Given the vast amount of data that is collected and sent to the mothership in modern "connected" cars, maybe they realised they can sell that on? Apart from all the obvious stuff like realtime tracking data and telemetry on your driving style while you are are on the road, there's your preferences on playlists, what kind of temperature you prefer (from which health info can be inferred), what stores you prefer and where your friends and family live, (extracted from parking location data), all tied into the real ID you used to buy and register the car - no "dark profiles" here.

It's a model that seems to be working very well for browers and certain OSs, as well as pretty much all of the Internet of Shit. It might cost a bit more and be a lot larger than some connencted $20+tariffs widget, but a modern car is still just another component of the IoS. It's said the margin on a mass market car is around 5-10%; care to bet that the captured data is being sold on to info brokers for a whole lot more?

Or it's a new take on the "RTO Mandate" approach to headcount reduction leveraging a kind of reverse Dunning-Kruger.

Right now, everyone at Opendoor is thinking of their colleagues and wondering if they are in the 15% that won't get the cut. For a team of 20, that means you've got to either truly believe that you're in the top three of that group, are blissfully naive, or will be polishing your CV and getting it out to agencies this weekend, and since company morale just went to shit, there's a pretty good chance that a chunk of those who *are* confident they'll make the cut will be doing the same, because once everyone else is gone they're going to have a lot more work to do. Good luck running the company on the blissfully naive remants.

Yes, there's probably a LOT of deadwood at Opendoor but, like RTO Mandates, this isn't the best way to get rid of it, and will have the same result as RTO; a lot of the best and brightest will be deciding the door they really want is the exit door.

Rich people (at the level you are implying) are generally egomanical, narcissistic, sociopaths who have no idea how to do the day to day things in life because they pay other people to do it for them. If you cream off the ~10,000 wealthiest people on the planet and put them into a community of some kind, even with robots to do the bulk of the work, I would still predict you'd rapidly find yourself back with a "1%" of around 100 mega-wealthy people, amid on-going power stuggles that soon turn ugly and gut the robot population (who else is going to do the fighting?).

With the labour pool mostly gone, the total population of meatbags will reach 0 soon after. It'd be like the Golgafrinchan B Ark, only much more so.

Come to think of it, there's probably a pretty decent dystopian short story with some very dark humour there...

Remind me again when the Govt censored you? Were you at Harvard by any chance?

I guess that depends on the volume of the aquifer and the geology. If there's a non-porous layer of rock in the ~1300ft of rock above it then, while the aquifer will inevitably start to collapse creating cracks in the higher layers of rock, it might be some time before enough salt water mingles with the fresh to exceed safe potable water limits. Besides, as long as it's still sufficiently less salty than typical sea water, then it's still going to be a lot more efficient to run it through some kinds of desalination plant than it would be to use ocean water like countries such as the UAE are doing, with a lot less waste brine produced as well.

I guess we'll need follow-up studies to be sure, but with the increasing pressure on fresh water supplies and more turbulent weather patterns making some of the current collection basins for reservoirs less reliable, search for potential alternative sources of potable, or even near-potable that can be readily purified, is probably quite a prudent thing to be doing. Dying of dehydration is not a pleasant way to go.

That's kinda the unspoken point behind doing this that I alluded to. There is a correlation between those who are poorer in money and in health, e.g. those are are most likely to be the net drain on the social services budgets, so by getting them to pay a bit more income tax and be a bit less of a drainon funds after their retirement because they die sooner, the end result is a disproportionate net reduction in the required funding of state pensions and healthcare.

YMMV on what all that is, probably depending on how much of a utilitarian you are, but it's absolutely some combination of deeply cynical and elitist, yet also a gain for the greater good of the population as a whole through the potential for lower taxation to provide the additional support that would be needed otherwise.

Several countries in Europe are taking this tack; a gradual rise in the retirement age before you qualify for the state pension. You could have a private pension and retire earlier on that, but many people are too cash-strapped to make any meaningful payments into a private scheme, and especially so when they are young enough for the plan to hopefully accrue a good deal of compounded investment returns.

In theory, it should help maintain the size of the labour pool, ensure older - and typically higher earning - workers pay more taxes to fund social security and healthcare, and (the unspoken bit) physically wear themselves out a bit more so they don't spend as long drawing down on those social security & heathcare funds once they do retire. Get the numbers right, and it should smooth out difference between the the taxable income from the labour pool against the need to raise taxes by eye watering amounts to cover all the state's post-retirement support costs. In practice the UK's reality at least is that a lot of the higher earners (boomers) actually do have a decent enough private pension pot and already checked out of the labour pool during Covid to the extent there are on-going efforts to try and get them (and their experience) back into work, so it seems further "corrections" will necessary to improve the balance. Especially so of the political right get their way and we follow the US' route and start blanket deportations of immigrants and reducing work visas rather than letting them fill in the gaps in the native labour pool that the natives generally don't want to do.

A bit too early to tell, although I have my suspicions, but under previous administrations (including Trump 1.0) doing this a few times with each sender was a *very* effective unsubscribe function.

Yeah, similar in the various anti-spam systems we run. Including PACs etc, the numbers are pretty clear, and the pecentages of spams are noticably higher for the GOP (not that the DEMs get a clean sheet either) in all of the following:

Emails that fail Bayes for spaminess.
Emails sent to spam traps.
Emails sent to non-US citizens (which, BTW, is against US campaign law if they're soliciting funds, so we forward all those to the FEC.
Emails sent to compromised email addresses (e.g. Company X gets their customer list hacked, spams start arriving shortly thereafter).
Emails sent from known spam-friendly ISPs.
Emails sent from eyeball network ranges (e.g. most likely a botnet).

If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's going to get called a duck. Spam is no different.

Actually, in the UK it's from age *six* if it's a pre-paid card, age eleven if linked to a bank account as a traditional debit card. I suspect there is some coding built into the number that might let a retailer determine the specific type of card and allow/block its use for ID accordingly, but functionally the pre-paid debit ones support contactless etc. just fine and on most online systems they just come up as "Visa Debit" or "Mastercard Debit", exactly the same as my own "adult" debit card does.

None of which gets around the issue of a kid "borrowing" a parent's credit card for a few minutes so they can record the numbers for later use in online ID verification, which would go completely undetected by the parent if there is no transaction logged. Even then, I expect there are a lot of adults that don't meticulously go through their statements and account for each transaction, especially if they use Steam themselves and might just see some token fee as some random-DLC/in-game purchase they made themselves.

Honestly, just stop passing the fscking buck. This is a *parenting* issue, not one for the government and legislature who haven't a clue how to set or enforce rules that the industry has any realistic hope of implementing with any high degree of success. My 10yo niece, who has had a pre-paid debit card for over 2 years now, was explaining to me the other day how she'd downloaded and installed ProtonVPN (she'd obviously done some homework on selecting Proton too!) on her tablet so she could get around geoblocks to stream some US TV shows that are not available in the UK yet. If kids want to see porn or play smutty games they are going to find a way, even if that's sneakernet, and it's up to the adults to make sure they are prepared and can deal with it properly when they do, not pretend it doesn't exist, the kid is still totally innocent, or it is someone else's (read "government") problem.

The UK Govt is considered right wing by the UK.

The ultra right Tories went halfway to banning protest (and broke the country).

The right only want free speech for themselves..
  to lie and say the N-word.

Which kind of makes me wonder, what happens to the Republican Party when Trump croaks given they've now thrown out pretty everything they previously supposedly stood for (third term or no, his hold over the party won't end while he can still type semi-coherent sentences)? He's pushing 80 and that is really starting to show, so behind closed doors they've got to be thinking about it. Do they turn to Don Jr., who doesn't seem to have a particularly high profile, and try to revert the US to a defacto monarchy, turn to some other prominent Trumpist, switch to Elon Musk's new party (if it ever gets off the ground), or pretend the last decade-and-change never happened and try to reset back to the GOP of the GW Bush era?

Like post-Putin Russia, I'm not really seeing many good options here, for anyone in the blast radius. In both cases, I suspect it's going to make "Succession" look like some toddlers having a squabble over who gets to have a go on the swing next, and nearly everyone is going to have to deal with some of the fallout...

I did wonder about going there with a Soylent reference, but we're a *long* way from that point. We have the capacity to grow and distribute food to a population at least a few billion more than we have at present, and chances are we'll hit peak population before we get to that point anyway; it's only wasted edible food, distribution inefficiencies, financial greed, and politics that still allow people to starve.

Besides, the latest legal right starting to spread around the world is "assisted suicide" which, in principle at least, I can agree with for the terminally ill (there are a number of currently untreatable medical conditions I'd definitely want not to suffer through), given suitable safeguards. However, it's also a slippery slope that is absolutely going to get abused to remove some of the perceived dead wood within the population, and most likely that is going to be in a way that will help smooth out the old age heavy demographic curve.

It's down across the board according to the graph in TFA, but Africa is still way above it (a touch over 4) and Oceania appears to be pretty much spot on the 2.1 threshold. Every other continent is below 2.1, with Europe at the bottom on 1.4, and the overall average is 2.2, so we're not far off a net global population reduction.

Be careful what you wish for though. What this creates are further societal problems in the form of a geriatric-heavy population in the 75% of countries with a negative population growth, meaning a higher burden on the younger generations to support those that have exited the workforce due to age, and increased local resource pressure in the remaining 25% where the population is still growing. Given that is essentially Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, which is likely to bear the a good deal of the pain of climate change, we can also expect a lot of that additional population to try and relocate elsewhere as living conditions worsen and resources become more scarce. Some will see that as a good thing, since it will fill gaps in the workpool elsewhere and, at the other end of the scale, the bigots will - obviously - have a very different view, so there's absolutely going to be a lot of political and socio-economic friction coming along with this.

Below a certain age they're not going to be going to a concert without a responsible adult, or at least an older sibling/whatever, that is old enough to have an acceptable form of ID. That doesn't have to be a formal government ID either; it could be just be the smartphone with the number provided when the ticket(s) were bought, or any other form of "what I have" information that was provided during the original booking that has some form of proof of name/address/etc. Noted that many concerts have rules on smartphones in the venue though.

In practice, it's still not quite foolproof though. Oasis tried pretty much exactly what Ledow suggested recently with their comeback tour in the UK, and there were still quite widespread allegation of ticket fraud and people claiming they had legit tickets bought through official channels yet were still denied entry to gigs, although subjectively the level of fraud/resales does not seem as bad as it was Swift's Era tour. There was also some "backdoor entry" issues, apparently, but that's a security issue for the venue, not a ticket problem. Some of that could well be teething problems and loopholes that can still be closed, though but as Ledow said; this has been a solvable problem for many years, it's just not been something the industry has cared about because they've grown accustomed to getting their cut regardless and the touts have not - until recent artist pushback - been their problem.