There's no evidence to support the assertion that tight election results leads to better governance and anecdotals are inconsistent at best; not least because when elections are tight people running for elections have a strong incentive to do things that sub-groups of the population care passionately about if the wider population won't change it's voting intentions based on it. They are also far less likely to do things that are in the broad interest of the state and its people UNLESS that will lead to them retaining voters they already have or will attract voters they don't already have.

It's really interesting that you chose Mass for your example of the downsides of a party being dominant. I don't live there but it's consistently held up as an example of a US state with great education, healthcare, general wellbeing, and making decisions in the long term interests of its population.

It does make me laugh that a lottery, which literally exists to get players to put more money in than they get out on average is somehow fine but someone buying lots of tickets is somehow a crime.

This is what is depressing about the current situation. AI target acquisition could help avoid innocents being killed but that would be dependent on the people employing it caring it about that and it's clear at the moment that they don't.

For brevity's sake I'll be direct. Putting aside arguments about inevitable developments, if a person can accurately assess if a potential target is legitimate or not and has time to do so safely then there is no need for an AI, thus the core advantage of AI will be in determining things that people can't determine accurately or doing so faster than people can. If what you end up with is an AI looking at data and saying shoot to a human operator who can't determine accurately for themselves OR doesn't have time to determine who then pulls the trigger then there is no meaningful difference between this and a computer pulling the trigger directly.

Spoken like someone who gets caught up in theoretical semantic arguments instead of comprehending reality. The point of unlimited plans is that consumers like knowing how much something will cost, even if in theory the cost will likely be higher than PAYG and that companies really like subscription based income. For 99.9% of people unlimited services are effectively unlimited because they can use it as much as they want without issue; the fact that someone can't buy an unlimited gym membership and then move in 24/7 while true is entirely irrelevant and aside from a few pedants no one wants 'unlimited' to be replaced with 'not limited within a broad acceptable use range' in common discourse.

This is the same person who in the same statement said he'd refuse to tip if they gave someone else at the table the check; you really think they aren't thin skinned enough to be upset by someone else acknowledging their wife. I'd say it was telling that they didn't say they felt the same way if the waitstaff flirted with them in-front of their wife, but I'm pretty sure that's because it's inconceivable it'd ever happen.

You need to get back on your meds. Nothing about this article is concerning to anyone with a passing understanding of what is happening. AIs can already choose to communicate in different ways, they already know about concepts like encryption. It would be blindingly obvious to most people that an AI that wasn't smart enough to work this out without being programmed isn't going to be smart enough to plan and execute the extinction of mankind.

If you have to link to the Daily Mail to back up your position then it's a pretty safe bet your opinion is wrong.

You may want a world where everyone is fingerprinted, DNA registered etc automatically and that all phone activity is logged and available to law enforcement automatically; plenty of other people see this as a massive risk to civil liberty because you can't control how that information will be used or misused once it is collected. You want to bet someone like Trump or Nixon wouldn't be happy to find whistleblowers highlighting abuses like Watergate using this information, or are you naive enough to think the checks and balances are sufficient to stop abuse...

Don't disagree with your general point but your wrong on when Twitter started requiring logins. Twitter was bought by Musk in late 2022 and started restricting viewing without an account in mid-2023.

Did Mark Twain have that plan at a point where copies of his works could be made by anyone and distriuted as physical and digital copies within hours of release if it wasn't for copyright protections? If not, it seems a little redundant to claim it provides insight in a completely different context.

How definitive your claim about Facebook is says a lot about lack of consideratiion you've given the issue before commenting. Facebook are investing billions in this area and are paying very generously for some of the data they use. If they hadn't torrented the works and their options were spend some money or not have the material they would happily have spent a large amount of money for it.

I'm a long way from happy with copyright law as it stands but arguments against entirely against it need to be a lot more persuasive than those.

Do we really want to encourage a world where users can just filter out the existence of other types of people they don't approve of? Once they've sorted out blocking the concept of gay people would you also advocate them adding buttons to filter out black people, asians, mixed race relationships, women in positions of leadership, disabled people so that people who want to discriminate against them can do so more easily as well?

Figures that someone this obsessed with woke is enough to not understand the redundancy in saying PC correct.

I'm sure your experience is valid, but my anecdotal evidence has been much more positive. In programming I've found that ChatGPT, I have less Copilot experience, is good as an assistant to people developing applications. At the more simplistic level it is more effective that searching for information via a traditional search engine, and as the employees become more capable it can be used to save some time writing relatively generic code for defined requirements. I'm sure when you get to people who are fulltime developers of complicated bespoke solutions it will become increasingly useless.

It's a long way from perfect but it feels like a considerable enhancement on traditional search.

I don't disagree with your summary, but I think I take away a different context. Regardless of your view of individual laws, how viable it is to enforce them etc etc that doesn't make refusing to enforce laws more or less of a legal and political issue. Trump supporters likely now believe that the TikTok ban was a dangerous infringement of free-speech as justification in the same way democrats might have defended their party doing something similar when it aligned with their views.

I'm completely agreed that this will likely only be the start of a wave of likely even more egregious illegal acts but what did anyone expect? What has anyone done to try and moderate the scope a president has towards totalitarian rule by fiat in the years after Trumps first term when it was patently obvious that the checks and balances barely held that time?

It makes way more sense than your response which is just parroting refuted, false, political claims. For example California made it easier to controlled burn a few years ago, they did recently restrict it but that was specifically because things were so dry the risk of any type of burning was too high. I'd like to be surprised that people are quick to jump on events like this that can kill or ruin people's lives to make false political attacks but sadly that's pretty much the MO of the right these days.