Nah... Only regular people and billionaires who scam other billionaires go to jail. All the other super-rich criminals just put on a 3-piece suit to go apologize and promise it won't happen again in front of a senate hearing committees.

but I watched Dune I and I found it really awful: Timothy Chalamet is to Paul Atreides what tofu is to meat, Jessica Ferguson has about as much acting range as a lettuce and Oscar Isaac - the only Star Wars character ever to manage the feat of making Jar Jar not so annoying after all - is as convincing a Duke Leto as Cheech Marin would have been.

It's truly a mystery to me how Villeneuve managed to make such a meh Dune after his absolute Blade Runner 2049 masterpiece. I expected so much of him after Blade Runner - because really, THAT was the challenge of the century and he pulled it off brilliantly - and all I got out of his Dune was an urgent need to rewatch the godawful Lynch movie from 1984. That's how bad it was for me.

So I'm very happy to give Dune II a pass.

Politicians don't do anything that won't re-elect them. They don't need to understand the consequences of the laws they pass, they only need to know if it makes them more popular.

Meaning you have to remember that if politicians pass ridiculous and dangerous laws in the bible belt states, you can squarely put the blame on the voters in those states, because if they didn't want that shit, the politicians wouldn't do it.

We already are in the dark ages of the internet.

The golden age was the mid-nineties to mid-2000s. Today it's all privacy violation, surveillance and dystopia. The age verification thing is just more of the same.

You could also go to town and find yourself real boobies in glorious 3D and touch-o-vision.

Making porn hard to access makes it all the more attractive to kids.

When I was a kid, sometimes we found a raunchy magazine with naked girls in it. As soon as we'd leave school, we'd hide in the woods to gaze at the ladies - and delight in the forbidden nature of what we had in our hands as much as the content itself. Because it was rare. Now porn is everywhere and it's just "meh..."

It's the same reason why neo-nazis in the US are a fringe phenomenon that most people look at thinking "What a bunch of idiots", whereas neo-nazism is gaining ground in Germany where it's actively repressed: make it illegal and it becomes attractive. In the US, it's totally legal and people can see just how much they don't want any part of it.

Requiring age verification to keep minors off porn will achieve the exact opposite.

He doesn't know about energy infrastructure. He knows about investment.

He's invested in those Texas companies he visited. What you're reading on his blog is PR.

He's totally not astroturfing for Infinium because he has a vested interest in its success, and totally not rooting for Mars Materials because he's invested in the company.

Remember people: don't be fooled by Bill Gates. He's still the psychopathic ruthless entrepreneur he was when he was running Microsoft. He hasn't turned into a harmless old man concerned with doing good around him. His Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just like all the other billionaires' foundations, has nothing to do with philanthropy and everything to do with hiding their wealth and not paying taxes. If you're not convinced, just browse its portfolio and see for yourself tne number of disgusting corporations it's invested in.

And here, old Billy is selling you his latest investments. He doesn't give two shits about clean energy.

But here it's a banal photo of a nice looking woman with a hat. There's no nudity, it's not gross. They could have used a man instead but they happened to use a woman. And even though the photo came from Playboy, they took care of cropping out what could be considered offensive.

So I don't know... All I see personally is a picture of a nice-looking, attractive human being that happens to be of the female persuasion - because at least biologically, last I checked, most humans fall in one of two categories, one of which being female.

Is it so wrong? What if they have used a man? Would men have had their pants in a knot since 1996 as women have over this photo?

But okay. I'll admit, maybe I'm too old to understand the butthurt here. There's a lot of other kinds of butthurt I don't really understand either lately, and I've just decided to shut the hell up and go with the flow personally, because there's no talking rationally to people about certain things anymore.

Therefore, in the interest of not offending anybody, I suggest using photos of alpacas and fire hydrants. I know some sexy-ass alpacas and some pretty hot fire hydrants!

The social elevator has stopped decades ago. You can do your very best at school, then in college to get a good degree, yet it all but guarantees that your fancy diploma will land you a job other than flipping burgers at McD.

Add to that AI, which is poised to make a lot of jobs students are studying for today obsolete, and you have a generation or two who just don't give a shit anymore.

I know that because my neighbor's teens also skip school all the time, and when their parents confronted them, they literally said "Why bother..." And the sad thing is, all their parents could say was "You still have a better chance at a better life with an education", which isn't exactly a great motivator.

Talk about dying on the wrong hill.

And Big Data has both.

So the AI companies' entire game is to find themselves a Big Data sugar daddy. OpenAI is Microsoft's bitch, and now Anthropic is Amazon's.

All I see here is Big Data entrenching their monopolies and turbocharging the dystopia.

You would think someone would do a modicum of research before subscribing to something as broad-ranging as a VPN service. Especially since, in theory, people who use a VPN do so to protect their privacy. And ESPECIALLY since the VPN was free.

Many software aren't that important and you can install them with a cursory check of what they do and who owns them before installing them. But some, like VPNs or browsers, are so central to one's personal life, and have such potential for abuse, that they absolutely require research. If an obscure company called Onavo proposed me a free VPN, you can be damn sure I'd find out who owns Onavo before installing anything.

If you install a VPN willy-nilly, you're reckless. Those people should have known better. Sorry but that's just the truth.

Privacy invasion on non-x86 platforms at last!

is like getting financial advice from Sam Bankman Fried: how did those people even think this was legit?