> The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said.

Good; it's monopolistic, predatory, and ultimately unnecessary. The entire practice is aimed at driving consistency and forced adoption rates, not anything else.

China wants a new world order where they are masters. They also see the lessons of the 20th century clearly. That is it is far better to be the worlds hegemonic master than to try to conquer and rule it in the traditional sense. Exactly non of this is possible though unless their sphere of influence appears irresistible. To that end they can't have a island they claim to rule sitting there doing its own thing, and worse being nominally oriented to the existing global power structure.

They also rightly see the rather 19th century western model of national borders being determined by a few world powers who make agreements about lines on map without regard to the reality on the ground or blood sacrifices the plebs for the political theater of the occasional proxy-'fight' over those borders, as limiting.

China wants to be able to use both soft power and hard power whichever seems least costly / most expeditious and have the results stick. To that end they have seen the muted response to Russia's actions in Ukraine as useful.

However the reality is Ukraine is not part of NATO, Europe is weal and broke, the USA is strong but broke, and nobody wants to see the mass destruction that would result from a atomic contest with Russia. So a truly muscular defense of Ukraine was never going to happen, is never going to happen. The mistake politically was not ignoring the situation. In making a fuss over it we have turned it into the precedent setting event China wants if Russia succeeds.

Ironically as far as US political influence is concerned, thwarting Russia is becoming important in a way it never needed be and wasn't four years ago. We made to big deal about it, so now we have to show we have influence and the ability to impose our vision. What we should of done is handled it like Crimea, looked the other way and it would have been no big deal in geo-politics or US power. Now we have to both avoid a hot contest with Putin AND win proxy-war. We are not that good at proxy-wars... Biden and Blinken really FUCKED UP.

I might be wrong but I don't think move fast and break things referred to that which you were building. It was more about don't worry about the consequences for the rest of the market place, perhaps don't worry about the consequences for cooperative shared infrastructure, like shoveling tons of data over DNS, or say abusing NTP to distribute a bunch of very large binaries..

Another example would be Electron apps, the move fast and break things does not apply to your own app it applies to using the giant frame work to deliver simplistic functionality that could have been implemented in single digit megabytes of resident code at a slightly lower level but chewing up 400MB on another chromium instance is someone else's problem, they can just buy more ram if it 'breaks usability' of the rest of their system.

I don't think move-fast-break-things was about excusing incompetence so much as excusing anti-social behavior or outright turning it into a virtue.

Sure and Nazi's did all the hard work in the decades before that.

The only point you are making is the state of the art advances. Does General Motors suck because Ford did all the hard work of trialing mass production and JIT manufacturing?

Space X has been doing the things that NASA and some of their more traditional MIC partners organizationally have not. The reasons why are only interesting if for political reasons you think we need to have state-run spacecraft production industry or you want to run your own commercial venture and need to know what does not work. As to the more general national and commercial interests Space X is delivering on domestic launch capability in a variety of useful capacity configurations.

NASA as a design house is a just yawn, at this point. I'd say kill everything besides administrative coordination and policy making. Nix the astronaut program, let the private industry train our pilots and space explorers.

Of course I would let them, how could I even stop them? Now would I buy such a film and show it in my theater chain, probably not but maybe some operators in Jordan and Syria would..

The entire history of entertainment? Really? There were a lot of Everyman plays. You bet the troop in the next town just "stole" it and did their own.. You are the one trying to apply a lens of what is actually very recent history here.

Yes someone should absolutely be allowed to generate and sell Superman Porn, the character is what ~85 ears old now! Why on earth should DC still be allowed to milk it, not a single persons who worked on the original character is still drawing a salary there, if any are even alive.

Exactly its business. The product is what is valuable. The buyer does not care at all what your production costs are, only if he can get something competitive elsewhere. Competitive might even be an inferior but cheaper substitute. If someone can make money with AI slop they should, if they can make money with really good AI products - even better. It is illegal until someone decides the change the law gets changed. There is enough money in play the law absolutely will get changed, get over it.

Writing stories is hard because it takes a lot of effort, people used to pay wild someones of money for large textile products too, than progressively more automated looms were invented. We don't only get sloppy low quality blankets and rugs, I can go to Walmart get something nicer than my Great grand parents could have for the cost of several months salary! Sure there is also a lot of junk, but that is choice! Sometimes you just want slop because new kitten will probably pee on it. Same thing with film, sometimes you just want to crappy movie to unwind with in your motel room, you'll fall asleep before it is over anyway, it might even be better if it is slop! On the other hand lots more creators can see their ideas thru to full production without the enormous investment risk.

I don't hate the industry, but I don't love it standing in the way of progress, at the expense of everyone else. While the same people who demand protection for their work, would turn around and destroy the livelihood of some commerical driver by importing 1000s of illegals and handing license to "no name given' and pretend to be virtuous. The world changes the entertainment industry needs to "fucking deal.."

The Red Army has never been very good at logistics either. They may or may not be self-aware enough to know it. I am not military history expert but it seems to be from the October Revolution on the story of the Red Army has been logistics failures, and their successes have largely been situations where they either had numbers wildly in their favor or their opponents suffered even more severe logistics failures, the two world wars.

Wow that's kool-aide drinking there. Let's be real Zhirinovsky project looked a lot more like creating an eastern EU, than a return to the USSR.

Basically at a time when the a long oppressed Russian public needed lesson in how Democracy and freedom work, include how that sometimes mean change isnt as rapid as many would wish, the US Administration and a lot of Western Europe showed them "Elections only matter if we like the outcome!" That pretty much opened the door for Putin's rise.

Both the Neo-liberal, and Neo-Conservative movements in the US and Western Europe completely botched their handling of a young Russian democracy, utterly unable to escape their Cold-War era thinking, posture, and assumptions. Just like they irrevocably harmed the Western Economy and created an existential threat in China via PNTR. The entire school of foreign policy from Kissinger - Hillary Clinton as sec-State need to be told to just STFU. They have been wrong about literally everything of consequence. All the textbooks of the era need to be toss and relabled as case studies in things not to do.

This deserves an up mod.

I think you are spot on here. If we had a more balanced system where it was possible to build on something that was at least popular in ones own lifetime, people would be a lot more likely to chose the path of legal-challenge avoidance and play with the availible content.

By taking essentially everything from living memory off they table they have invited direct challenges and scoff-laws alike

The Entertainment industry wants to have it both ways with copyright. They want everyone talking about their stuff and creating interest in their characters, personalities, sound, and other properties because otherwise nobody gives a hoot and they don't make any money on them. The instant someone else earns a dollar with it thought they demand the entire pie and the right hold onto it until the heat death of the universe!

Let's be perfectly honest ever since some guy probably refereed to as 'ook' started banging to sticks together and dancing in a circle for the amusement of others everything in entertainment has been in some way derivative. If it is worth anything it comes down to two things, was enough effort put in to make the new thing good, as in well executed, and did the creator add any new vision. To that end I think a good prompt + quality GenAI probably meets the definition of 'art', just because a machine did most of the effort does not negate the value, after all the machine required input energy run and capital to build.

If GenAI can make as good a movie as troop of thespians, team of writers, camera operators and directorial staff, VFX studio and associated staff, all while doing it cheaper and faster, why not? While some people are worried about 'jobs' there certainly isn't the same 'omg omg omg, the customer support reps' there isn't even the same sentiments for internal devs cranking out CRUD apps being replaced with 'vibe coders'. This entire concern here is just Hollywood Neppo-Baby Privilege talking. They are 100% right about the threat it represents to the them though. If you can make a decent 1:30 clip for next to to nothing, you can do the same thing with a 1:30:00 art-house film for not much more, and it won't be long after a few successes there you can do feature films. A-List Actors, and big Hollywood Studios are probably seeing the beginning of their final act here.

There is literally no way to handle those topics in any commercial entertainment product right now that isn't going to enrage 15% of the audience. Those 15% will certainly use social media to make the normal people who understand it is just a fictional game, to uncomfortable to want to deal with it.

I would have canceled it too. There is no winning marketing something like that right now.

And he has been massively successful!

He has brought inflation down to tolerable levels, he has done a lot to improve the overall fiscal picture.

Trouble is voters like free stuff, they are tiring of austerity and the nation is still in debt up to its eyeballs from past mismanagement. Shocker a few years for doing the right things, does not immediate correct long term structural harm.

Good lesson here for the people keeping the government shutdown so they can shovel more money at the ACA. It does not work, the premiums remain affordable no matter how much stimi you try to use to get healthy people buy more insurance then they need, and with the nation graying it isn't going to get better, the demographics are against it.

Yet there is a segment even among the MAGA crowd that is pissed they see their costs going up. Politically this is problem - that extends beyond health care. We have an entire nation that is hooked on Federal largess but there is no way to pay for it. Let that sink in there is no way to pay for it. You can't generate enough revenue to eliminate the deficit without crushing the economy and you can't cut enough either. It has to be BOTH at this point, and we might already be Argentina. The UK is, and most of the EU probably are too.

I am sure it isnt going to sell a faction of what the original has over any span of its market offering. I would not be so quick to assume they wont still sell a lot of them.

Keep in mind the original was as far as mass market US in the US a 1980s today. I think it showed up a little earlier in the UK. This a gen-X nostalgia item. Older X'ers are hitting retirement age now. While it took them a little longer than the boomers many of them did alright economically.

The timing is spot on for remakes of the 1980s pop culture items. See Naked Gun and Spaceballs remakes, the resent explosion in retro-computing stuff, return of the Ford Bronco, heck even in US Presidents in some ways :-P. There is a huge market push to sell stuff to people who were in the mid-20s in the early-to-middle 80's right now because those folks at at a stage of life where they have disposable income and time. Everyone's first instinct is generally to return to hobbies they once loved, maybe share it with their grand kids in some way etc.

Courts have often ruled that various forms of compelled speech violate 1A.

I think court got this one right though. There is a bright line here. The law requires disclosure of an activity the business is engaged it. It isnt requiring business to engage in anything speculative or discuss what any others are doing or may do, for example forcing you to disclose the existence of a competitor or that they might offer a lower price.

Without getting into any ethics, heal, virtue, type questions, I will just say this in defense of the parent.

I have had several friends who wanted to stop eating meat but struggled to convert to their ethical target of Pescetarian/Vegitarian/Vegan-ism

All of them really wanted meat and would try to satisfy their cravings with fauxmeat products. All this was in the era before 'beyond meat' so maybe it is different now, but they all pretty much reported that eating something like a Boca burger; generally left them unsatisfied and made their cravings for the real thing continue.

When they quit trying to find meat substitutes and make dishes traditionally prepared with meat products, and instead turned to vegetarian foods that were just 'good in their own right' and living on thoes, that when they really stopped feeling like they just had to a have cheese burger or disparately wanting fried chicken etc.

Censorship aside, it is really a shame more of the world does not have a 'First Amendment", I don't see the internet getting some enforceable national borders as a bad thing.

Nations and societies must have laws to function. Democratic nations have right enforce those laws ( derived from the consent of the governed ). Yes I would argue places like China DO NOT have a right to enforce their law, only the might to do it.

With so much commerce and general activity being online now nations need to both legal authority and enforce-ability over online activity. As a citizens I think everyone should want the laws governing their online life to be defined by people who are answerable to their votes, rather than by some "intentional community", where many of the most reprehensible regimes are given a platform or even just the whims of some foriegn power with more global economic influence then your own nation.