If you don't see this and immediately think it's a project of Big Pharma to escape regulatory scrutiny and astroturf the desire for 'solutions' to the common cold and flu then you're just another NPC. They are trying to convince the public they need something they don't need and something that will without question do more harm than good. Vaccines don't work on things that mutate rapidly like the cold and flu. They know that. That's why they do this astroturf and NGO crap to pretend otherwise. WAKE UP, become a player character in this game.

Central bank digital currencies "have no real uses" !?! Are you trolling us? They have essentially only one benefit or use which is to surveil and control an individual's use of their own money and that means their ability to live in modern society. With the CBDC, the EU won't even have to arrest and jail dissidents any more, they'll simply be able to turn off their ability to do transactions. "Do you want to eat, travel, pay rent, etc.? ya? ok, then stop being a nuisance to us on social media..or going to AfD party meetings, etc."

How about instead we put the socialists' money where their mouth is? How about we do a 'one-time' tax on the DSA party's assets? How about we do a 'one-time' tax on the assets of all the Democrat legislators who have gotten us into this mess? That sounds like real "Equity" to me.

How about this.. let's do a 50% tax on all assets of the CA legislators who served during the period of the runaway budget? And for the current legislators, if they don't get the budget down to the 10 years ago budget inflation adjusted to today in 3 years, then they get 90% of their assets taxed away? How does that sound???

Something tells me that pretty quickly the socialists wouldn't be so happy to spend other peoples' money quite so freely anymore and they might start to notice the actual tyranny represented by taxing of their neighbors' fixed and unrealized assets.

Anthropic and their arrogant employees shouldn't have tried to dictate to the military how their models can be used. It's more tyrannical for some unaccountable private company to have this power than it is for the military to have it because the Commander in Chief is directly elected by the citizens of this country. The people have no power to replace Anthropic's leadership if we don't like what they're doing. Congress is utterly compromised by special interests and deep state (as evidenced by GOP inability to pass the Save America Act for example) so there's zero chance of getting those elected representatives to implement policy the people actually want (again, we have evidence they don't work for us... there are dozens of policies they imposed on the country that the citizenry is hard against with open borders at the top of that list). If you want an even clearer picture of what it looks like when the power elite implement policy directly against the will and interests of the people, just look at the EU and UK. It's the picture of what will happen here if the current preferred party of the power elite (the DNC, obviously) gets back into power -- open borders (which leads to their post-Nation-State utopia, right?), digital censorship and control, lawfare against their opponents, two-tier justice, inheritance taxes ("equity" and steal the farmland), etc.. In fact, it's the same globalists controlling the UK, European Commission (not the Parliament but by design it doesn't have the real power), the US deep state and 5-eyes mainstream media. If they get back into power in the US, the West is in serious jeopardy.

One of the best things about Roku was that it wasn't really a streamer itself which helped prevent the enshitification of the product because there were no real anti-competitive pressures there like there would be if for example, say Peacock/Hulu owned it, or Amazon or Paramount/Warner. So next year it'll be owned by FOX and then they'll be in competition with all the other free news outlets and apps and they'll need to drive viewers into their channels in order to monetize them and pay for this acquisition.

Charging times on trips is negligible. It's all about charging a little more often in the 30%-70% range which goes extremely fast and just making a couple more stops. Porsche proved it by making an LA to NY trip with less time spent charging vs filling gas. Don't believe the hype. Your Tesla will be done charging before you've even got your Starbucks order in when you stop to go pee.

And the cost for charging an EV is $0.25/kwh at home. At 4 mile per kwh, that's $1.25 per gallon for a 20 mpg car equivalent or $1.75/gallon for a 28 mpg car equivalent. I think I like EV over ICE at $5-7 per gallon! Even at $3/gallon you're saving significant money and there's essentially no service costs. You'll get tired of the car and want to upgrade before your battery range is even 70% of what it was when you bought it. And if you get the bigger battery and only charge to 70% most of the time, the degradation is pretty negligible. EV is clearly the way to go for AT LEAST ONE of your vehicles. Eventually battery prices and energy density will be so good that you'll even be able to justify an EV truck to tow your boat around. Hell, your boat may be EV in a few years, too (probably with an on-board emergency charging motor though which is fine).

It should be called Clippy, not Scout!

And weirdly, it's the orange man who they never let into the club that is trying to excise them from the system. But the old progressives can't see that and instead have become stooges for their old enemies who are not running and controlling all the left-wing movements and political parties. It's a topsy turvy world...

I'm a big fan of Roku. They have made my parents' (and mine as the tech support) lives a lot easier by having a consistent experience through every TV upgrade. There's just reason to use the garbage interfaces of the TV manufacturers when one can get a Roku 4k streaming stick for $30 and turn off the wifi on the TV.

Bill will use it for "good", so long as you think the depopulation agenda is "good". And it will be paid for by us because Anthropic will no doubt get huge tax write offs for "donating" inflated values of AI services. Just wonderful...

Makes so much sense for Anthropic to put restrictions on how our military uses their tech but then turns around and gives it to Gates with no such restrictions. Well done morons!

Hey parents of school age children... If you're a member of your kids' school board, you qualify for the discount so this means that parents who chair board committees and whatnot would qualify for the education discount. Not sure how they would verify such a thing, but you could just request an email address from the school and you should be good to go... Cheers

The best model I'm aware of for how self-awareness aka consciousness emerged is that social survival factors led to model making capability for the awareness of the mental states occurring within other individuals (that they are thinking). Eventually that model began to be applied internally and self-awareness was born. There is no analogous process occurring within the LLMs (yet), so there should be no reason to think there's anything aware of itself in them.

The UK has drunk the Marxism kool-aid and everything is non-sense oppressor/oppressed framing now. The UK will quickly become a place for companies to avoid investing if the culture there doesn't change direction. No company is going to invest in a place and hire morons who think "collectivism" is a viable approach. If the youth want to get a slice of the pie (which would be a good thing), it's not going to work to do it with unionization and collective bargaining and strikes. It's only gonna happen via worker equity that incentives efficiency and increases energy in the system.

Socialist approaches will always drain energy and efficiency from the system until it's no longer viable. It's just the mathematics / game theory of human behavior and incentives. This is so well understood and incontrovertible that socialism is essentially a psychological denial syndrome. Advocates are just fooling themselves (and others unfortunately).

It seems a bit convenient that "carbon" is the issue. What about the drop in soil minerals? or the drop in insects? How do we know what role those are playing compared to the increase in carbon dioxide? I suspect we don't and the "researchers" are making bold statements they can't really back up.

Seems like we need legislation that will create a new tier for FISA that is for these kinds of criminal cases rather than terrorism or national security. It should establish some guideline as to the conditions under which a warrant to search location data is justified, such as the types of felonies and above that are in scope (not for misdemeanors, for example), the failure of other measures to generate a lead in a case, etc.. It makes sense for law enforcement to have access to this investigative information, but with controls. When you think about it it's really not different than collecting and analyzing surveillance camera footage for all cameras in the vicinity of a crime... it's collecting and analyzing the cell tower logs, or the Google/Apple/Meta pings for devices in the vicinity. In both cases you're not using probable cause for an identified individual (which is the criticism) but rather you're are doing something more like a forensic analysis of the digital crime scene. That seems perfectly acceptable police work so long as there are controls to prevent abuse of the 'forensic' location data systems.