So the new AI is going to be so 'opt-in' that it needs a killswitch you can use to get rid of it?

I realize that marketing and PR flacks are subhuman enemies of communication; but that's not even pretending to be what 'opt-in' means.

The characterization of "risk of artificial intelligence overpowering humanity" as the substance of an 'AI debate' seems itself like a strategy in trying to forestall it.

Sure, there's some fun sci-fi there; but most of what actual people are actually concerned about is what specific parts of humanity are using 'AI' to do, or justifying doing in the name of 'AI'; not fretting about how skynet might kill us all. And it's exceptionally handy to pretend that that is what people are fretting about; both because it's a distant and vague enough problem that you can justify punting most action without even lying; and because it's not even false that (perhaps outside of a handful who have outright cracked and started thinking about it in religious terms) even the most psychopathic techbros are also against skynet exterminating everyone; both because that would include them; and because Judgement Day would not be a good time for social media engagement metrics.

So what? What damage do you think can he cause with a non-existing flight ticket except some financial damage to the airline who will be forced to fly him back to Heathrow if he managed to get to LAX, for example? He cannot even use it to give me a paper cut because he doesnâ(TM)t have a bloody ticket.

In Germany he would easily get through security, because security checks security, not whether you have a valid passport, ticket etc. You can kill someone with a knife so security confiscates your knife. You canâ(TM)t kill someone with a fake passport, and definitely not with no ticket, so thatâ(TM)s not their business. Making sure you have a ticket is someone elseâ(TM)s job.

I had a colleague who had studied architecture. He told me they made little clay models of houses and for that you need a clay cutting tool that is sharp enough to cut clay. For all intents and purposes this tool is just a knife, but with an extremely sharp edge. Will make an absolutely clean cut through clay, which many knives cant, and cut your throat very easily. But officially itâ(TM)s not a knife, itâ(TM)s a clay cutting tool. They let him carry it on flights.

So he got on a flight without paying for a ticket. Quite common on trains or underground in the UK, rare for an airplane. Saved himself a few hundred pound maybe except he got caught.

But no security risk, because anyone up to no good would obviously buy a ticket. Trying to get on a plane with a bomb or gun or knife but no ticket would just be obviously stupid. You wouldnâ(TM)t bring a bomb and risk being caught because you have no ticket.

This looks pretty close to what the rail boom of the late 1860s and early 1870s looked like. Some corporations and investors then did some pretty incestuous stuff of a similar. The resulting bubble pop was devastating to the US economy. But it is notable that even as that bubble popped, the overall amount of rail continued to grow, with almost every major metric (amount of track laid down, number of passenger-miles traveled per a month, number of locomotives, number of overall stations, etc.) barely showing blips as they continued to climb.

I just found the numbers for Germany for November 2025.

• Bestselling Chinese brand is BYD with 1.7% market share.
• Bestselling European brand of Chinese made cars is MG Roewe with 1.0% market share, followed by Tesla with 0.7%.
• Bestselling European brand owned by a Chinese company is Volvo at 1.9% market share.

This flood is often written about, but has not materialized yet. Chinese brands are only 8% of all BEV cares in Europe as of Octoberf 2025, and BEV cars are about 20% of the total car market. And even if we include Chinese made cars for non-Chinese brands (like Tesla sells in Europe), we are at less than 20% of BEVs or 4% of the total car market.

And the main reason for high energy costs in Germany are massive investments into the grid, amounting to a planned total sum of 300 billion euros. If you include local grids, it's 700 billion euros.

The grid investment were planned at a time, when battery storage was not viable, and is by many deemed to be excessive, as the average load of the grid is about 15% of the capacity.

Another quirk is that German regulations are currently paying a renewable energy provider for the potential amount of energy, not for the energy amount actually provided. This means that the provider is notifying the grid about the currently available power, and gets paid for being willing to provide the energy, independently of the grid's capacity to make use of the energy. This disincentivizes the combination of renewables with battery storage, and hence letting available renewable electric energy going to waste, because the surplus energy is not stored, but simply switched off. On the other hand, the amount of battery storage projects applied for is currently 20 times higher than assumed in the energy report from 2023, which means that the money planned for the grid might be freed up when some expansion projects are proven to be unnecessary.

A politician is by definition anyone doing politics. You trying to influence us to agree with you and ideally taking action the way you want it is the very definition of someone doing politics.

You, my friend, are an acting politician.

This almost seems to be convincing us that the absolute worst statements about Russian culture today are accurate. Invade another country, continue that invasion with warcrimes and drafting of young men to be sent as cannon fodder, barely a whimper. But interfere with a videogame platform, and now we have a protest. Pretty despicable priorities. On the other hand, this may be overly negative; this protest itself seems small, and it may be that people expect less pushback or jailing of protesters about this sort of thing than those protesting the invasion of Ukraine.

"Make America healthy again"; unless it's bad for business.

iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

The US of AI in x-ray imaging did grow the demand for radiologists That's accurate. That doesn't that AI will necessarily grow jobs in general, or even if it does that AI creating more jobs will not cause enough disruptions that it will take time to shakeout. It is possible for example that a lot of jobs which are being lost to AI now will be temporary as corporations realize more the limits of the technology. It is also possible that what we're seeing now in terms of job losses will become more extreme as the technology improves even further. Predicting what is going to happen here is genuinely very difficult.