It's a state matter; SCOTUS isn't going to take it.

False. While the ballot measure does not impose an annual wealth tax, it authorizes the legislature to implement one without further voter approval. It also lets the legislature set the rate and the floor.

The wealth tax on Brin would amount to 67%, because it goes by percentage of voting shares or percentage of ownership, whichever is greater. I assume something similar would apply to Page, who also holds Alphabet class B shares. Of course they're going to avoid that.

> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.

They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.

I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.

Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.

"Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?,"

As soon as they heard about the cameras? EVERYBODY.

I guess we can add a whole new category to the Darwin Awards.

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

CloudFlare was an aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation. Now it's an AI-powered aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation.

Why don't I feel excited about it?

Crypto grift, AI bubble and psychopathic billionaire CEO.

Yes, that's because there have been a lot more stupid humans doing stupid things to databases for a lot longer than AI agents.

So tell me: if AI is no safer than people, what's the point of replacing humans with AI?