Keep on babbling about Smollet -- a guy no one ever gave a shit about -- surely you'll be winning soon enough, just like you've been winning when you go to the gas pump, the grocery store, ...

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

Did you literally just write a list, made up that they can be attributed as some sort of majority opinion of the left, and pretend that you proved something? Again, attributions you made up? That's some sad fuck shit, lol

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

i.e.: Fucking. The crew is gonna spend the next 10 days fucking each other's brains out in the name of science. Your tax dollars are paying for it, and you're not even gonna get a copy of the tape.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

Immunology, presumably.

The only donor bodies that aren't going to treat the transplant as an act of war are clones or heavily immunosuppressed; and it's probably more plausible to assume that you'll be able to clone a human like a sheep than assume that you'll be making some fundamental breakthroughs in immunology to deal more elegantly with unmatched hosts.

I can see the utility of having spare organs in certain emergencies; but how much life extension would you actually get even if the sort of neurosurgery involved in removing a brain and reattaching it to a new host's spinal cord were viable? Is the theory that the assorted ghastly flavors of neurodegeneration are actually to be blamed on older organs and everything will be fine; or is this just a very expensive way to ensure that you skip the various ways peripheral organs can kill you and are assured to be the spryest patient in the dementia ward?

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.