You're not comparing apples to apples. In Arizona, do you experience the heat indexes 15+ degrees warmer due to humidity?

Because in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, they regularly experience relative humidity of 100%. Last I heard, Arizona doesn't ever come anywhere close to half that.

(I'm going to start posting this now every time I see anything about facial recognition software, because people need to understand how dangerous this software is to implement and trust on a large scale.)

Let's pretend for a moment that facial recognition software is 99.9% accurate. It's not, but for sake of argument, let's go with it.

Now, pretend you walk into a store, the software flags you as a criminal who shoplifted from the store earlier, and you get arrested. If that store received 5,000 visitors that day, what are the odds you were a false positive, i.e. you were flagged as a criminal but weren't actually the one who committed the crime?

Answer: 80%.

Why? The average Joe wrongly assumes a 99.9% accuracy rate means 99.9% of the time it will identify a criminal correctly. But it does not mean this. What it means is that the system will correctly identify -anybody- 99.9% of the time; flagging a face as "not the criminal" counts to this accuracy score as equally as "is the criminal". So, out of 5,000 people, 0.1%, or five people, will be identified by the system as the criminal. This means that, if you are flagged as the criminal, and you are one out of 5,000 visitors, then there's a 4/5 chance, or 80%, that you are not the criminal.

But here's the kicker: Facial recognition software is being used to convict people. This is the real crime. This technology is an emperor wearing no clothes, but everyone from prosecutors to juries, pretends that it is authoritative. This technology is not 99.9% accurate; at best, it's about 99% accurate, as long as the individual is Caucasian and male. At worst, it's about 65% accurate. We would endanger the stability of society to take something this inaccurate and use it to convict people of crimes.

If this is an April Fool's Joke or a sincere attempt by Arizona to compete with Florida for dumbest state ever.

Chronic was on the rise before the pandemic hit. So were student discipline issues. COVID just poured gasoline over that tire fire.

I blame the smartphones.

But it's more than just that. Our culture was brewing this disaster long before it happened. I grew up in the 80's and 90's, where I was taught that I should be an upstanding member of society, because society will reward me with a good job, a good house, a good family, and a good retirement. And because I'm American, "Freedom!" was the icing on the cake. Oh, and not to mention, we won the Cold War, and there wasn't a single major war between Western powers throughout my youth, so there was also no threat of conflict that could disrupt all the goodness that was the USA! USA! USA!

And then the Dot-Com crash. Then 9/11. Then Iraq. Then Afghanistan. Then the Great Recession. And then, THEN, after I thought our whole society collectively shared in all those sacrifices, I remember sitting in a hotel eating lunch and watching CNN and hearing this headline in 2009: "US Records A Record Number of Millionaires Amidst the Recession!" And I finally realized the truth: the rich followed a different set of rules than the rest of us. And since the "recovery" from the Great Recession, the only thing that has been driving this country's economy forward has been the rich. While that's been brewing for fifty years, it's finally reached a boiling point, where Americans can't afford to pay for college, can't afford to pay for cars, and can't afford to pay for homes.

Which means America is depressed. Both the adults, and their children. And depressed children just aren't motivated to go to school. And smartphones love to just fuel that depression. And to just add insult to injury, Corporate America's even figured out a way to make money from all that smartphone addiction, by turning our youth into data cattle.

TLDR: American youth has figured out there's no hope for them in today's society, so their solution is to quit society.

"If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,"he added. "This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor."

For those of you not fluent in the language of corporate greed, allow me to translate:

"Over the next generation, we intend to promote and market AI as the greatest thing in economic history, not because it is, but because our silicon snake oil will force businesses everywhere to pay us a fuck-ton of money to subscribe to our AI software, making us insanely rich, and to hell with the humans that lose their jobs in the process."

Fuck our corporate overlords.

You seem to have forgotten all the other things credit cards do. Like giving you a credit. The cost of debt DOES scale by the amount. Or did you expect to have a mortgage with a "flat interest fee" because the cost of transacting loan doesn't scale with the size of the loan?

You seem to have forgotten that Visa and Mastercard assume zero risk if the cardholder defaults on the loan. They only transact the payment. So they should get paid for the transaction, nothing more, nothing less. Banks that issue the credit card assume the risk. And how do they profit from the risk? Interest rates, which do scale with the size of the loan.

Not to mention credit cards have you covered in case of fraud and your card gets hit with transactions.

Thank you Truth in Lending Act. What, do you think our corporate overlords want to bear that responsibility? You know as well as I do that they only have to do this because legislation requires it. And a neutral party like the FTC could make sure that the cost of managing that responsibility is included in the transaction fee. We already have another consumer insurance that merchants pay for that protects us, the consumer. It's called the FDIC. Nobody's complaining about it. So why are you complaining about the TILA?

If we citizens made a huge fuss about it, we absolutely could amend the TILA to cap transaction fees in a manner that is transparent and fair for all parties involved. If we made a huge fuss about it, that is. Until we do, Visa and Mastercard and Amex and Discover will continue to contribute massive campaign donations to Republicans and Democrats to keep the status quo exactly as it is.

2% as a transaction fee is robbery, especially with today's infrastructure. We should get it 0.5%

It doesn't take a computer scientist to tell you that the cost of transacting a payment does not depend on the amount of the payment. Whether I pay $1 for a candy bar or $10,000 for a first-class ticket to Singapore, the cost of transacting is practically the same thing, especially in today's electronic age. Even 0.5% would be highway robbery for merchants if the amount went above $500.

Transaction fees should be a flat fee, or perhaps a percentage if the cost is under x-amount of dollars (maybe 2% up to $100), then a flat fee for anything above that amount. And this fee should be governed by the FTC. And if that fee was passed on as a surcharge to consumers, even better; at least then everyone would be transparent and honest about what it costs to transact a purchase via credit card.

As long as this fee remains a flat percentage, that means that every time I use a credit card, I'm paying a 2% tax to Mastercard or Visa, because we all know that those merchants pass those costs onto consumers. And to hell with rewards; they're only giving me back a small percentage of what I'm paying them, which only incentivizes me to spend more! It's no different than if I walked into a casino, and the house promised me 2% cash back on everything I spent; the house would just set a new edge where I'd still lose, but I'd lose more, but I'd keep playing longer thinking I was getting more money back.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Imagine if Hitler's scientists and Roosevelt's scientists both spoke out to the world in a radio broadcast back in 1942 about "red lines" in the development of the Atomic Bomb. What would Hitler and Roosevelt say to that?

I believe something along the lines of "I don't give a damn", I would imagine.

Because they were building it to have the most powerful weapon of warfare, that's why.

And today, now that the most powerful nations on this planet can't use nukes against one another without screwing themselves over in return, now we recognize the next most powerful weapon we can develop is AI.

So I'm pretty sure that Biden, Trump, and Papa Pooh are all all saying the same thing: "I still don't give a damn." Because the moment one side gives up on the pursuits, the other side will persist and win in its development.

Yes.

Next question.

I would love it if Microsoft could make Windows easier with AI. "Hey Windows, please dim my screen to 20%." "Hey Windows, please close all processes of Google Chrome." "Hey Windows, open my calendar, cancel my 9 o'clock, and notify all the participants." "Hey Office, open up that document I was working on before I left for lunch." "Hey Office, please download the data from this PDF, convert it into a CSV file, then input the contents into this mail merge document, and print one of each record." The possibilities to streamline the user experience are endless.

But it should not come at the expense of Microsoft seizing our private data. But every one of us knows that this is why the integration is happening. Microsoft wants our data, because money.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Then why did someone w/ a 4-digit UID make an insightful post about him receiving $15K for his work on VA Linux from back in the day? And why did someone else mod him up for it?

There's still a decent amount of knowledge that's circulated everyday on Slashdot to make it worth visiting for me. It's certainly not nearly as strong as it was back in its prime in the aughts. But I continue to learn things each day with each visit, and so I continue to do so.

Then I guess we need more communism. Because, until very recently in human history, "right to repair" was an unthinkable concept. Humans repaired, and no one told them otherwise.

When I was a kid back in the 80's, there were TV repair shops, vacuum repair shops, sowing machine repair shops, shoe repair shops, clothing repair shops, computer repair shops, car repair shops, bicycle repair shops, furniture repair shops...I mean, the list goes on and on and on. America fixed stuff until it was unfixable, and then it was thrown away. Because it was cheaper to repair what we had than to buy something new.

Then we shipped production to China, thank you Sam Walton. Suddenly, everything was too cheap to repair, and too cheap in quality to repair. Corporate America decided that as much crap as possible should be engineered to break, then price replacements so cheap that we Americans would be trained to believe throwing away old stuff was normal.

It is absolutely bat-shit crazy that we citizens have to fight to get a "right to repair" law. Because that right was inherent, until it was taken away from us by corporate America, who also bought out all the legislative bodies that should have been fighting for citizens, not corporations.

No, they won't be able to compete. The only way one can recuperate capital costs of this magnitude is through economies of scale, by having huge corporate farms. And with land prices at ridiculous prices, it is near impossible for ma and pa farmer to compete.

The corporate machine producers are pricing family farmers out of their farms. They could produce simpler affordable farm equipment, but they choose not to, because money.

We should stop corporate America from fucking with our food supply. But we won't, because they keep giving money to Congressional leaders to keep things exactly as they are.

"Maybe we need to look at the incentives to make sure safety is getting the appropriate first rung of consideration that it deserves."

For every person who dies due to manufacturing flaws in a Boeing aircraft, every Boeing executive is fined one million dollars, with the money given to the family of the individual that lost their life.

Can we please do that?

(And additional plug: Wendover productions just released an amazing video on the subject of Boeing, titled "How Boeing Lost It's Way". Definitely worth the watch.)

All AT&T California customers will continue to receive their traditional landline services until an alternative service becomes available by AT&T or another provider."

"Alternative service", huh? And what exactly do they define that to mean? In the wording provided, sounds to me like anything wireless, including cellular and/or satellite, could be construed to be exactly that. In court, they could say, "This residence already has access to Starlink internet services. With a VoIP phone, they would have access to services equivalent to what was provided by AT&T's landline."

Fuck AT&T. They're another corporation trying to minimize their liabilities to maximize their profits. I hope California doesn't let them get away with it. Better yet, I hope CA passes a bill that says instead, "AT&T must maintain all existing landline services to residences, unless they replace existing landlines with fiber optic cabling and its associated services." Because that's what Pacific Bell promised 30 years ago, and they received millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to deliver exactly that.