CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.

The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.

It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.

At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.

No, there are all kinds of information the government has that are legitimately not available. Sensitive data on private citizens, for example, which is why people are worried about unvetted DOGE employees getting unfettered access to federal systems. Information that would put witnesses in ongoing criminal investigations at risk. Military operations in progress and intelligence assets in use.

The problem is ever since there has been a legal means to keep that information secret, it's also been used to cover up government mistake and misconduct. It's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep things from its citizens *if there is a specific and articulable justification* that can withstand critical examination.

And sometimes those justifications are overridden by public interest concerns -- specifically when officials really want to bury something like the Pentagon Papers because they are embarrassing to the government. "Embarrassing to the government" should be an argument against secrecy, because of the public interest in knowing the government is doing embarrassing things. In the end, the embarrassment caused by the Pentagon Papers was *good* for the country.

All you need to know about RFK's fitness for office is out in public for everyone to see.

Well, under some conditions an unique movie car *would* be copyrightable. The case where the car is effectively a character is just one of the ways you can argue a car to be copyrightable.

Copyright is supposed to protect original creative expression, not ideas or functional items, which may be protected by *other* forms of intellectual property like trademark or patents. This is because copyright protects *creative expression*. It doesn't protect ideas, or functional items. A car is a functional item, so *normally* it isn't protected. But to the degree a car in your movie has unique expressive elements that are distinct from its function, those elements can be copyrighted.

But the plaintiff still wanted to claim that he owned the design of the car, so his lawyer looked for a precedent that established that cars can sometimes be copyrighted even though they are functional items, and he found the Batmobile case, where the Batmobile was ruled to be a prop that was *also* a character. Because he cited this case, the judge had to rule whether the Batmobile ruling's reasoning applied to this car, and he decided it didn't. The car may be unique and iconic, but that's not enough to make it a character.

Sadly, based on experience I think you are wrong. Employees who screw up are often not fired, or are replaced with employees just as bad.

There's a reason there's a common saying that "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys." It's because it's very common for employers to accept mediocre or even poor work if the employees doing it are cheap enough. I'm not anti AI -- not even generative AI. I think with AI's ability to process and access huge volumes of data, it has tremendous potential in the right hands. But generative AI in particular has an irresistible appeal to a managerial culture that prefers mediocrity when it's cheap enough.

Instead of hiring someone with expensive thinking skills to use AI tools effectively and safely, you can just have your team of monkeys run an AI chat bot. Or you can fire the whole team and be the monkey yourself. The salary savings are concrete and immediate; the quality risks and costs seem more abstract because they haven't happened yet. Now as a manager it's your job to guide the company to a successful future, but remember you're probably mediocre at your job. Most people are.

According to economics, employers stop adding employees when the marginal productivity of the next employee drops to zero. What this means is that AI *should* create an enormous demand for people with advanced intellectual skills. But it won't because managers don't behave like they do in neat abstract economic models. What it will do is eliminate a lot of jobs where management neither desires nor rewards performance, because they don't want anything a human mind can, at this point, uniquely provide.

Being a machinist takes a lot of training, but itâ(TM)s a good job. Being a paid monkey who loads billets in a machine and pushes the buttons heâ(TM)s told isnâ(TM)t being a machinist, and isnâ(TM)t really a better job than pushing buttons on a computer keyboard.

I think we should make a distinction between "AI" and "AGI" here. Human intelligence consists of a number of disparate faculties -- spatial reasoning, sensory perception, social perception, analogical reasoning, metacognition etc. -- which are orchestrated by consciousness and executive function.

Natural intelligence is like a massive toolbox of cognitive capabilities useful for survival that evolution has assembled over the six hundred million years since neurons evolved. The upshot is you can reason your way to the conclusion that you can remove the blue block from underneath the red block without disturbing the red block, but then metacognition uses *other* mental faculties will overrule this faulty conclusion. Right there you have one big gap between something like an LLM and natural intelligence (or AGI). LLMs have just one string to their bow, so they can't tell whether they're "hallucinating" because detecting that requires a different paradigm. The narrow cognitive capabilities of generative AI means it requires and engaged human operator to use safely.

For many decades now I've heard AI advocates claim that the best way to study natural intelligence is to try to reproduce it. I always thought that was baloney: the best way to study natural intelligence is to examine and experiment with animals that possess it. What AI researchers try to do is to write programs which perform tasks that previously could only be done by humans. That's why when any AI technique starts to work, it's not AI anymore. But these tasks are so restricted, and the approach taken is so uniformed by actual psychological research, that I doubt that these limited successes tell us anything about natural intelligence.

Until, maybe, now. Now that AI has reached a point of unprecedented impressiveness, I think it teaches us that reductive approach to AI we've been taking won't generate systems that can be trusted without human oversight. That doesn't mean these systems aren't "AI" by the field's own Turing test.

A bit of an exaggeration, but let's assume it's exactly right. It's irrelevant. The conditions in the Archaen Eon or the Cretaceous Period tell us nothing about what would be good for *us* and the other species that currently inhabit the Earth. What matters to species living *now*, including us, is what would is typical of he Quaternary Period. Those are the conditions we've evolved to survive in.

Says who? In any case, there have been at least four major ice ages prior to the Quaternary Period (past 2.6 million years). The Quaternary represents less than 1% of the time in which the Earth has had major ice sheets.

This is just wrong. Since 1990 the rate of change of global average temperature has been around 2 C / Century. It's never reached 1 C / Century before on a global basis so far as we know. Of course there have been regional events in the 1 C/ Century range, like the termination of the Younger Dryas, but that high rate of warming was regional and those regions experienced catastrophic mass extinctions.

There is no "right" temperature for the Earth. There isn't even a "normal" one. Humans, if we continue to exist as a species for another million years, will experience states of the Earth that will look very alien to us, and they'll like it that way because that's what they'll be used to. The problem for us right now is the rate of change is beyond what we would experience as economic *stress*, and well beyond the levels that triggered mass extinctions in the geologic past.