No worries, the project will die after tax rebates have been paid in advance.

I have it on good authority that Ferraris are faster than Civics, and therefore there is no market for the Civic.

>their uniqueness has intrinsic value that belongs to the individual. No it doesn't. Walk out into public, you may get photographed and that photo used however the taker chooses. Don't like it? Tough.

When 71% of employers and 43% of young people agree there are enough jobs available for them, it exposes the official unemployment and economy numbers as a massive lie. Not even the people hiring believe it's a job seeker's market. And the stagnating to falling wages (vs inflation) tell the same story. Until we know what the numbers really are we won't be able to see the extent of the problem. The BLS and DOL need to STOP LYING so we can get our collective head around the situation we face here in the real world. Start by counting the "gig workers" who are cashing in on the equity in their cars, the discouraged workers, and the early retirees who couldn't find work and decided to give up but who would jump at a decent job. Then count the underemployed who are just scraping by. Factor in the disparity between wage growth and official job numbers and you'll start to approach the real unemployment rate in America.

Lasers might not even make a difference. AI is getting massively better, and you can't use a laser against a swarm of 100 AI enabled low-flying, evading drones. America needs interceptor drones. Worse, America needs AI-enabled interceptor drones because you can bet the airspace is going to be jammed to hell and back. You might be able to get by with three times the number of counter-drone UGVs armed with sky-facing shotguns, but whatever you do it's going to be a DARPA hard tall order. And that 100 drone AI-enabled swarm isn't science fiction, it's flying now.

Returns have been gradually falling for decades. Sure a lot of it is studios and middle men squeezing theaters for more than the market will bear leading to half an hour of ads before the movies just so the theater can stay in business. But most of it is this re-churning of the same old slop decade after decade by big Hollywood companies and theaters not wanting to take a chance on smaller studios offerings. If you don't like risk, get out of the movie business.

It beggars belief that both switches would, due to vibration and missing the toggle lock, move within one second of one another.

In this as in all matters aside from a genuine existential crisis the wealthy control the US government. A few months after America gets into it with China (God forbid) these silly rules will be kicked to the curb, the same way Russia controls its oligarchy.

The semi-qualified human will at least understand the context of the paper and hopefully not inject his own lack of understanding into it. He won't modify your maths because he thinks you meant something else. If you send him a message saying "do x" he won't do x and y and also delete a chunk of your paper. If he doesn't improve much he at least won't foul it up.

LLM use is unacceptable for use in copy editing unless it's reviewed very carefully by someone who knows both the material and English very well. In which case there's no point in using the LLM in the first place. One problem is, it doesn't know which, if any, modal verb is appropriate. Is it "this data may indicate the confounding factor increases the error rate by..." or is it "the confounding factor increases the error rate by..."? You certainly can't tell by guessing the next most likely word. Another problem is a complete lack of understanding of the material at hand. Did the material undergo a conversion or a transformation? And another is math. LLMs may be able to solve a large number of math problems, but they absolutely cannot be relied upon to output a novel math statement between translations without being copy-edited.

Mechanization of various kinds, including AI, has been eating the American job market for decades. It's only just coming to a head in the form of wages being reduced for people wealthy enough to be listened to. Now we're facing the crisis more head-on.

Even productivity-reducing measures like the reaction to the pandemic can't stop the inevitable march of progress. And I don't even know what the Trump cadre think they're doing by reducing cheap goods for the whole economy, but only long enough for it to raise prices and hurt the standard of living even more, while transferring trillions MORE to the top. It's like the whole American economy was supposed to crash and didn't and now they're trying to help it along. And people on both sides are cheering on one or the other side of the destruction because it's their team doing the destroying. But I digress.

Mechanization will continue, and it's not physical work that's being cut into anymore but intellectual work all the way from how to know what boxes go where or how to navigate a busy road all the way up to composing appropriate messages for each of ten vendors to negotiate lower prices, and what to bargain for, and how. And that's okay. Work is a necessary evil. We need to drop the idea that a man's worth is measured by how much money he's making or whether he's working at all. We need to reduce involuntary employment -- a measure of how many people are working because if they don't, they'll suffer -- to zero. We can accomplish this by encouraging mechanization, by clawing back the wealth transfer from the top and reducing income inequality (How about the six hour work day?) by UBI, by hanging the next person in power who says "trickle down" works, by creating the first-ever "unemployed and that's okay" class as opposed to the current "unemployed, barely surviving and looked down on constantly" groups, and by encouraging companies to be more efficient instead of pushing for "jobs". Oh, and I want a pony.

It's about the fines, and also about pushing just that much more toward a totalitarian state. They (the notorious They) don't realize they're pushing society toward a phase change, or that it's not in Their best interests to gain power in this manner.

The point at which some environmentalism reveals itself as misanthropy is where "don't feed the animals" is commanded because it's "unnatural." This stance overlooks that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. Barring legitimate safety concerns, like habituating bears to human sites, there is nothing inherently wrong with developing relationships, even co-dependencies and forms of partial domestication, with wild animals. Such interactions can represent a form of interspecies mutualism, a concept well-documented in biology, where different species form beneficial partnerships. History, too, offers examples of co-evolution, such as the relationship between humans and the ancestors of domestic dogs. The argument that animals "don't understand what humans are like" is paternalistic. They understand what they like and, as the orca study suggests, are capable of initiating interaction based on their own complex social logics. To deny them this agency is to deny their intelligence and autonomy. They can choose to interact or not, to the limits of their abilities; let them make that choice. This aligns with philosophical arguments for animal autonomy, which posit that sentient beings with preferences should have those preferences respected. The appeal to "naturalness" is a flawed premise in the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by human alteration of all ecosystems. There is no longer a "pure" nature to which we can defer. The insistence on a hands-off policy often stems from a puritanical, almost religious, reverence for a "Sacred" nature that must remain untouched by humanity. This view secretly frames humans as a blight, a contamination from which the world must be cordoned off. It is a philosophy of alienation, not of responsible cohabitation. The fear that a friendly whale, offering fish as a gesture of friendship, might suddenly attack boats is not just unfounded; it actively dismisses the animal's observed intent. It is a projection of human fears onto a situation that the animals themselves are defining as peaceful. This is not to ignore all risks, but to challenge a risk-averse dogma that precludes the possibility of positive, unprecedented relationships. The real debate should be about fostering a more nuanced ethic of interaction, one that respects animal agency and acknowledges our shared and entangled future on this planet, rather than one that capitulates to a deep-seated misanthropy that ultimately desires a world with fewer people in it.

You just replied to a Poe's Law of yourself with the same Poe's Law. This is either meta and philosophical or, more likely, an indication of the depth of your ideology-driven idiocy.

I hope they have an option 2 and 3, because killing anything that mates with x is a guaranteed way to create sexual selection.