Computers never make mistakes or have problems. Let’s go 100% autonomous!

(they’re not using Windows for any of this stuff, right?)

It was a rip-off in 2010. Maybe it's because I grew up with the idea that, “Ok, TV is free, but you have to watch these commercials” that I could never bring myself to pay for cable TV. Like that frog in the pot on the stove, they slowly added commercials, then more commercials, and (apparently) increased the rates people paid at the same time. Now, people finally seem to be noticing that the water is boiling.

Yeah, no one with zero dollars is turning anything into anything. You need tools and energy to acquire any raw material, let alone turn it into something, unless you’re an artist working with found-objects. Sounds like Ayn Rand’s fantasy.

That’s correct, and it’s what the Right seems not to understand. Demand is what drives the economy. You can give Mr. Rich Guy more money, but he’d be an idiot to open a widget factory if no one is buying widgets. You give poor people more money and they spend it. Mr. Rich Guy can get a loan, or get some investors together, if there’s a demand. He doesn’t need more pocket money.

Unless it’s the Federal government. But what Alaska is doing is taking money that would normally go into the state treasury and giving it directly to the people. While any kind of spending is good for the economy, since it always creates work for someone, giving it to the people to spend injects it into the economy much more evenly, and more effectively, than, say, spending on construction projects does. The money goes to more diverse places.

Also, the notion that a thousand bucks a year is going to cause people to stop working is just nuts. Thirty-thousand, maybe, but a couple/few grand isn’t enough to live on. What it does is give people a little more spending power, which is great for the economy. The problem we have in this country is that we have some people who just cannot abide seeing poor people get any kind of leg up. So they oppose any kind of program that would lift our least fortunate citizens out of poverty, and to their own detriment, since they don’t understand how that grows the economy.

Which he sent from his iPhone. Use TweetDeck. It’ll tell you which phone he’s using.

It doesn’t have to be about government or politics to be useful information. Trump has little interest in those topics, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump wants to use his own phone because he’s more worried about his own government spying on him, (although I’m sure laziness is a factor). If he’s using that phone to run his always shady business deals, that could be very compromising information.

Right, it’s an evolutionary adaptation. All social animals have “rules” which help the group maintain cohesion. Ours are just a bit more elaborated.

Yes we can!

Well, I can. I’m still, after all these years, a bit shocked that not everyone uses even ad-blockers, let alone script blockers. A browser that automatically blocked all ads, beacons, scripts, etc, etc, would be nice, I suppose, but haven’t we dumbed-down the internet enough already? As it is, we have to put up with two-factor authentication because some people are too fuckin’ lazy to use password managers, and now they want us to hand over our phone numbers, too.

Personally, I think it’s smarter to be in charge of your own privacy, rather than trust that ten million different web sites will do it for you. I’m certainly not going to trust that these mega-corporations, whose sole business is selling ads, will do it for us. Install ad-blockers, Ghostery, and No Script, get a password manager and start using good, unique, passwords, and don’t use your real name online. Oh, and never use the credentials of one site to log into another. It’s not that hard.

Let’s see how many burgers robots buy.

Unless Anish Kapoor buys the rights and won’t let anyone else use it.

It’s even sadder that people can’t, or won’t, distinguish between compulsive behaviors and addiction. We’ve watered that word “addiction” down to near-meaninglessness.

This clearly isn’t gambling in the normal sense people think of. What this is, not letting people see what they’re buying, is a scam, a fraud, (of course, that defines gambling, too). They should have no trouble regulating that. Anyway, people should be allowed to gamble, in spite of the fact that a minority of people develop compulsive gambling problems. We don’t prevent adults from enjoying alcohol simply because a minority of people develop drinking problems. The same should go for gambling and drug taking.

He’s lamenting the loss of a more democratic web, where all kinds of content was possible. You can’t compete with these huge commercial entities. Since the commercialization of the web, all these little one-person web sites have disappeared, and the ones that still exist have gotten harder to find due to the peculiarities of Google’s algorithms. Unless you have a million other sites linking to you, you’re pushed way down in the results. I don’t use Google, but it seems most people do, and instead of neutral results they’re getting what Google thinks they want. Even if that can be trusted, and they’re not getting what Google wants them to have, you’re still getting boxed in.

You want him to provide the content? That’s just it. One person can no longer compete on the web, and for a number of reasons, not least of which is the security environment. Anyone running a server knows this. It’s become a commercial wasteland, and like its brick & mortar counterpart, an endless strip of blinking lights and advertising. Good content has gotten much harder to host, and to find.

Right, and never mind this has nothing to do with the problem being discussed anyway. One thing about right-wingers that never ceases to amaze me is, they can’t stand to see some poor person get a little help from society, but have no problem giving millions to already wealthy people. They seem to think one comes out of their paycheck, but the other doesn’t.

Lol! Like what? You pretty much have to be disabled, or a woman with children, to get any help at all. And the assistance you receive is a pittance, an amount no one can live on. And even then, you’re cut off pretty quickly, and expected to work. You ought to look up the requirements for "welfare" sometime. Welfare, as people still think of it, has been dead for twenty-five years now. Yet, I hear idiots complaining about how “illegals” are getting welfare, when citizens can’t even get it. Google “bill clinton welfare reform"