content I guess. But I'll get that content on the High Seas from now on.

The I stands for Intranet. Don't buy crap that relies on the cloud.

There are some devices that phone home and/or are cloud enabled, but do not require the cloud to function. Though in a lot of cases that does mean you have to set up an alternative app to control it, for instance something like Home Assistant or Apple HomeKit; it's pretty rare for the vendor's app to work locally without access to the cloud (Philips Hue used to, for instance, though I'm not sure if it still does).

AFAIK the Ecobee WiFi thermostat works with HomeKit or whatever Google's equivalent is. Should be able to isolate it on a VLAN, and as long as your phone can see it, you can control it locally.

If Mr Beast is peak YouTube, then bring on the AI already.
I should say that I watch plenty of content on YT, but most of it is small and mid-sized channels. The small ones do it as a hobby, the larger ones as a business, and I'd hate to see them disappear or lose their income. But it seems that this was already happening before the rise of AI slop, revenues getting squeezed or the algorithm playing them false.

Absolutely. P&R lots as well as parking near offices are great places to charge, during to day so you can take advantage of cheap excess solar power. It's also a great way to make EVs viable for those who do not have the opportunity to charge at home. But here in NL that has been slow in coming as well. Many offices installed a mere handful of chargers that are invariably all occupied. That is where we need to scale up... as well as bring down the price of public chargers. Here it usually is 50-100% more expensive than at home.

Wondering about possible consequences. The reason I don't use cloud services like Google for anything except transient stuff, is that they can pull my access in case they decide they don't like me anymore. What happens if MS pull my account or they have a screw-up in their data center?

I enjoy my Hyundai EV, get in, hit the Start button and Drive button and just take off: fast, quiet, smooth. I've owned my share of cars and that Hyundai is easily the most comfortable to drive, despite the sub-premium plasticy interior. We also own a few IC cars including a 996TT, which is a fun drive but serves a very different purpose. The Porsche SUVs are positioned in the same group as that Hyundai EV, not in the group of the 911s. Who cares that those SUVs are sold under the Porsche label? They sell well enough...

That's what various larger cities have been doing here in NL: building Park&Ride hubs on the periphery. People drive to the city and transfer to public transport there. Judging from how full those parking lots are, it's a popular option.

I proposed to socialize the costs but recoup them through corporate taxes. Effectively offering companies affordable insurance against worker injuries. Much more efficient than letting private insurance companies handle this, especially as they have a habit of gouging small companies.

Nvidia is therefore a bubble. This article is complaining that Europe is an obstacle to further bubble inflation.
No amount of Nvidia etching IP onto wafers is worthy of a 4.6 TRILLION market cap - bigger than the 4.2 Trillion market cap of the ENTIRE name-brand pharmaceutical industry.

The pendulum does swing too far the other way in the EU though, and often it helps protect large incumbents against small innovative firms. For instance in the Netherlands, if a worker is hurt for any reason, even outside working hours (snowboarding, skydiving, juggling chainsaws), the employer is on the hook to continue to pay him for up to 2 years. During that time the worker gets 70% of his contracted wage (but never less than minimum wage).

If you're employing 1000 people, you can self ensure this risk because the averages will work out in such a large group. But if you have only 5 employees, this is not a financial risk you can take so you have to take out costly insurance against this. The obvious solution is to make society pay for this safety net that society demands... for instance by upping corporate taxes.

I'm not convinced of their intelligence, but if they are, they deserve at least similar consideration. That does not include a total 100% protection of whatever habitat they choose to live in. We know night flights are not good for people living near airports, yet we continue to have them. By the same token, whales living near drilling platforms can suck it up too. With that said, if they truly are intelligent, perhaps they deserve a "country" of their own, which is to remain inviolate of human intrusion.