It's a literal Mussolini quote.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini

Why not both? A good salesman will be able to provide the same value whilst charging more. Probably one of the jobs that you'd find companies don't hand over to AI.

No, I don't need to give you apologies for my correct analysis of your behavior. If you go and shit in the middle of the street I judge you. If you go and hand over other people's data to the big corporates I judge you. No problem here. I'm not putting everyone else down, just those people that choose to do evil. Especially those people that do it so thoughtlessly that they probably aren't even aware of having done it.

It's not enough. The value of electricity is extremely variable based on both location, time and the extent to which it fits with previous plans for electricity. The price that they pay will vary depending on time but if they are coming in with new, unpredicted, demand then the cost of satisfying it becomes even higher and they should be paying even more per unit than the other people that are more or less following what was predicted.

On the other hand, if the AI people can move their demand to places and times with spare electricity, for example the North of Scotland when it's windy, that would mean they could quite rightly get very cheap electricity and not really cause any problem for anyone.

I guess this ends up as ethics vs law and how you see that. As I said, my decision has been that I don't enrich by not buying

Android itself is clearly owned by google in a privacy sense, but you do get the freedom to install your own software in a way that Apple never allows. Android devices with unlocked bootloaders and operating systems converted to one of the Android Open Source project based alternatives such as LineageOS are approximately owned by the person possessing them. GrapheneOS is reportedly privacy respecting, though I haven't used it yet so can't comment on usability. Whether that's worth the hassle, though, is a question only you can answer. You'd want to be quite experienced with them before starting recommending them to others I'd think.

I wouldn't. I'd start with everything free and get the songs into a free environment.

Personally I try to completely boycott the commercial music industry. If I want/need to listen to something from them I use one of the free streaming services and avoid delivering revenue where I can. I look for music from alternative sources where possible. I buy old CDs and the like.

If I wanted to start from the situation like your flatmate, I'd consider my ethics on that. I don't make unlicensed copies myself because I don't want to encourage use of their products, however you might consider it reasonable to use unlicensed copies where they are doing something unethical like running a "rental" model contrary to the reason that they have been allowed to have copyright. IMHO, copyright in the US was allowed only where it leads to more, unprotected works in public access. The US supreme court has criminally expanded the rights of copyright holders to allow DRM and rental. You would be justified in making unlicensed copies to get around the supreme court's breach of the constitution.

In the case that you have accept that logic, the thing is to get software which exports a list of the songs and playlists you have and then get copies from wherever available on the internet and move them all into an app like VLC that can be used both on an iPhone and elsewhere. Gradually move away from an iPhone to a device you actually own.

Firstly, not everyone, because I've made it clear I understand that there are those that have good reasons like being forced by corporate. Secondly I am accepting comments like "I've got software I can't move" and I guess people know that Microsoft will eventually force them off Window 10, so that's an okay excuse. Getting a little bit of a raise never hurts though.

However, having said that, the people that end up using the spyware edition just because they like it deserve a certain level of contempt. Nobody processes just their own data, they have their friends and children's addresses. They know about what the small companies that support them are doing. They are trusted by others. When you stay on a system that's spying on you that is socially irresponsible. Continuing to collaborate with Microsoft through choice is certainly not as bad as murder but it's definitely a worse social evil than parking in disabled parking spaces.

That has already happened. Note the discussion around DeepSeek and the Tiananmen Square protests the Chinese government likes to hide from their population. The Chinese government identified this as a bug in the AIs and reported it at ring 0 priority. The AI companies understood and "fixed" that bug.

No, think is one of those "I know it when I see it things" like pornography. There are a bunch of edge cases and places where we aren't sure and we don't agree. However, there are straight forward simple cases where everyone who's engaging in good faith (another of these) can clearly see that it's pornography even if they aren't properly able to define the word itself. Since nobody has come up with a good definition of thinking so far, demanding one as an entry to the debate is no good.

When a user cuts and pastes from an LLM straight into an answer we know that's not "thinking".

When a clever lecturer comes up with a question which LLMs get wrong 99% of the time, which most people will cut and paste into the answer but which the "thinking" student will spot and will be able, after a bunch of work, to correct then we really see that both the lecturer and the student were "thinking".

Personally I'd start by assuming that the Chinese university teachers are far ahead on this and that they know exactly how to force LLM users to think. The current arrogance of many in the West who think that China isn't up to their standard suggests to me that either we're seeing the effect of Chinese/Russian social network manipulation or the West is setting itself up for a fall.

They know they are frightening educated / intelligent people off. They already make an enterprise edition so they could just make it easy to switch off all the spyware and run as normal, possibly with a small charge. Instead they decided that if you aren't willing to be and pay to be enterprise and you aren't a sucker who lacks understanding of the value of privacy then they don't want you.

To be fair, I'd probably count that as "forced by corporate". It's the corporation making your software, but it's a corporate decision. Still, if you are in that situation you should be desperately trying to get an alternative. If there's an application you are using there's probably enough other people that it would be worth getting together and funding an F/OSS alternative to escape onto.

They've likely realized that suckers are much more profitable and that the worse they make the OS the higher percentage of suckers they get. Anyone remaining on Windows by now is either forced by corporate or educationally subnormal.

Ah. Yes of course. You'd need the raw data with those broken out to even be able to understand what's going on, probably not something the researchers are motivated to provide.

I guess the question is "what do you expect the answer to be?". I'm not shocked, but I wish it was lots less.