more racist.

FTFY, even though I think AC was being intentional.

Closest I could find to the nub of the problem. Whether this is going to work would depend on very accurate weather AND climate modeling and I don't think we are anywhere close at this time. Due to butterfly effects, the prediction problem is probably unsolvable, so I think that means we would need a control system with extra capability that is constantly compensating for prior interventions. It reminds me of the fly-by-wire problem for aircraft with negative dynamic stability. Not even theoretically possible for a human to fly the thing if the computer burps.

I still don't know what AC was mumbling about, but the few posts on this story say all that needs to be said about the relevance of the EFF now.

Not worth much, but I do have a couple of takes on the topic. Main one in my Subject, but that's part of a general problem of broken economic models. The big donor may mean well, but the model only works until the donor starts calling bad shots, which is what always happens. But now I think even the "aligned business model" solution angle fails on the dimensional collapse problem, and we humans are NOT going to stop collapsing the dimensions. We're intrinsically simpleminded and will insist on more simplicity than reality involves.

Time for a "discussion" on building "trust" with Claude?

Yeah, same joke but AIs don't call for original humor. Still, I sadly thought the story had more potential for funny.

It'll have pretty much the same outcome. 8^)

When is the EU going to heave a censor to save people from such terrible treatment, European citizens need to be protected from anything anyone doesn't like.

Perhaps a fundamental difference between Europe and the heathens in 'Murrica. I was annoyed by some of meta's practices. Set my browser to not autoplay. But apparently EU needs to do the pecuniary extraction route.

Seriously, is there nothing that the EU doesn't try to extract money from? I'll bet they will fine anyone using comic sans font next, or Borders larger than 5 pixels. I mean really, we must protect our citizens!

Russians tried this in the 1990s. Seriously underwhelming, and not likely to be much better this time around.

I'm guessing it was a rush to FP but I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out your intention from that short teaser. You should have given us a hint, perhaps by speculating about the bribery. However I do think Facebook is only "donating" small amounts of cash and most of the YOB's "eternal gratitude" is based on past services rendered. (In the YOB's case "eternal" means about two weeks. Until some other shiny object gets his attention.)

I know it seems intrinsically off topic to mention books on today's version of ye olde Slashdot, but I've been reading a bunch of Facebook histories lately, and serendipitously I'm just now finishing Careless People: A story of where I used to work: Power. Greed. Madness. by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Seems to be a classic case of one of those roads paved with good intentions. I think she got too personal in places, but I think there were a couple of key omissions that bother me more. Most important involved the intrinsic self-contradiction in Zuck's denial of responsibility. So on the one hand Zuck is claiming Facebook didn't cause all those bad things, up to an including lots of deaths, but on the other hand, why are the advertisers giving Facebook so much money? If Facebook doesn't work as advertised to the people buying the ads on Facebook, then this defense becomes "Meta is a total fraud taking money for nothing."

I think the "Facebook as a drug" aspect also deserved much more consideration. The tobacco industry as a bad example did get mentioned once, but the entire internet.org => Free Basics scam is a classic drug dealer story. Giving away free samples to get the suckers hooked and turn the blind eye when the addicts start doing bad stuff to pay for their next fix. I actually think that psychological addiction has become a bigger threat to society than chemical addiction. In general psychology is bogus hokum, but the applied psychologists have learned several things about selling soap, widget cleaning services, and politicians (with the dirtiest widgets of all). (Not sure I should go into the historical details because of the ageism thing, but I remember free cigarettes with my C-rats, though I never made the transition to full addiction. I was saved by a psychological block against paying to literally burn the product?)

Another fundamental problem is at an even higher level and I'm still unsure how to describe it. One hand is the "unite the world with better communications" thing but the other hand is the "divide and conquer" tactics of the worst abusers of Facebook and Instagram. But all in all I definitely haven't found any evidence for Facebook/Meta making the world better. In the book she argues that this part is much worse than I thought, but I'm too personally inclined to lean in that direction so I want to reserve judgment and read a few more books...

I feel like I need to add the personal disclaimer thing... I decided Facebook was a seductive waste of time some years ago. I had one of the old university-linked accounts so I was on for a long time, but my solution was to cut it to 5 minutes/day using timers. I think I was probably using Facebook at least half an hour per day before that, but the five minutes was enough to see the main news from actual friends and it also broke the urge to visit Facebook, so many days got skipped entirely. Never felt like I was missing out. Then in 2022 I was assassinated on Facebook. There was no option to find out why, only an option to submit to Zuck or be dead, and I'm not much inclined to submit. I did exercise the option to download "my" data from Facebook and spent a while looking through the small amount of recent stuff, but didn't find anything interesting. Leaving me with the hypothesis that it was some kind of politically motivated hit job?

Well look here, "Many Americans would have done the same.

A little history for ya, superior being.

Did you know that at the start of the war, many Japanese Citizens were interred in Camps? Yes.

But there is a difference in the camps. the Japanese were not starved, they were well fed. They were not forced into Slave labor, and make no mistake, they were not gassed with the European's favorite gift gas, using Zyklon B. And they were let go eventually .

And here's the difference. We Americans are ashamed of that action. It was wartime, and well, many of us understand that while deplorable, it was a different time. There was a worldwide war happening, one in which the axis powers were killing "undesirables" en masse, and it was not a good thing to be in say Nanking or South Korea, during the Axis actions if you were female.

Meanwhile, your whataboutism is not true nor accurate, but you stood up for the holocaust by saying Americans would have done the same.

We did not, Europeans definitely did, and that is why you act all high and might5y, your deepest impulse didn't go anymore, just submerged a bit below the surface, ready to be enacted again when you get the chance.

How do you know he enjoys watching his wife have sex with other men? Or is that just projection?

Yup, and they still do that crap. While food is fairly well controlled, medicine is a disaster. As people become more and more expecting miracles in a pill, we're getting some freaky side effects.

Men are regularly put on meds that kill their ability to get an erection. A friend in his mid 30's was suggested to go on Cholesterol meds. I pulled him aside.. "You just got married last year, do you and your wife enjoy intimacy?" Oh hell yeah!" The you really need to check out the side effects of what statins do ."

Or constant fatigue, or permanent coughing.

And women have become victims of a constant and increasing antidepressant use, which has not branched out to prescribing antipsychotics. I suppose after they experience the chemical straitjacket and mental numbness, they might be about as "happy" as they can get - AKA numb - but yes, the sexual dysfunction, weight gain, and the special gift of Tardive Dyskenisia, those uncontrolled movements often kick in. But fear not, there are meds for TD - although one of the side effects is TD!

And that's the insane thing. We have all of this disinformation about things like vaccines. Yet people gobble down, like candy, meds that will wreck their lives . I've done my best to avoid getting into the system, I only doctor for acute things like injuries. No maintenance meds. They always try to get me into the system, I tell them to slag off.

Unclear to me what distinction you are trying to make. My suggestion for a tax-based solution approach involves focusing on the effects of monopolistic practices on profits, and it does not matter which form the monopolistic practice takes if profits can be linked to that practice. I'm not saying it's a trivial problem, but I think there are clear indicators of abusive situations. In this case, the critical metric is that customers have no freedom to choose where their apps are coming from.

It might be possible for Apple to argue this is a kind of natural monopoly over security concerns, but I'm saying that should not matter. The profits that come from "gatekeeper" status should still be taxed at a higher rate.

In solution terms, this example seems quite similar to what should have been done to Microsoft a LONG time ago. Imagine if Microsoft had been divided into several competing daughter companies, each starting with a copy of the OS source code and equal resources, both physical and human. The larger the company, the easier it is to achieve reasonably equal divisions, though some minor financial adjustments might be necessary to balance the books. After that, the daughter companies would have competed to provide the best versions of evolving OSes and the customers would have had real choices. If the Apple Store was split between several competing companies, it would work in a similar way. One of the new stores might focus on attracting more developers with lower fees, but I'd be inclined to use the store that focused on fewer apps of higher quality.

Weird that you were modded as troll. What you wrote was not only funny, but likely true. I always thought his presence was to make the rest of this administration look normal.

There is another piece of idiocy. "Make America Healthy Again? Yeah Not that health issues are an America thing, but MAHA must be returning to everyone smoking again, Drinking Radium Water along with putting it in food. Having children's feet X-ray Fluoroscoped to fit them with shoes, Mercury treatments, cocaine for kids for teething, Arsenic and lead in medicines, Lead in gasoline, tapeworms for weight control. Purposely getting Malaria to treat STD's. Arsenic in Wallpaper, Arsenic as an Insecticide, and on and on.

Sorry, but MAHA is merely insanity. If America (or the rest of the world) was somehow healthier at one time, we need to return to all those things that were provably killing us.