So if you run a casino, and every time someone loses you give them a lollipop--then it's no longer gambling?

Without regulation, even the weak shit in the USA, Linux would've been crushed by Microsoft very early on. The USA's own antitrust trials against MS probably made them cautious of any moves like that...

The only reason that other governments are turning fascist is because of the USA. Over there you let absolute bellends get mega-wealthy and have a culture that pushes people to the right and far-right.

They then turn their huge, ill-gotten gains on the rest of the world to drag them down with you. They're afraid, all the time, of most things--and the idea of an alternative system flourishing anywhere else that erodes their wealth and power terrifies them most of all.

It'd just be pathetic if it wasn't so destructive.

This is mental, I live in the UK (itself, falling apart) and just paid £40 for a good concert ticket to see a contemporary band!

I had some American friends fly over to Sweden for a week to see Taylor Swift there. That whole trip (flights, hotels, concert tickets etc.) was cheaper than just the tickets to see her in the USA.

I do feel bad for you all.

The obvious thing to do is just to kill immunity for platforms that have an algorithm decide what you see (maybe only those over a certain size)

Chronological feeds of everything you follow / choose to look at? immunity remains

WW2 was already won by the time the USA officially joined in. They waited to see which way it went before choosing a side. Not to say there weren't heroes from the USA that helped out, but the uniquely American myth that they won the war is delusional.

It's sad, the "Citizens" united decision marked the end of American democracy. It enshrined two absolutely abhorrent concepts in law: 1. that corporations are people and 2. that money is speech. :|

Correct framing is that elites remove wealth from the rest of us BY MEANS of unrestricted immigration.

Bullshit. They removed it by any means necessary. Yeah, sometimes that means importing cheaper workers, offshoring, and underpaying poor undocumented immigrants who are generally fleeing war or poverty the UK directly caused. It also means bribing politicians, committing massive fraud, wage theft etc.

Plenty of developed countries within the EU have high migration and better economies.

We have a collapsing (sabotaged) health service that depends on immigrants, same for agriculture because we simply do not have enough people and rich cunts are huge parasites sucking all of the wealth away from us. The consequence of 40+ years of neoliberalism and right-wing rule.

"I've personally never met or heard of a rational, functional criminal."

There are a lot of them, they fill boardrooms, political buildings, luxury yachts and banking offices. They just have enough money and connections to get away with it

Based on what? GDP?--maybe, our biggest export is probably financial crime. All of those GDP gains ain't going to people. Average French person has it a lot better than we do here...

I dunno, it's a useful planning exercise for a "wtf" situation--don't other organisations use Zombie Outbreak for the same sort of thing? And i'm pretty sure the nutters in the Vatican have a department setup solely for how to handle Extraterrestrials being found or showing up.

I used to build automated voice systems and chatbots for a large retail organisation, this was in the days of traditional NLU but before LLM stuff.

I mandated every bot and automated journey we deployed had to have a number of things in place to prevent this problem--really trivial stuff like "if there 2 or more failure states in succession (error or customer says something like 'no not that', offer a human agent.", or if a human agent is requested but no automation was attempted, encourage the customer to try automation first but don't force them to stay in automation.

There was always pressure from other parts of the org (marketing, financial types etc.) to contain people inside bots in a hostile way all to "reduce costs" which is a false economy, because customers either leave out of frustration or these tasks generate full blown complaints which ended up costing more to manage.

It's tough to push back on that stuff for some dev teams, I'm guessing they get outranked a lot. I was lucky to have board-level backing of my approach

The USA has 25% of the world's prison population, with only 5% of the population. Get a grip.

The "absolute freedom of speech" delusion is uniquely an American one, the rest of the world isn't that naive.

Brexit is a bad example, almost everyone thinks it's a total disaster and mistake. In some delicious irony, all the racists (not all brexit voters were racist, but all racists were brexit voters) who supported it directly caused a huge increase in non-white migration due to leaving the EU :)

That aside, migration is not a huge problem. It is being manufactured as a problem by the very wealthy. They're terrified that people are realising they are the problem, and use their wealth (they own a lot of media companies also) to find someone, anyone, who isn't them to blame and to stir people up about it. If we hadn't had decades of neoliberal economics and right-wing rule, people would not be so poor and disillusioned... whether that was deliberate or just gross stupidity on the part of politicians and rich dickheads, who can say...

haha

I had to chuckle at this quote of his: "My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military."

I think this is the entire point of all the training? To produce someone who will, on command, murder someone else without question or thought?