Ever noticed how the fictional TV shows in Idiocracy, often incoherent nonsense that people can't stop watching, are basically the same as the AI slop we have today?

We're not going to be fighting an robot army, like in The Terminator or The Matrix, but a destruction of our humanity from within and of our own making.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

You mean, why does Linus keep agreeing to be interviewed, and then reply to straightforward questions with the obvious answers?

What would you rather he do? Refuse to be interviewed, or maybe make up unexpected answers just to be edgy?

We've been putting shady spy shit into our "American made" products for 80 years, and famously caught doing it a few times too.

They're selling actual working hardware. But that hardware's value is significantly lower after 5 years, and almost zero after 10.

It will be time for all of us to prepare for a massive crash when forward markets pop up around AI hardware (think tulip mania). We're already seeing some serious red flags with businesses including their GPUs in their assets and taking loans on them.

How does any one of us survive a decade long recession? At an individual level, I don't think you can reliably do so. Ultimately people will have to relearn how to cooperate and come together and not be so damn greedy, not obsess about their standing in social media, and get back to the fundamentals.

The ones hit the hardest will be the luxury producers. I'm not talking about gold watches either. But online influences will suddenly find their payouts from YouTube and others have dried up when the marketing and advertising budgets are cut. Product reviewers won't be getting new products, because in a recession the best you can often do is just to keep making last year's products, and even so you might be cutting back in volume and completely removing the advertising budget.

The further we go down the wrong path, the bigger the correction. That's just how our economic system works, it's not centrally planned but it is manipulated by a few back actors for short-term profit. The consequence is the middle class watches their 401K get flushed down the drain.

Did they make any attempt to distinguish between correlation and causation?

Such as? There have been a couple of controlled studies on ultraprocessed food. They found weight gain and other things like speed of eating associated with the UPFs and not other diets. Good luck doing a decade long controlled study until people get heart disease, even if you somehow convinced an ethics committee to let you try.

https://www.cell.com/cell-meta...
https://www.nature.com/article....

There have also been lots of mechanistic studies of many of the common ingredients in UPFs.

Just like today, most people in power are willing to look the other way when money is involved.

If it was a reasonable balance of risk and payback, then they could get a private loan like everybody else.

There's been ticket scalping since the days when I was a kid...

It was always, back then....illegal to scalp tickets, but they would do things like sell a Bic lighter for $200 and throw in a ticket free with it.

I imagine they'll do something similar to get around this law over there in EU.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.