I mentioned this to the other guy but yeah they were destroying rare books. A rare book seller caught them by sneaking an Apple Air tag into one of his books that he shipped to them. That's the only reason we know about this.

Both things can be true. There can be a ton of books that nobody wants and to get thrown out and Amazon can be buying those books in addition to Amazon buying rare books to destroy for their AI model. Because of course they're going to want rare books if they have rare books in their model and they're competitors don't that is a competitive advantage.

And I guarantee you they're not going to stop destroying rare books they're just going to be quieter about it. And they will check the books for Apple Air tags

So they want as much data as they can get and they were actively seeking out rare books. They had gone to a rare book seller and they were buying them to destroy them. Because of course they want rare books if they have rare books in their model their model will be better than somebody who doesn't have rare books.

The way we found out they were destroying rare books is that the rare books seller got a huge order and he got suspicious so he snuck an Apple Air tag into one of the books and monitored where it went. That little bit of citizen journalism is the only reason we knew.

I haven't looked into it but I wouldn't be surprised to find that Amazon is going to keep doing this they're just going to be using shell companies and freight forwarders.

Rare book sellers aren't going to want to sell to people who they know are going to destroy rare books. Especially for such a stupid fucking reason.

I am a little surprised there are this many Americans upset about it though. It could just be I know a lot of idiots but a lot of the people I know would cheerfully show up to a book burning party if there wasn't social stigma still associated with that. And frankly I'm surprised at stigma still exists after the last 16 years.

Okay, let's say the quiet part out loud. You'd have liked nothing more than to have told your kids they can't bury their faces in Facebook/TikTok/Instagram/X, but they'd whine incessantly that you're the worst parent ever and that all their peers are allowed to have their doom scrolling and brain rot. So, because you can't take away their addiction without also forcing every other parent out their to align with your ideals regarding social media, you want the government to step in and do it for you.

Sound about right? The irony is all you parents are stuck in a prisoner's dilemma of your own making. If you'd just take the damn brain rot away from your spawn, other parents would see it's no longer normalized for their kids to be glued to social media and most of them would do the same as well. You don't actually need the nanny state.

....are books that they can buy by the meter, for pennies on the dollar, if that much. These are surplus books that publishers - the world's leading destroyers of books - would have to destroy anyway.

Trainers can't afford to buy actually rare, desirable books.

It's a shame that all of this data is locked up on private servers, but that's really more of a problem of the copyright system than anything else. Anyone who scanned these books would be banned from making it public.

Usually there's a need for age appropriateness warning labels on things when a parent can't reasonably be expected to sit through an entire movie or play a video game to determine its age appropriateness. Most adults who are giving their kids access to a smart device, though, probably do have enough familiarity with Facebook to make their own determination as to whether or not they want their kids using it. It's also been possible for as long as these sites have existed, to do a Google search on professional opinions over age appropriateness of various social media sites.

I used the junk food as an example because the label doesn't specifically say anything about that if you kid pigs out on this non-stop and you keep replenishing their supply, they're going to end up with childhood obesity. The label just says that the product is mostly sugar, and a parent is supposed to connect the dots that it is only appropriate to consume in moderation. Some parents might even decide that giving sweets to their kids is something they'd prefer to avoid entirely.

I'm not holding Facebook entirely blameless here. They did the same dirty tricks the old tobacco companies did with trying to hook kids while they're young, but this time it wasn't something kids could get their hands on by dropping a few quarters into a vending machine. Parents willfully participated by buying smart devices for their kids.

Yeah, there were always some kids who smoked and figured out how to get ahold of alcohol, but that wasn't normalized. We didn't literally have parents going "Here's something intended for adults, have at it." in the way it seems almost every kid has a smartphone nowadays.

It's not just smart devices either. Orange County (Florida, not CA) recently had to ban e-bikes and e-scooters from their public schools because parents couldn't be arsed to figure out which ones met the legal requirements before buying them for their kids. We had kids zipping around on bikes and scooters that could keep up with cars. I certainly can see the other side of the argument that it is a bit of a mess to have to figure it out (although these days ChatGPT does a reasonably good job answering "is this thing age appropriate for my X-year-old kid?") and regulation seems like the quick and easy fix.

Something has definitely changed with parenting, though. Had they existed at the time, my folks never would've let me have a smartphone with unrestricted internet access, and definitely no electric motorcycle.

Then you have the people that think upscaling an image 3x makes it more detailed and sharper.

It doesn't? You might want to tell these folks.

With the caveat that there will probably be some sort of age verification coming so they can enforce their screen time limits on the underaged users. Though, we were kind of heading in that direction anyway with quite a few states becoming quite keen on the idea that adults should have to show ID to every damn site on the internet where one could possibly express an opinion or see some naughty bits.

I realize parenting doesn't come with an instruction manual, but come on. If you've used Facebook it was pretty obvious that it wasn't appropriate for kids. So we're just gonna ignore that a bunch of parents gave their kids smartphones and tablets, didn't bother to set up the parental controls, and just said with a shrug "this is probably fine."?

I get that Facebook made it appear that their product was appropriate for kids, but a stroll through your local grocery store will reveal a whole bunch of companies doing exactly the same thing with unhealthy foods. Parents are supposed to be the ones reading the labels and realizing that the mega pack of "fruit" snacks with the picture of two happy children on the front is really just clever marketing for junk food that consists primarily of empty calories from sugar.

Muskrat wants to build data centers because that's what gets all the investors excited and he's not going to be able to do that in Texas. Remember he mixes his various business arms in ways that are normally illegal.

If he says he's going to bring a spaceport then everyone will welcome him but if he came bearing data centers they would tell him to go fuck himself.

You can't do it in Texas because they have simply overrun their electricity capacity and they are in danger of shutting down hospitals. Also Texas is much closer to becoming a blue State than Louisiana and so there are political considerations with letting a trillionaire bring in extremely unpopular businesses.

Give it a few months or maybe a year and you'll be hearing about how they're building a data center where they said they were going to build the spaceport.

About 7 million Americans tried to vote in 2024 and couldn't because of common county level voters suppression tactics. Combine that with the flood of Russian propaganda and we were pretty well fucked.

When your crackhead neighbor who owns a fuck ton of guns is going through a thing letting your other crackhead neighbor fuck with him because you're hoping the two of them are going to off each other is not actually a sound policy. Because instead of getting two dead crackheads you usually get one of them killing the other one and then you've got a crazy crackhead running around without anything to keep it in check.

A better solution would be a intervention. Maybe help your neighbor get off the crack. But on the other hand you'll probably hoping that your neighbors going to kick the bucket and that you can take advantage of that for a quick buck.

They don't really give a shit about privacy and they're just going to have their own homegrown companies rape your privacy and push billionaire propaganda it'll just be more local billionaire propaganda as opposed to international billionaire propaganda.

The point I'm trying to make is this isn't your upstanding up for privacy or the rights of children or any of that this is just standard run of the mill international politics enacted by the same ruling class we should be getting pissed off at but we never actually do.

The quote was from the Bavarian government guy, so it seems unlikely that he's concerned about Waymo's competitive worries.

Also, German regulators are very cautious, so I expect Tesla's camera-only and less-mature robotaxi service will have a harder time getting approved.

Well, given that Waymo has been testing for nearly 20 years and been operating commercially for six years, currently operating nearly 4000 vehicles in 11 cities doing 500k rides per week... there's not a lot of risk.

Roads in Munich aren't terribly different from roads in US cities. Stoplights work a little differently. Munich does get a little snow, but rarely very much and it almost never lasts long. If Waymo's vehicles can't deal with it they may just suspend service... though I expect they'll probably handle it fine. They're supposed to go live in Detroit and Minneapolis this year, and if they can handle the weather there (where just shutting down for snow is not an option), Munich will be no problem at all.

So, not much like OceanGate.

> The numbers I saw suggested a 1% change in humanity's emissions, half the CO2 budget for the world, would solve the problem.

Where did you see that? Even the Paris Accords - which are kinda the minium effort - calls for 50% CO2 reduction by 2030.

=Smidge=