No he's too busy watching to gorilla channel to do that.

this device presumably needs temperature control, consumable chemicals, and strict biosecurity protocols in order to turn into a mass of goo*.

This doesn't seem like better. It seems like gee whiz in the same way a cat piano is gee whiz.

*I'd have said "in order to not grow intelligent life" but that would be one witticism too many in this context.

May I suggest Europe. Might need to brush up on your Russian. Or China, where there will be no need to change the tone, tenor, or target of your political pronouncements.

Rights work as a general concept because we don't have to think about the contradictions and conflicts too much. This is because most people will go along to get along, and not in the bad way.

We don't need id checks on the sale of matches and gasoline because arson is already a crime and nearly all people have enough of a sense of self preservation to not attempt it. Same with the dangerous chemicals under your sink, the sharp knives next to the sink, baseball bats, firearms, etc.

Same with pr0n and gore. The weirdos will seek it out. The nutters will attempt to recreate the worst of it. Normal people will neither engage with it nor take up arms against it, and raise their kids to do the same.

It's the neurotic busybodies who get everyone into trouble. Kinda the mirror image of the aforementioned nutters. I'm satisfied with telling my kids to stay away from the sharp knives and the stuff under the sink. My oldest for some blue state public school reason already thinks guns are bad so I'm sure a stern admonishment to not play with guns and not go looking for daddy's guns will do the job. And not get into trash on the internet either when the time comes.

And again: it works not because my word is law by fiat but because people, even little people, understand at a visceral if not intellectual level what's good for them and what's bad for them.

This "phone hypnotizes kids" stuff is exactly the same collectivist anti-human-agency nonsense as "guns make people kill" and "3d printers need firmware to make sure you're not making anything naughty."

You know...I can add and subtract but quite frankly I'm out of practice at paper and pencil multiplication and division. And I don't think I was ever taught to take square roots by hand. I can probably manage the recursive method if I had too, but I'd be slow.

I can still do "math" better than most people.

Fast forward ten or twenty years and I could see using ai for code when it's more mature and less borderline retarded with anything harder than scraping a webpage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Let's translate into political philosophy, for fun and profit.

The base of the pyramid is basic physiological needs. In terms of statecraft and economics...don't mess with the food supply and refrain from messing with water and electricity.

Right above that is physical safety. That means a lot of things, but what it does *not* mean is defunding the police or intentionally hobbling your military.

Way up in the stratosphere where only ivory towers can reach is "self actualization." That is to say, the luxurious and privileged place of opining about morals and ethics to the point where you believe your own propaganda.

It's certainly a good place to have your quandries and your problems. Much better than worrying about where your kids' next meal is coming from or whether you need to have your go bag ready before enemy tanks start rolling in the streets.

But it's also only possible to live at the top of the pyramid if Jack Nicholson is in fact standing on that wall keeping the chaos out.

You know, I'm both old enough to have kids and young enough to have grown up with unfiltered internet in the late 90s. And plenty of gore and sex in good old fashioned PG13 and R rated movies in the mid 90s.

Boys being boys, we got our share of nudity over 56k dialup and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of us didn't grow up into sex perverts and deviants. It's the genxers and boomers who couldn't really handle it apparently. Not sure what the greenhaired zoomers are on about, but they seem to be a small minority, vocal though they may be.

As for violence and gore in general? Maybr 2% of my broader social circle growing up seemed to be into that stuff. And they sought it out and found it pre internet too.

My point?

The world's been messy since forever and people managed to stay sane.

Scapegoating the phones or the social media or the whatever is a One Weird Trick that will work out as well as any other One Weird Trick well. If the kids see you seeking out the trash online, they will ape that behavior. If they see you living on your phone, they will do that too.

If the screen is a tool to a well-defined end, then it's going to stay a tool. If it is the end, then that's how it's gonna be treated. I just don't buy this witch hunt any more than I buy into any moral panic.

In the USA, understanding this is key. It's a giant organized voting block. There's "democracy" allowing collectivists to fondle the controls, again. Private schools regularly kick the dogshit out of public school results, with more than twice as many private school students getting a bachelors degree before 30. Not only that, but private school students regularly score 20 points higher in math and reading by 8th grade. Also, since private schools get better results for less money why not just close them down and let teachers compete for jobs like any normal person in the private sector has to? In other words, vouchers make way more sense than continuing to run a broken system that fails it's students more or less universally.

So much for the collectivist fantasy that government is the source of all good. In this case, it's literally institutionalizing harm to students to provide a retirement path for teachers. Realize folks that many public school teachers are on the bench, not teaching anyone, who never contributed jack shit to a 401k, and are getting retirement pay from publically managed pension funds that pose a huge risk to the taxpaying public.

If they try that with me, I'll just thank them for promoting me to overpaid consultant to clean up the ai mess.

You know who else was "taking matters into their own hands" a while back? Those dipshits who were torching cell towers because 5gcovidmicroships!1oneeleven!

With any kind of contract, the customer puts out a call for bids and vendors must voluntarily elect to respond. The fact they knew who and what they were choosing to do business with makes them look even stupider.

I'm in the business. When I was younger and prettier and interviewing for my first defense job, the graybeard interviewing me looked me square in the eyes and asked me: "You understand what we do here, and are okay with doing that yourself?"

Just like "i disagree" is not hate speech nor a hate crime, "i am going to shoot you before you put on that suicide vest and ride the bus" is not a war crime.

It's the school issued device that's the problem?

It's totally not the lax standards and the meh attitude to work that's permeated down to the kids from their millenial teachers. It's definitely the gizmo, the doodad, or the distraction that done it.

I've got a first grader in a rich boston suburb school. Yesterday was a snow day because it was blizzard conditions. Today was a snow day on account of it was too fucking hard to clear the foot of snow that stopped last night by this morning apparently. Tomorrow will be a half-day on account of we have a crap ton of half days because working five full days a week is for suckers. Also, no homework until high school because reasons having totally nothing to do with a quarter of the kids in town having fake diagnoses on file that entitle them to extra time on standardized tests.

It's a supply chain risk if the supplier flat-out declares their intention to cripple the product because it doesn't like it being used for military purposes.

Right to repair and all that?

Let's try a car analogy. All the Big 3 and a few nice manufacturers like Oshkosh make military vehicles. Let's say one of them gets a contingent of wokesters on staff who raise holy hell unless the ECU in one of these big trucks refuses to move if it detects a load consistent with a big ass gun mounted on the vehicle. "You can use it for an ambulance or a supply vehicle, but nothing icky like trying to kill the enemy," they'll say.

Or let's move it a little closer to the digital realm. Intel supplies computer chips and IBM supplies platforms and software to the military. "You can use our chips and OSes to manage logistics and do payroll, but if you have to calculate a firing solution for a gun, that violates our TOS. And maybe we put firmware in there to make it damn hard to do any kind of floating point calculations just to make sure?"