Meta is the latest 'tech' giant that thinks they can get rich selling artists own work to the artists who made the work. Adobe has leverage because they have a tool-set that many artists depend upon. Meta doesn't.

Agreed.

The first 2 scams involved tricking a panicked idiot into not checking what was actually happening. But giving untraceable gold to an untraceable stranger: In what universe does that sound helpful?

A law demanding 'more' pollution: Florida's geriatric voters should be rioting at the state capital.

Solar is already cheaper than coal so this is billionaires (and politicians) demanding the population pay to poison themselves. Forget the damage to the global ecosystem, Florida's rich retirees will not survive this.

The US government has slowly been moving towards the 1930s/1970s policy that the bottom-tier class (Eg. immigrants & entry-level manual labour) is a fungible and never-ending resource (See: "Self-regenerating assets" AKA "livestock"): Thus, there is no need to spend money feeding, educating and healing each "resource". The "under-babied" meme is code for "we need more babies so the few that survive disease and illiteracy can, instead, die protecting our greed and wealth". The rise of AI means this serfdom can be replaced by drones.

This leaves the problem of what to do with the middle class. While the immensely wealthy are betting on AI replacing them too, it will be a far slower transition. The wealthy needs to keep the middle class reasonably busy until they can be treated as a fungible resource. The Intellectual-Property-as-a-subscription form of capitalism is draining their wealth sufficiently to make rebellion difficult, but not totally impossible. It's why corporations, after 40 years of refusing to invest in employees, are creating multi-skilled employees. With AI slowly replacing middle class careers, educated people will need to be highly liquid/mobile and repurposed to the jobs that haven't been replaced by AI. The greed and arrogance of corporations means the employees pay the costs of their own obsolescence and 're-purposed' careers.

What about Sprint/AT&T/Verizon/Dish providing the gateways/routers and optic fibre to carry that pirated data? Hell, what about the Chinese factories that manufactured that infrastructure? This is more about, who they can squeeze money from, than stopping piracy. Intellectual Property owners litigating over piracy-induced "losses", is their new business plan.

Does anyone think Starbucks is buying this information? Or, that McDonalds is checking your location at 7:30 this morning? This surveillance is happening purely at the behest of government, just like the building of warplanes and ICBMs. That's why it's a small skip and jump to this technology becoming militarized. It's already militarized with mobile cameras carrying Hellfire missiles: Such as Predator drones. This version of surveillance is literally aimed at people and it will be militarized for use against the people.

The danger is, it's easy to give the government "carte blanche" for this technology, under the excuse of "war on" terror/drugs, "tough on" criminals and "think of the children".

There are swaths of countries where the daily wage is US$5/day. Assuming their customers are earning US$2,000/month shows how rich a country must be, to join the digital economy.

TL;DR: US company that screws-over its suppliers and its employees also suffers employees that help suppliers screw-over other suppliers.

Wannabe with mob complains about different mob.

News at eleven.

We embrace Capitalism because wages are meant to be proportional to productivity. That hasn't been true for 40 years.

We embrace corporations because they standardize and automate and reduce head-count. We don't think about the resulting monopolies and wages converted to profits. We're reaching the point where that inhumanization is affecting most humans: Rent-seeking, gig-economy employees and enshittification.

It's is the job of government to provide social welfare. But Reagan and the GOP re-purposed the US government to abandon the poor and protect the rich.

The mass of people have always refused to think-through large-scale problems, particularly the problems that grow into an attack on human rights and constitutional rights. Climate denial is more than billionaires hiding the truth and spreading propaganda: It's a consensus that the problem is "too hard" and thinking must be limited to short-term problems, like "Do I have job security?" (Actually a long-term problem.)

"Casual" Friday?

Did you notice they've put both hands in: A left-hand 'pile' under a right-hand 'pile'?

The UK polices have strict procedures for processing evidence. The US city police not so much: In fact, several cities have already proven their police are more interested in throwing someone in prison than collecting evidence.

The "software maker" isn't accusing the wrong person of a crime, isn't failing to seek supporting evidence, isn't demanding immunity when the lack of supporting evidence is revealed.

Yes, someone should pay and if the burden is on the software maker, then the software maker should demand a cost-plus contract that transfers the fine to the relevant city. Next, $5,000 might do for a week in prison but when US police are enforcing months of imprisonment resulting in the loss of all assets, $5,000 is not enough.

https://despair.com/cdn/shop/p...

I was contrasting the propaganda of billionaires with the history of industrialization. The USA has long had a culture of billionaires having more rights and the press assists them by restricting the freedom to find the truth.

In "The Jetsons", buildings were assembled by a giant robot: While some menial jobs were performed by robots, humans also did menial work by pushing buttons that controlled the robots. (Mr Jetson did that in a factory that made sprockets and gear-wheels.) That in turn, was a warning of Idiocracy (2006), where technology was button-operated, or too difficult.

My perspective: The idea of AI-powered robots replacing humans leads to the realization that they will be building AI-powered robots, not the humans. A few humans will likely be needed to update software until AI is 'smart' enough to correctly identify problems.
The predicted consequence will either be "the singularity" or "SkyNet" powered genocide.

Governments have policies to eliminate such mismatches but they never work: It's like someone always moves the goal-posts.