What part of that fiction has any connection with the reality of the 1%?

The social media platforms would rather have it treated like an R rated movie that kids can't get into than simply not run ads or show content for people they aren't explicitly connected to on the platform.

Because most people would opt for that.

Imagine only seeing content from people you follow and who follow you back.

Yes. We should all be our own FDA, EPA, and OSHA. That worked *really well* in the past.

The British traded spice. They didn't use it.

Even if we want oil to be the currency we use to manipulate the world, us using it is a very silly way to go about it because it just makes us susceptible to manipulation.

We're supposed to want OTHER people to be dependent on oil and for US to control it.

Instead it's just us shooting ourselves in the foot constantly. We're supposed to be hoarding oil to drive up prices. Not consuming it.

Yeah. I wish that were true. Trump was elected by a majority. And his current support numbers are still around 38%.
https://www.economist.com/inte...

It turns out the number of idiots if really high. And the ones running the country and enforcing the 'laws' include a lot of 'em.

I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

De Immenso et Innumerabilibus On the Infinite and the Countless By Giordano Bruno Of Nola

is essential reading. It sounds like 1950's sci fi.

From their site:
"drive up to 40 miles per day completely off the grid".

Even half that would cover all my driving needs for our 2nd car (2 person/2 car family).

The fact this was ever a question is a farce.

We all pay for the gas in our cars to get to work. We pay for the electricity that runs our homes and computers.

Somehow, big tech thinks they can just mooch instead of paying for the batteries for their toys.

Crypto and AI should have launched a great leap forward in clean energy.

All the oligarchs care about is profit, not legacy.

I hate that I can't run MS Office on my cluster of headless Linux servers.

The key problem is that AI isn't being used to make the final draft faster to write, it's being used to replace people to maintain a status quo.

They could hire more journalists to go out and do fact finding and come up with key quotes and key statements that AI could then weave into the final article. Journalists could spend a lot more time building the structure of a story than banging out the final article. This would also free them up to cover the local stories that often get ignored because there just isn't time for them.

If you can go to a community meeting with a tape recorder and a notepad and write down the angle and 10 key points, AI would put together a very compelling article so you can go off to the next one.

Most journalism is supposed to be written in a boring, just the facts manner. Exactly the kind of work suitable for a robot. After a human collects the facts.

Am I the only one that find "times as cheap" annoying? I really want it to be 1/3 the cost. Meh.

I'm also curious how many cycles it's good for when compared to other battery tech.

COBOL isn't a legacy language. It's domain specific language that is designed for exactly what banks need: high precision math without floating point errors.

Any Comp Sci student should be able to take what they learned and apply that to COBOL.

What actually sets COBOL devs apart is their attention to detail and ability to do math.

Even if backend banking code was written in TypeScript, they would still have to hire the best of the best to work on it. You can't have errors at that level.

If the employees are being paid for every hour they work or have stock to make up the difference, sure, maybe long weeks make sense.

But volunteering free labor so someone else can be rich is pretty foolish.

A junior developer earns $10 an hour because it takes them 10 hours to solve a problem.

A senior developer bills $100 an hour because the same 10-hour project takes one hour. The productivity gain is reflected in higher value, not lower pay.

If AI reduces audit time, that is a measurable productivity gain. But time reduction alone does not define value.

If AI also improves detection, reduces risk, and increases reliability, then the value of the audit may increase even as the hours decrease.

Pricing purely on hours assumes the service is nothing more than labor input. That ignores quality improvements, risk reduction, and reputational impact, which are often the real economic drivers of an audit.

There is room to balance time savings with cost savings. But focusing only on reducing fees risks treating AI as a cost cutter rather than a capability enhancer.

Instead of asking how much cheaper an audit can become, firms should be asking whether improved audit quality expands trust, strengthens legitimacy, and ultimately supports market growth.

Cutting costs can increase margins in the short term. Improving quality and legitimacy is what sustains them.

News at 11. Again. I mean... really, this time for sure.