I'm in favor of enforcement of laws which protect rights, but it's cheap and easy to get such devices, and there are valid reasons for them to exist — like knives.

You could cook with only shorter knives. It would be a lot more difficult (I also cook) but it would be possible.

Young men will lose billions on it. Billions they don't have to lose. It will put them in a increasingly desperate situation when we are already putting them in a desperate situation because we have automated away the jobs they traditionally do.

Short-term crime will go up. Long term those young men will be organized into gestapos and secret police and pointed at you with guns.

Whatever else you think about ICE you need to realize that from Donald Trump's perspective they are his personal army at his beck and call. Now that is currently not true but there is work being done to fix that...

If you don't understand why that's a bad situation for you to be in I'm not sure what to tell you. But what I am trying to get across is that you can't just abandon large swaths of the population to be exploited. No matter how many guns you stockpile sooner or later you're going to run out of bullets before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.

I don't think most people who can afford a thousand dollars for a phone plan to keep their phone for longer than the 7 years Google will support their Pixel devices these days, nor do they want to buy a phone which has been out for very long. The poors will accept last year's iPhone, or an even older one, or the Shitty Edition bundled into their phone plan.

For a non-Pixel device you'd have a solid point, as most other Android phones have abysmally short support lifespans. Then again, many of those phones are so much cheaper you can buy one every three years...

It's partly end stage for a nearly dead country that causes us to have to talk about politics now.

But it's also partly because we didn't take politics seriously, and get involved enough in it. If we had discussed it a lot more sooner, maybe we wouldn't have to discuss it so much now.

Even if it could find the answer it might mess it up before it gave it to you. It might give you the right answer sometimes and not other times, especially if the right answer has changed...

Something that was initially impractical because it couldn't be used at scale but that advances in technology elsewhere suddenly made it useful for ton of applications.

Technology is not a one-way Street it's a complicated mess of back roads and by roads.

We have a lot of major disasters we are ignoring. Climate change, boomers dying and taking all the money with them causing a collapse in disposable income spending, AI taking all the water and electricity, fascism, etc etc etc.

But just for fun let's add another on the pile. Specifically we are running out of basic research.

Basic research is stuff you do that is not immediately profitable but is extremely expensive. For centuries we didn't do that and we called that time to dark ages.

The merchant class combined with world wars caused us to start doing some basic research funded by the government. A shitload of money was made and for a very brief period of time private industries like Bell labs were doing some basic research. It wasn't profitable enough so they stopped.

Billionaires want to be trillionaires so the government can no longer do basic research because all that money got turned into tax cuts and subsidies for the upcoming ultra Epstein class. This all happened to me mid to late 1980s and was finished by the late 1990s.

So we have been over 20 years without a serious push into basic research. But it's a pipeline. Basic research done today won't pay off for 20 or 30 years maybe longer.

This means that we are using up a resource most people don't even understand exists because it's way too complicated a topic to discuss.

I don't know exactly when the well will run dry but based on what I've read we're not too far off from it. We're going to start seeing advances slow and we have been relying on those advances to stay ahead of the rapacious Epstein class devouring money. Basically productivity has been rising so much that no matter how hungry they are they can't gobble up everything. But without those absolutely enormous productivity gains from all that basic research paying off after 20 or 30 years or more... Well it's going to bring everything screeching to a halt at exactly the same time everything else is going to shit.

And as usual people will blame the Democrats or whatever the local equivalent non-fascist party is and then shit's going to get real fun. What the Chinese call interesting times.

I mentioned it on another thread but I wish I had died before it all started to happen. There was this very brief period of time the baby boomers enjoyed when as long as you were reasonably white or lucky enough to be born in one of the nicer parts of America you made out pretty damn good. Those times are over.

Wikipedia wasn't banned, though one asshole did introduce a bill which tried.

You can't cite ANY encyclopedias after elementary school, whether it's claimed they are particularly inaccurate when they aren't, or not.

We would have fixed this with wind and solar already if the money holders didn't think nuclear was going to solve these problems any day now.

Into groups useful for large corporations owned by the Epstein class. They aren't there for you to learn and if you do that's a happy accident and the Herculean efforts of a teacher trying to go against the system.

This is partially why the cost of education per student is skyrocketing.

In the past it was really easy to sort the kids. It was basically two groups the ones who were teaching themselves and only needed a minimum amount of oversight, what we used to call academically inclined, and everybody else who was on their way to the factories and going to be taught just enough reading and math to be useful over there.

The factories are full of robots now so there's nothing for the second group of kids to do. What we've been trying to do at Great expense is actually teach those kids enough that they might be able to land a job and if we can't do that we can at least keep them out of the job market for a little while while we try to figure out what the fuck we're going to do with tens of millions of people who have no reason to be alive besides inherent limitless value of human life (I'll wait for everybody to stop laughing)

If you ever pay attention to Rich schools notice how expensive they are. That's not because of the marble in the walkways or the edible food in the cafeteria it's the small class sizes, large number of books and lots of paper for writing and lots of extra programs for things like the humanities and music where kids can learn critical thinking skills even if they don't just naturally have them.

If you look at how rich people teach their kids they don't do any of this experimental bullshit and they don't give them Chromebooks they use the same techniques we hammered out from about 1910 through about 1970. All the experimentation is done on the poor kids.

The point is you have too many people and nothing to do with them. We're running out of work and we are a society where if you don't work you don't eat.

AI breaks this entire system even faster than the factory automation did. It doesn't just expose the cracks it Rams a crowbar in between them and then uses a machine to pull them apart. Students can bypass the sorting mechanism designed to decide who is and isn't worthy of the attentions of the 1%. The teachers for their part are dumbfounded because they haven't ever quite come to terms with the fact that our education system does not serve the students it serves big business...

Sooner or later something has to give and I just kind of wish I had died before the shit hit the fan

Huh. I thought these guys were all about States Rights.

Apparently that only extends to telling women what they can do with their own bodies?

More than that, the seatback display on every Delta flight gives you instructions for how to connect to their real WiFi. If you join some random SSID that doesn't follow the instructions literally in front of your face, you deserve what you bought.

Found the guy who hasn't done an interstate move in at least 20 years.

So you don't think the Attorney General of California would have the ability to talk to industry experts, economic experts, and legal experts about this?

The industry is based in California, and has a very rich ecosystem of analysts and experts around it.
There's a lot of economic expertise inside and outside of the state government - including countless professors of economics in the University of California system which has several fine schools (UCLA, UC Berkeley).

Yes I'm sure as a lawyer, he didn't actually look at the law before filing a lawsuit. And the court he filed it in, I'm sure didn't bother reading it before accepting it and setting a hearing schedule.

What the hell are you on about.

Humanity is in the end stage atmospheric we're fucked fire... And the amount of fire is increasing.

If some people didn't spend political effort to make sure of that then this wouldn't be an issue.

Slashdot has ALWAYS been a place where we discussed politics. Cry harder.

Lots of assumptions happening there.

This sounds a lot like a professional sports team owner demanding hundreds of millions in stadium renovations or they are taking the team elsewhere.

And municipalities everywhere are learning that it's usually an idle threat, because they can't move the team without league approval, and leagues aren't interested right now in upending media markets they serve.