It's not a question of if it's going to be mandated it's when. And we will suck it down because we are nerds and nerds lean towards the libertarian side and it's the libertarian types that are pushing this from the top down.

Specifically Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted because AI slop is starting to infest his data sources that he sells for money.

All this age verification bullshit is just Zuckerberg and other billionaire types getting out ahead of the AI slop apocalypse so that they can continue to have access to training data that can be tracked back to real humans, so that they can slightly improve the value of their advertising products, and most importantly of all so that they can continue to monitor all of us and gather all our sweet sweet data without the data set rendered completely worthless by slop.

We will let them do it because folks are easily distracted by other issues when it comes to fighting for privacy or other consumer rights.

The 900 though is for the higher end option. Still you're looking at $600 for a PS5 with a disk drive now. If I'm comparing that to something like the Sega Genesis or super Nintendo that is more than either of them launched at adjusted for inflation let alone what they cost at this point.

It bugs me cuz it kind of feels like people who aren't well off are getting cut off from what used to be one of the few affordable hobbies. Yeah you could play Old hardware but it's hard to find players on old games... And playing newer games as part of the hobby.

And of course you have to know about those games. It's hard to be a dumb kid and we were all a dumb kid at some point and you're not necessarily going to be able to find that cool game that a bunch of people are playing...

They did it overnight. It was done across all retailers so it was coordinated. I doubt you can find a retailer that isn't selling it for the increased price now even though obviously it's the same old stock that you could have bought last week for $100 or $150 cheaper.

It's amazing how quick they can reprice things to screw us consumers over.

Criminalizing drugs completely changes us politics. We learned a long time ago that the reason drugs were criminalized was so that the right wing could go after the left wing because statistically working class people are more likely to take drugs. Nixon's people came out and just admitted it because they felt guilty. The entire purpose of the drug war was and always is political.

Because of that you are never going to see things like this used properly and legalized which is a shame because psychedelics have been shown repeatedly to be a game changer for people with post traumatic stress disorder. And there are a lot of people with PTSD beyond soldiers.

The catch is that for it to work you need to do it under Dr supervision generally. You need someone there who can carefully guide you through the process. Just dropping a tab of acid isn't usually going to work. So by criminalizing it an entire group of people whose lives could be transformed or just left out in the cold. But compared to the billions and billions of dollars that can be made using the drug war to win elections that's a small price to pay.

And of course because we have been conditioned to view talk about politics as dirty anytime you bring this up you're guaranteed to piss everybody off. It is no coincidence that you are conditioned not to talk about your salary with your coworkers or your political beliefs.

Fun fact the reason rural towns tend to be right wing is because there is usually one extremely wealthy landowner who runs the show and if you deviate slightly from orthodoxy then he's the only employer in town and he runs the church and everything else and you're basically persona non grata.

I bring it up because it's another way that the discussion and debate in our country is locked down to the benefit of people who do not have your best interests at heart

For a company that blows through 60 billion dollars a year like it's nothing... And this is the pilot. Meaning that a lot of people are coming in buying ads because they do not yet know how effective those ads will be.

We got a preview of how effective the advertisements are. Amazon and a couple other companies tried to use AI chatbots to do website sales. The results were basically a disaster with a 30 to 40% drop in conversion rate compared to the same product on the website. In other words people were 30 to 40% less likely to buy from a chat bot then from just going to a website.

Internet advertising does not work. The only reason it continues to survive is scams and large advertising firms convincing people to buy into it even though it's completely ineffective. It kind of sort of can work for branding exercises like letting you know that the Ford motor company exists but that doesn't sell specific products it just creates a rough vibe.

What does work is influencers. That's where the real money is to be made. And I could see AI influencers taking over from real humans to some extent but the reason influencers work is the parasocial relationships so that's going to be tough to maintain when people find out it's not a real person which is going to happen sooner or later.

If AI ever gets to the point where it can outperform human beings at finding defects then there's going to be a major issue with world powers.

That's because right now if you really want to hack somebody's data you can do it. There is a company out of Israel that will sell you software if you have enough money had enough connections and that software can break into just about any phone in existence. If they can break into the phones they can get past most encryption mechanisms.

So the question is what happens if intelligence agencies and law enforcement can no longer get data when they really want it.

I'm not so naive to think that is going to be a glorious time of freedom.

Facebook for example is facing an existential crisis from AI slop. There is so much slop and it is so hard to tell from the real content they are having a hard time getting data they can sell. Advertising rates are also at risk although it's less of an issue because as it stands advertising on Facebook is pretty useless and largely done out of habit. But the risk of slop overwhelming their data collection is a much bigger deal.

I bring it up because Facebook didn't just roll over and die. They are going around the world buying off politicians and getting laws passed requiring age verification that will in turn let them identify real users from bots so that they can continue to collect your data and sell it to their advertisers and governments and whatnot.

My point being that when a large powerful group faces a problem they solve it. And when somebody with that much money in power has a problem and they solve it it's usually to your detriment and mine.

What I would expect is that we are going to lose more freedoms. And any attempt to save those freedoms will fail because at the end of the day we would have to vote for politicians that would protect those freedoms and I think the 2024 elections proved that it's pretty easy to get people to do the opposite if you dangle cheap eggs in front of them...

This is that super bowl ad bullshit. The Epstein class wants all of us to accept and enjoy a complete surveillance State and 24/7 tracking of every single thought and action that goes on in our lives.

So they were looking for ways to package that because obviously having cameras and tracking on you 24/7 isn't a good thing.

They have landed on pets and protecting children. Honestly it's working reasonably well. People keep setting up their own surveillance networks and handing them over to the Epstein class. Meta and Planitir have been going around buying laws to require age verification and operating systems and the internet. This is especially important because AI slop is becoming endemic and it's becoming hard for the platforms to tell the difference between the AI slop and the actual human content and if your job is to sell user data and advertisements you can't really do that if your data set is full of bots.

And he is a known idiot so there is good reason to doubt anything and everything he says and by extension the FBI.

If you look at the credentials of the people in charge of the country right now it's a who's who of has been bloggers and TV show hosts. This was on purpose. The voters gave us Trump and Trump wanted yes men.

Privately every single person in Trump's administration is terrified he's not going to get a third term because if he doesn't then they don't have any of that sweet sweet supreme Court granted presidential immunity and they're all wrong prison.

It's one of the things that makes the right wing so effective. The centrists are really just looking to put a feather in their cap and run some committee meetings. Keep things going smoothly. The right wing is so full crooks and lairs every single one of them is fighting for their freedom because if we ever start enforcing laws again they're all going to prison. Steve Bannon for example has been bailed out twice now by Trump and the Republican party.

Honestly Windows 7 and 10 are fine. Windows 11 is an absolute shit show. I don't care how fast your hardware is it is so painfully slow

I'm guessing it's mostly just him complaining about getting shot down for dates and forcing his way into locker rooms to drink beer.

Last time Trump was President famously they kept him from having access to classified information as much as possible because he kept leaking it and so did everyone around him. Trump didn't like that so this time all the adults in the room are gone and it's all toddlers. It must really suck to be an American intelligence officer or asset right now. I mean we had people restraining the stupidity back in 2016 and they are all gone now and the last time the number of dead intelligence officers and assets shot through the roof. These days I suspect they have a life expectancy comparable to a drain fly.

So companies opened literally thousands of data centers that use huge amounts of electricity and water both of which are increasingly in short supply.

Now they have basically unlimited money because they are dangling the possibility of freeing the Epstein class from their long-standing dependency on us filthy filthy peasants.

But the problem is they don't quite have unlimited power and people have noticed how terrible the data centers are for their communities so they can't just keep building them.

So because of that they are starting to have to prioritize what their data centers are going to support and to do. At least in the short term. They are still building data centers here and there and they are gradually getting state laws changed by buying off State legislatures.

The Epstein class is always been really big on buying up the state legislatures. They are big and powerful enough that they can use them to ram through anything they want no matter what voters actually want but they aren't so small and numerous that they're too expensive or troublesome to buy up. And it can be hard to buy a national government completely.

First off about 60% of people never move from where they were born. Of that most of them move for work.

Second of all it is perfectly fucking reasonable that you should be able to move to any major city or town and not have to worry about whether or not you have water. Having water is one of the most basic elements of functioning civilization.

I am so sick of the absurd length and excuses people come up with to blame individuals for systemic problems just so they can preserve some kind of weird libertarian worldview where we don't actually have to take care of each other.

Meanwhile the reason is reservoirs are low is largely because we fucked up the water cycle with climate change. We didn't need to but it helped corporate profits and it got a few men closer to being trillionaires

And we are on track for another 1,500 this year

I think you're having a hard time with the scale of what's going on because it's numbers that aren't normal for human beings

But I seem to remember them all being pretty crazy expensive for what you got. I guess it would be probably quieter than the equivalent Windows PC or hackintosh but most of the models I see out in the wild are the really expensive ones that would have sold for $5,000 and up

A quick search shows 5 million gallons daily. The Southwest states are currently fighting over the Colorado River or what's left of it and everyone wants to build data centers there because they get very few natural disasters. I think some parts of Arizona get big dust storms but those are easy enough to deal with. And the rest of the Southern United States doesn't even have those.

Remember it's not just about how much water an individual data center uses it's about how much water is available to that specific community.

Never mind the fact that we are seeing dozens of these data centers built. A large city might use 100 million gallons a day so the 10 data centers you might easily see near a large city could guzzle 50% of the water.

All of this because the rich don't want to have to pay people and they don't like to have to pretend to be civil to consumers or employees