... if [companies like Google] find that someone is abusing DMCA requests, they absolutely do have a right to sue the abuser. Google has done this at least once, and rather recently, at that.

They should use it as a revenue source. Troll the bogus-DMCA trolls for $ome big buck$.

Maybe let the people hit by the bogus takedowns join the suits as co-plaintifs, boosting the bite by THEIR damages and giving THEM a cut of the swag. (Provide running and lawering the suit as a service, for a cut of the winnings-if-any for any co-plaintifs who want to sign up for that rather than run their own lawyers. Google: win, Co-plaintifs: win, Trolls: LOSE!

The concept of corporate personhood well predates the Citizen's United ruling. All that ruling effective did was say "we have all this precedent and case law saying that corporations are effectively people, and a whole bunch of other case law saying people can spend their own money to create advertisements and otherwise campaign for political issues (i.e., free speech), so we really have to admit that these corporate persons that already exist can do the same things." You might not like the final outcome (and it is problematic), but to change it you either have to change how corporations are treated by the law or limit what people can say and do with their money.

Personally, I would prefer the former, but it would be a lot of change for how we do things. For example, would the changes allow for a corporation to own and control property, both real and imaginary (IP)? What about monetary assets? Can a corporation sign a contract? Currently, a person representing the corporation physically signs, but if the contract isn't upheld for some reason, that person isn't personally responsible, the corporation is. All these things that corporations can "do" make them look like a person.

Of course, other things don't. For example, a corporation cannot be sent to jail. Also, for some reason, real people effectively pay income taxes on their revenue (with some allowed deductions) while corporations pay income tax on their profit (because they are allowed a lot more deductions).

Changes to how things currently are might be a net positive, but they would also affect a huge amount of our economy, and getting things wrong would be disastrous. I don't personally have any good ideas for reform of corporate personhood that address the problems without causing other big ones (the closest I have is to change the tax code to make corporations more like real people by limiting their deductions). And as you say, corporations are currently politically powerful, and probably would prefer the status quo to changes.

Do you have any thoughts on what true corporate personhood reform could be?

An elephant in the room is the efficiency, Solar electricity through electrolyser and fuel cell to power for the forklift (including electronics such as max-power-point trackers for solar panels) vs. equivalent devices (inverters, charge controllers, etc.) for alternatives such as battery-electric.

LFP and several other lithium battery systems are now 93-97% efficient round trip from solar or line input to line-equivalent AC. Going to motor control should be at least that good. Last I heard, electrolyzer/fuel cell systems were nowhere near that. Charging time vs. refueling time issues can be handled by swapping low battery packs with fresh ones on chargers. (The packs-on-chargers can also do time-shifting for shifts during no-sun periods.)

I hear now NASA used to find hydrogen leaks was by having a worker hold up a big sheet of cardboard as he walked forward. When it caught fire he'd found the leak. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible (in sun or bright light) but VERY hot flame and "There's no such thing as a hydrogen leak that's NOT on fire." after non-trivial time.

Banning high-sulfur fuels in cargo ships was a good move when it comes to reducing acid rain - but it became obvious very quickly that the ocean-spanning clouds seeded by the resulting sulfur dioxide had been causing a powerful global cooling effect, and removing them is nearly doubling the rate at which the planet is warming.

In particular, as of a couple months ago the climate scientists were estimating that the sulfur cleanup driven ship track reduction was more than enough to explain ALL of the ocean surface temperature rise during the last two years.

Up front note: this post (at least the first part) is from a Christian perspective, which I am most familiar with. Other perspectives would probably use different terminology.

For someone who believes that God created everything, including the universe itself, why would that person have to believe that God is subject to the same rules as we experience? Let me put it another way: if God created the universe and everything in it, it stands to reason that He created space itself, the 3 spatial dimensions we perceive. And given that and how space and time are related, it is reasonable to follow that God must have created time in that process as well. If God is creating all these things, then by definition, He would have been outside of them when they were created. We really have no idea, perhaps cannot even perceive, what sort of reality that God would experience. Is cause and effect even a thing for God, or is that part of creation? Did the act of creation essentially create the concept of "creation" in the first place? It's a weird thing to consider, as we think of certain concepts as immutable, but that is because of our experience with time.

Even if you don't believe the universe was created consciously, that it was an extra-universal random equivalent to a nuclear decay, there's no reason to believe that any of the normal rules that exist inside our universe in any way have to apply outside of it. Even the ideas of "inside" and "outside" are based on our 3 spatial dimensions.

No one knows what happened before the universe was created (regardless of random big bang or conscious effort). That might not even be a reasonable question if time only exists inside our universe and outside there is no "before" or "after".

The point is your third statement is not unreasonable. In fact, requiring anything that might have caused this universe to itself require a cause itself requires the belief that cause & effect exist outside our universe and that is not necessarily true.

God could have created our universe and not required something to create Himself.

This is not a new idea. I helped install Linux on a school's computers 20 years ago. Sadly (for software freedom), these ideas never seem to take off. The problem is, people start seeing Linux as the "lesser" or "hand me down" OS (when of course it is not). So the first thing they try to do to improve themselves is get something better that can run Windows. Or worse, Mac, as Apple has cultivated the idea that it is a "premium" product that deserves the extra money you have to pay for it. There are many private schools around the country that advertise the fact that all their students get iPads to work on (because expensive must be better). In general people don't value things they don't have to pay for.

Also, MS has figured out how to make sure all those volunteer orgs have access to free or cheap MS products. It's not that those orgs are against getting stuff for free, but at least on a subconscious level, they prefer getting what they perceive as expensive things donated.

Or how about stop bugging me to always download a new version. Even if I don't have permission to install a new version or when it's running on a disconnected network and can't even detect what the current version is...

US-ians hate the idea that something everybody wants can't be owned and used for profit-making.

"US-ians" understand that if you can't own it, you can't keep others from taking it away from you/.

These two things (fascism and socialism) are not related.

Actually, they are: Like Communism, Fascism is a particular subset of socialism. But it's gotten such a bad reputation that the rest of the socialists want to avoid the fallout and go so far as to claim it's their opposite.

The fascist approach is to pick a limited number of winners - sector labor unions or corporations - and heavily regulate them.

National drug store chains turning over patent records to the cops etc. without a warrant also lets them track their movements arounjd the country.

Not as find-grained, but much quicker than trying to mine license plate reader and surveilance camera imagery from around the continent. "Where's Wally Suspect?" "He was at this Walgreens in Tacoma on June 7 but that Kroger in Phoenix yesterday."

If you're against the surveillance state over cameras, library checkouts, browser histories, or TV show selection, you certainly should be against this data leak.

"But I don't have anything to hide so I don't care." doesn't cut it when, say, some piece of a cancel culture gets control of the machinery of government (or just some piece of law enforcement) and uses it against anyone not perfectly aligned with their particular ideology.

Trump wants to be a king,

Dictator, not king. But only for a day.
Oh wait that wasn't comedy that as Trump's actual words.

They were his actual words AND comedy. He was cracking a joke.

If you had actually watched the Hannity giest-appearance / interview where he cracked it (and aren't too closed-minded to get it), you'd see he was promising voters he'd spend his first day writing executive orders undoing Biden's "first 24 hours" spree of orders shutting down all Trump's first-term policies, along with Biden's later policy changes implemted by Biden, establishing or reestablishing his own policies.

Trump knows the media outlets opposed to him will take his comments out of context - and try to censor his own actual statements and their context. So he uses it. One way is to crack jokes they'll distort into ludicrous flames. Later, when people hear what he actually said and understand how they've been gaslight, the media that distorted him are discredted and some of those people switch to supporting him.

... Google will automagically disable the site's advertising (demonitizing the entire site)

Oops. "Demonitize" is the wrong word for that, as it's denying them traffic and exposure, not money for displaying their content (which is a different branch of Google.)

Google ... says it will deindex offending platforms from search and also remove their ability to advertise. "Since this is a dynamic blocking, the search engine therefore undertakes to perform de-indexing of all websites/telematic addresses that are the subject of subsequent reports that can also be communicated by rights holders accredited to the platform," AGCOM writes. "Google has shared a procedural mode for the communication of the blocking list, and the Company has also committed to the timely removal of all advertisements that do not comply with the company's policies, having particular regard to those that invest the promotion of pirate sites referring to protected sporting events."

Did I read that right? Anyone can repost a link to a pirate feed to any free-speech discussion site and (once a purported rights owner - for instance: the operation that also posted the link) complains Google will automagically disable the site's advertising (demonitizing the entire site) and stop displaying anything from the site in response to searches (effectively hiding the entire site from Google Search users).

What an opportunity for censors worldwide! Corporate, State Actor, Political Party, Terrorist, Political Pressure Group, Vandal, Extortion, etc.

It's hard to evaluate the 500k statistic without knowing the total number of deaths in that period. Does that represent most of the deaths, or a small amount? A quick web search brought me to this page, which claims "Europe" had 9.6 million deaths in 2021. I put Europe in quotes because that is what the page says and the EU is not necessarily the same as Europe, especially as that graph goes back further than the EU. But it's probably a good rough estimate.

Interestingly, it's clear from that graph that about 1.5 million in 2021 are excess deaths likely from COVID-19, but that's not relevant here.

Anyway, given that number, that makes the 500k about 5% of total deaths. To me, that seems a reasonable possibility.

Other comments pointed out that the headline here is bogus, and that the 500k isn't direct deaths, but contributory, where the poor air may have made people weaker and thus less likely to survive whatever really ultimately killed them. And even the article only claims that half of that number would have survived with lower pollution levels.

That does decrease the usefulness of the statistic, because it becomes clear that the authors are just trying to make a big number to make their work (and thus themselves) look more important. Not that air pollution isn't important, but this appears to be another example of over-hyping a problem, which does tend to turn people off a lot and maybe that is why you consider this article "nonsense".

So, while the article has the standard hyperbolic attitude, the underlying information is likely correct, when taking into account its own caveats.

It does mean that it's actually not as big a deal as the article would like, though. Useful for someone deciding what level of enforcement to put on polluters (vs. economic interests), but not really something for general people to get upset over.

I note that the study was of the correlation of population death rates with pollution from coal plants. Attributing the entire improvement to the coal pollution reduction misses things like coal-polluted areas tending to have lower average income than cleaner ones, with all the other health hazards and service shortages that brings. It's across time, and as the areas clean up they also tend to gentrify, changing that factor. (Though some of the resulting mortality improvement might fairly be credited to the pollution reduction - even though not due to direct chemical / micromechanical effects on bodies.)

Since it's across time, EVERYTHING ELSE changed as well, and some of that (such as improved medical treatment) might also have caused much of the improvement. To sort that out you need to do a multivariable analysis against pretty much everything (and then you STILL have a correlation-as-causation issue.)

(I'd also like to see how much percentage-wise the coal pollution dropped across the study groups, which would also be indicative.)

Nevertheless, though the number might not be right, pollution from coal combustion IS some very nasty stuff, and a lot of it has been eliminated. So perhaps most of this stat IS from that cleanup. (Or even "more than all of it", if the total of conflating effects was net negative.)