The problem is 'safety' does not mean anything any more. Its a blanket term that can now mean anything from broken skulls or chemical poisoning, to financial fraud, to Bobbies feelings are hurt because you pointed out 'a boy without a winkle is a girl.'

In anything tech related once the word 'safety' gets trotted out its take like turn stupid up to 11.

The printing press was heavily controlled early on for 'safety' that sure helped make things safe for autocrats and certain institutions like the Church. It might have helped make things safe for the King and the Pope but not so for the rights of his subjects or even the Christian faith.

AI regulation will be the same. It will make it so handful of tech oligarchs how can afford audit and compliance to decide who gets to use AI commercially and for what. Meanwhile the really dangerous people like foreign(probably domestic as well) intel agencies and criminal gangs who already have open source models will do whatever they like.

Your small business, you're getting flagged as 'AI generated content' and will have watermarks on all your ad copy and the taint for fraud when you did nothing wrong. The guy who created the fake pictures of your wife he is threatening to publish if you don't pay him, not water marks for him. Putin generating videos of $candidate doing blow of some hookers rear, no watermark for him.

This is the world the Regulators of AI are seeking to make for us. F'them!

There is a third far more likely option. Corruption inst widespread but some agent has a bug up his but because you hurt his feelings at the school board meeting and decides to fishing and pull your records.

if he had to explain to judge the need to investigate you for terrorism comes down to you having complained that a history lesson on aboriginal smoke signals was not an appropriate use of geometry class no matter how interesting or more inclusive it may have been he'd be laughed off. However without this he gets to crawly thru your facebook history and cherry pick things posted in private groups; because meta sold it to them. He can find some post that says something like: "we should riot - but seriously we need to keep this peaceful" truncate the last part and charge you with some kind of incitement crime.

The simple reality is that is how typical FBI agent thinks and operates. I have known many. They think they are 'better' the regual cops, they don't see themselves as citizens or any part of the community. They belive they are watchmen and if anyone suggests ever that someone ought to watch them, well that person is a agitator/commie/traitor/cultist/insurrectionist/ whatever the favored deamon of the week is.

Wanna talk real world. Arafat and his followers had multiple reasonable peace deals and rejected them all.

The simple reality is the displaced population of Palestine (they don't really exist any more that was two generations ago now) over played their hands, they thought they'd play the rest of the Muslim world against Israel in hopes of getting their wildest revenge fantasy fulfilled and when it did not worked they raised previous generation in to be steeped in hatred a bitterness. That group 20 years ago now chose terror and compromise-less war. They were determined to treat the Israeli state and population with hostility and yes to some degree as a result have been met with hostility.

Its called natural consequences, the present groups suffering and dying now are doing so because of the choices their parents and grandparents made. If they want it to end, they need to depose Hamas, and until they do they will continue to suffer and die and watch their children suffer and die, not because they 'deserve it' or anything like that but simply as a natural consequence of their actions or lack of action. Israel has a right to defend itself; it IS JUST for them to do so, that defense means Palestinian deaths and always will until they abandon the vendetta of their grandparents. Its not about 'fairness' there is no fairness, no 'equitable solution' for everyone there is only might-makes-right and perhaps grace, charity, generosity if people chose to put down their swords rather than fight to the last.

Roads should be funded by taxes on tires. That would reflect wear on the public's property the road better than fuel.

Except that is the same. Its being a useful idiot for Hamas.

Hamas attacks Israel than very intentionally puts civilians in harms way and maximizes the civilian costs to any attempt to remove their authoritarian grip. When inevitably something happens like some civilians or aide workers are killed they play the victim card. That causes people to protest Israel, international pressure mounts, Israel backs down, we return to the frozen conflict until the next time Hamas's feels it might be losing its grip on the population and murders some innocent Israelis again.

Its literally how they keep power.

Anti-Zionism is nothing but antisemitism with a thin veneer of intellectual argument over the aggressive racism it represents. Just imagine if the Federal government decided to start eliminating tribal lands and home rule, would that be anything but the cultural destruction of what is left of the first nations? Could it possibly result in anything other than genocide, maybe not thru murder directly but rather ethnic dilution? The same is true for the Jewish state.

Now I might be inclined to say there is nothing wrong with ethnic dilution even if it results in the elimination of a 'unique' group of people, however there is a big difference between that naturally occurring through very voluntary mixing with other groups and outsiders pushing a policy choice, which is what anti-Zionism is.

Oh yes; lets give people who often have the greatest access and knowledge of vulnerabilities and flaws in critical that could fetch big money on the black market to people who might need drug money and are not motivated enough to put on button down short and slacks for a paycheck!

That sounds like a great plan - oh wait its not and any actual security professional could tell you that.

Its one thing to look at total MPAA-scope production and say 'see see its about what it always has been in terms of original content' but...

I assume that includes all the direct to video/streaming, barely promoted stuff you never hear about unless you are like "into" a certain art-house or something. Certainly there is a lot more of this now that:

You can shoot a movie all digital rather than on expensive film under very costly lighting conditions and/or in any location where you don't have as ideal conditions as CA.

You can 'get away with' if you are budget constrained doing most of your post production on a couple Mac Pros with a handful of people.

Your distribution and reproduction costs can be near zero.

I would be more interested in how the break down compares if we only look at movies with say a 2024 budget of 130mil+ and compare them against movies with that kinda production budge inflation adjusted to previous decades. Putting a filter like that on it might be a little more realistic view of what the 'industry' is doing.

I guess sure if you are like mentally handicapped that makes sense.

I have filed taxes in at five different states. After you have handful of numbers from the federal form like AGI the state tax forms are mostly a handful of pages and few numbers to copy. There maybe a few additional questions about education expense and certain investments like muni-bonds which might be tax exempt at the state level, plus the usual 'do you owe us any extra sales tax'; and all that assumes you can't file the -EZ version. Which again you pretty much know ahead of time; not to both with unless you are not in school, not military, and don't have non-ira/401k investments.

It probably taxes as long to staple the w2s to the form, stuff and address the envelope as it does to complete. In Ohio you could literally file you taxes via touch tone phone it was so stupid simple.

The ONLY barrier at all to filing state forms for the person who already hasn't got a situation complex enough to retain and account to do it for them in the first place is FEAR. And not don't feed me some bullshit about how people don't have time. Everyone can come up with 20 min once a year.

Its federal filing that is complicated.

I am curious why you think this. I don't see any 'real' competition for YT in terms of place besides traditional network/syndicated media production for content creators.

Steve Crowder is a good example. Love him or hate him he has a fairly substantial audience and they are arguably as hostile to Google as it gets. He uses Rumble on his own site and actively encourages people to watch there, yet he STILL simulcasts on YouTube as far as I know; because people still watch there even though he has to censor half the show...

Meanwhile on the couch potato end YouTube charges absolutely ridiculous subscription rates, They are asking more than Netflix, Hulu, etc, and i assume people must be paying or that they think they can push people to pay to escape the ads and that they will rather than jump ship.

FAKE NEWS.

If fossil fuel lobbying was so effective they would have also been able to lobby against carbon reduction policies in general and take the whole 'electrification' issue off the table. If the USA as matter of policy did not subsidize electric autos or require higher mpg standards or otherwise seek to as matter of regulation limit co2 outputs most of this technology would not exist because the presumption would be there would not be a big market for it.

The reason China ate or lunch is because cheaper labor, lack of NIMBYs, and lower overall environmental standards when it come to rare earth extraction and manufacturing.

You are also making the assumption that trough hours are not used for plant maintenance etc. Which they probably are. Ie keep a couple plants at day-time output while you offline one at night to inspect/repair/etc.

The more you push to round the clock full output operation of fewer generating plants the less flexibility and resilience you are going to have.

Did I say things were better for anyone but the landed-gentleman after? No I did not. Maybe you should learn to read!

Think of how many people could have been fed clothed and sheltered for that.

Think of how significant the 'inflation' is as the costs are passed on to rate payers, which impacts both housholds and producers.

All to replace a gas generated we already had.

he is trying to say the American revolution was not about tyranny.

Which is a of course BS it absolutely was. George was no tyrant though not really the parliamentary system back in England was probably as 'liberal and democratic' as any of our colonial governments were at the time.

The fact that the colonies did not have representation there though was a very real and perfectly legitimate complaint. Even if the counter narrative that founding fathers were 'a bunch of rich guys looking out for their own pocket books' is true, and it can be true, without negating the fact that comparatively speaking back in the Old country nothing was going to change as far as the colonies getting a real voice in government. To man influential and monies interests there had captured the system and they very much planned on using the America's as their personal mints.