That would have been an interesting angle, but I don't see 24/7 as the crux of the problem. The police-state/authoritarian personality is not crucially dependent on surveillance. If that were the case, then East Germany should still be going strong.

I can actually recall a stop-and-frisk scenario that convinced me the cops can find SOMETHING to make an issue of if they search carefully enough. Asking for a friend who feels lucky the police settled for a hundred bucks?

My own feelings are mixed. I'm a big believer in the truth and I don't have sufficiently negative words to capture my true feelings about liars. However I also think there are cases of "You can't handle the truth" and some of these cases might even involve police officers.

Still spanned about a quarter of the discussion...

That's why they stink?

Oh, wait. I meant "spell", but they and their "you can't blame me if you don't know who I am" ideas do stink, too.

I should include some flavor of the old joke about mud wrestling with pigs, but that would take effort and the propagation only spanned about 1/6 of the discussion (by ye olde scrollbar metric), so such effort isn't justified.

But a joke related to the story? Can AIs solve the AC slop crisis? Or a joke about prison for ACs, coming real soon if'n AC actually lives in the wrong place.

Just joking. It's already arrived in a couple of places. I just don't want to name them because I might get put on a (yet another?) list.

I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.

Also makes you wonder how many officials are getting kickbacks from SafeSpace Global for this.

IIRC, a "recall" is a notification of a defect in a car that needs addressing. If that can be done OTA, it's still a recall.

A coffee snob? Just the human to ask in lieu of an AI (which will just tell me whatever it thinks I want to here).

I've been wondering whatever happened to percolated coffee. I'm guessing it tastes bad, but I didn't start drinking coffee until decades after I last saw a percolator.

Okay, I think you deserve the Funny mod but I also think it was a weak FP.

Yeah, my Subject is worse, but... The thing that is going wrong is that we are all part of a mad experiment. Some of the people doing the experiment do have good intentions, but the Waymo robotaxi that tries to follow that road... Well, you know where that road goes.

But it's a much bigger problem that the humans controlling the various flavors of the experiment have only one intention: MORE MONEY. They already have more money than any human needs or can possibly use, but they need more money ASAP. I personally rate Thiel and Musk as the top poster children for that madness.

And what is the main experiment? Daily exposure to alien intelligence that too often seems smarter than we are. Not difficult to seem smarter than me in the robotaxi case since I was never a great driver. I'm even remembering a tractor accident in a construction area... Which reminded me of a truck accident involving construction stuff...

Along the lines of the response I might have written if the reply you are replying to was more substantive and cohesive. The inline response format basically lacks sincerity and is mostly used these years to break things out of context in search of cutting responses to "win" the "argument". I only noted one area of possible agreement that might have justified an attempt to respond. I think he [young? MIPSPro with an 8-digit ID] was saying "We can't get there from here", and we would probably agree that "there" is some sort of better place and "here" is the status quo, but the underlying philosophies remain completely incompatible... Dare I say incommensurable? In particular I didn't detect much comprehension of my ideas or any requests for clarification. Rather it sounded like he thought it was a chance to grind his axe and you identified the Libertarian axe.

With the right hype, and a high enough price tag on the machine, the coffee snobs will be all over this.

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

You got me to do the research. Turns out the major accomplishment of the YOB administration is reviving Sharpie manufacturing in Tennessee. Take that, you foreign adversaries and heathens!

c/I came to mind/came to mind/

Minimal edit, though I was probably thinking of writing something like "came to my mind".

Too bad the longer discussion apparently generated no Funny. At least not according to the precious moderators.

NAK

Valid points, perhaps well made, but undercut by the vacuous AC Subject that you propagated. Lazy? Or just unthinking? You undercut your own position and the main result appears (by the scrollbar metric) to be helping AC "guide" half of the discussion.

As usual, my own thoughts tend to wander into nether regions, but I wonder whether it would be possible to reach any sort of agreement about what constitutes a good discussion. It is certainly my impression that there used to be a lot of them on Slashdot, but these days? Not so much. I also noticed that Slashdot appears to be down to its final editor.

So here's my funny idea how to pollute the Slashdot conversations with AI support. The latest owners (whoever?) should recruit a couple of AIs for editorial slots. Let's go all pie in the sky. Let's include enhancing the moderation system to also evaluate the work of the human and inhuman (dare I say subhuman?) editors. Which editor picks the best stories in terms of producing those "good discussions" we somehow agreed were good? Which editor produced the best summaries that induced the most humans to actually look at the fine articles? Heck, why not even consider which editor was least attractive for AC drivel, with or without AI support for extra slop.

Small difference: drugs are known to be harmful, and illegal. The harm of social media to developing children has only recently been documented

If it is known that social media harms kids, then doesn't the state share some of the blame? Why is there no law?
If it is not known (or only recently came to light), can you really blame the social media companies? You could blame them for trying to block relevant legislation, but not for harm done in the past.
If the harmful effects were known to the companies and they kept it quiet, then you'd have a case, morally speaking. Bit like the tobacco firms.