It's called "pathetic fallacy"-- ascribing feelings (pathos, in Greek) to inanimate objects.

I'm afraid that we do this all the time. I don't even think twice before saying something like "the toaster doesn't like you to run the blender while it's toasting" or "this program wants two special characters in the password, not just one."

I heard earlier today that a court has determined that since governments are using all of this data, including license plates, that a FoIA request for all of the license plate data gathered from Flock in a city area for a range of dates was valid.

They want to have a power advantage over their serfs but turning their advantage into a burden changes that dynamic. Something to look into for those so inclined.

We seem to be well past the point of being able to expect them to follow the Law or "do the right thing".

> I see no reason why the government shouldn't be allowed to buy the same data that jim-bob the farmer can purchase.

Jim-bob is likely to face some serious problems if he smashes down your door and drags you away in a pre-dawn raid.

The IRS people get a promotion.

This is why the Constitution places strict limits on the actions of government agents.

(in its original interpretation)

Here I am about to think "damn, people losing their jobs to AI" and then I realize its the "pizza in 4-easy payments" people.

They should probably go all-in on AI as soon as possible. For their investors' sake.

OK, that was pretty funny. +1.

This is a point people keep missing. AI is not just ChatGPT and its clones. Those are just large language models. What really matters is the use of AI in doing actual work, and that has little to do with language models.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.

If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).

You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.

Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.

It'll be at least half of that in ten years.

The Zoomers have no interest in cable TV.

> Why not just build the proper infrastructure with what we know works?

I tried to do this locally. The government allows the pole owner (electric or telephone usually) to charge $50/mo/pole to the startup that wishes to hang wires.

The owner pays $5/mo in property taxes to the town.

There are exceptions for large corporations that are in the state's good graces.

It's just to keep competition limited to the cartel.

Short answer: corrupt government.

This was my first thought as well.

Such marketplace confusion!

You're ignoring everything I say. Bye/

You're not paying attention. What I said was that it is not beneficial to compel people who don't want to vote to do so anyway. Somehow you mutated that into "let's take away self-government!"

This is characteristic of your arguments: you take what I said, immediately jump to something different, and then shoot at that straw man.

I don't see that this discussion is going anywhere, since you seem to be primarily interested in not listening to anything. My thread was about the mathematics of voting, and you have hijacked it to be a platform for your ideas that it's important to make people vote whether they want to or not, that legislatures should be enormously huge, and that anybody who tries to analyze these ideas in any way is necessarily "authoritarian".

OK, those are your opinions. You're expressed them. I'm done. Bye.

That's correct.

It is you who jumped from there to "you're an authoritarian!", not me.

The assumption that all people are perfectly rational is contradicted by vast amounts of actual experience. It would be nice to live in an ideal perfect world, but we don't.

And your logic fails. The objective is to find a system that works as well as possible in a world including imperfect people. Your core logical jump "if people are imperfect then autocracy must be the only possible solution!" (because autocrats can't be imperfect?) makes no sense.