For several years, I had Comcast cable TV because it was $10 less per month to have Internet + TV than just Internet (and Comcast waived the cap if you had both, but enforced the cap if you had Internet only.)

This was several years ago. Now there are other providers that service my home, and it is cheaper to just have internet. (a LOT cheaper)

Reality does not care whether you believe in it or not. Change is happening. People are making it worse.

In a few generations things are going to be unrecognizable. Floods, droughts, famine, disease, and wars over increasingly limited resources. They are already happening, but they will intensify.

Ignore it if you wish. You will be dead long before it gets bad.

How?

By making public education a public good, paid for by the public (aka government, aka taxes) and setting real requirements to participate: grades and test scores to get in to college, can't keep up = flunk out. Community College and Trade Schools for the rest of us.

Teachers have to teach for a living. Drop "publish or perish" requirements. Researchers are not teachers. Research institutions are not schools (although they could offer internships for students to learn practical research skills while contributing to a researcher's work.)

Dorm life should be more like boot-camp living and less like a luxury vacation. A shared room, simple nutritious dining hall food, campus work-requirements, etc. This will reduce overhead costs.

Private schools can continue to charge whatever their customers will pay to be "elite". They can admit a percentage of exceptional (but $ poor) students and continue to teach the best and brightest as well as the richest in exchange for tax breaks.

Remove all government involvement in student loans. Lenders will stop loaning money for private school education without government backing. Private schools outside of the elite private universities will fade away.

Make Education Great Again. No really -make it something to be earned and valued instead of just another check-box on the job application filter.

"Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed?"

If so, STOP doing that!

Go outside. Experience sunshine. Meet real people. Live life while you can.

The paywall does not actually block access to the information: it just uses javascript to halt display of the text by your browser -but it already sent the text to your browser. To Perplexity, the javascript is just another block of text sent as a response to the wget request.

The NY Times could actually require a successful login to access data on their website -but that would prevent search index spiders from cataloging what they are offering. Then only their subscribers would see their content... and not the random people reading the web who might become subscribers if only they knew the NYT had such great offerings. The NYT really wants to attract those random people.

Bypassing technological measure to violate copyright is a crime, even if those technical measures are easily bypassed. See [DMCA] 17USC 1201a

(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

UNLESS the intended use of the copyrighted materiel is non-infringing (such as news reporting, scholarship, or research) See [DMCA] 17USC 1201a

(1)(B)The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).

(1)(C)During the 2-year period described in subparagraph (A), and during each succeeding 3-year period, the Librarian of Congress, upon the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, who shall consult with the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce and report and comment on his or her views in making such recommendation, shall make the determination in a rulemaking proceeding for purposes of subparagraph (B) of whether persons who are users of a copyrighted work are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by the prohibition under subparagraph (A) in their ability to make noninfringing uses under this title of a particular class of copyrighted works. In conducting such rulemaking, the Librarian shall examine—
(i)the availability for use of copyrighted works;
(ii)the availability for use of works for nonprofit archival, preservation, and educational purposes;
(iii)the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research;
(iv)the effect of circumvention of technological measures on the market for or value of copyrighted works; and
(v)such other factors as the Librarian considers appropriate.

So, it may -or may not- be illegal to bypass the crappy paywall attempt in order to access the copyrighted materiel, depending on the use the materiel is put to, either by Perplexity or its users.

NIMBY

The court ordered OpenAI to log everything -all input and output- when the NY Times filed the lawsuit. These logs did not exist prior to the court order to begin recording them.

We (mostly) do not process our own oil supply in the US. Our refineries are built to work with imported crude. We export our crude oil, and import a different grade of crude oil. We would have to refit our refineries to use domestic supply.

If we want to be self-sufficient, and really fuck with the global economy, we should invest in refitting our refineries to process American crude. That would be a ballsy power-move for Trump to back.

Gotta keep the demand up so the profits can go UP. Drill baby drill!

The world is moving on from inefficient oil-burners whether we like it or not.

More than that:
- They cannot talk about what happens to them in the future.
- They cannot have lay people (outsiders who are not bound by a religious gag-order) come to the convent as they might report on what is done in the future.
- They cannot seek legal representation, no matter what happens to them in the future.

It is a deal with the devil.

You would need a paid subscription to an actual news service.

There will likely be a few that survive this transition by offering high quality content -but there will not be many of them, and they will not be giving it away for free.

Who cares? The concept is so last century that it is not relevant anymore.

New content is being produced faster than it can be consumed. There is no longer a value to it. The money is made by selling advertising views and by paid manipulation of the narrative. Nobody needs to clone yesterdays work when they can just generate a new work to sell today.

I dislike the idea of people leaving reviews while being to cowardly to sign their name (or pseudonym):
-When a reviewer's ID is attached to their review, their friends and family can see what they had to say: if you are foul-mothed or just rude, your grandma and your potential girlfriend can see it (not automatically, but it is there if they they care to look).
-It can also lend weight to a review. If BobSmith24 says they had a great time, and you personally know BobSmith24, you may actually trust the review.
-You can click on the reviewers ID and see the other reviews they have left and get a feel for what kind of things they had to say about various places. This tells you a lot about a person, and lets you judge their reliability -if you care.

As a small business owner, I do not generally reply to people's reviews -good or bad, what they have to say stands on its own merits. They are entitled to their opinions. The only replies I left were to people who were clearly confused or lying -complaining about physical features not present in my store.

We are blind men attempting to describe an elephant.
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