Once VPNs exist, it becomes impossible for a law like this to be enforced without enforcing strict age verification around the world, which is impossible given the technological state of many countries in the world (including the United States). It isn't even possible for companies to reliably comply with a law like this by blocking all access from Australia (because VPNs exist).

Once again, dumb legislators who don't understand technology have passed laws demanding something that is technologically infeasible (bans) instead of something that is technologically feasible (providing special accounts for underage people that give parental supervision, blaming the user if the user deliberately goes around that, and encouraging parents to report when their kids make friends with other kids who use fake ages to go around that).

The result, predictably, is that it doesn't work. And everyone who has ever worked in the tech industry is shocked in much the same way that we are shocked when the sun comes up in the morning, despite us demanding that it not come up until noon.

The trouble is the only place to dump it that much money involved is into your 401k. So it's only a matter of time.

There will be an initial gold rush by Insiders. And then the regulations will quietly be altered. Just in time to let them screw us all over and make out with all our money.

Did you get paid to post that? If not then you should be.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law in the '80s. If you try to make a serious go at competing with any major company then they will come in and if you are extremely lucky off of the buy you out but these days they just come in and copy your product and do it cheaper by leveraging other businesses they own and run you out of business.

As a employee you're also fucked because we also stopped and forcing labor protection laws. So companies can collude to lower wages while getting tax breaks for offshoring your job.

The game is rigged against you. But that's a really hard thing for people to accept.

Is so good for the billionaires that they don't care that America is rapidly getting shut out of the rest of the world because we are a national security risk...

Ordinarily what would be happening right now is billionaires would be telling Trump to knock it the fuck off with the crazy foreign policy because of the risk of us companies being frozen out of European markets. But nope. Everybody is just full steam ahead on the Trump train.

It's another example of how every single system designed to protect you has broken down.

I really want to know the configuration of this AI and the base model it was built on, so I can identify it and avoid trusting or using it inadvertently

Go see The AI Doc. Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. so you'll know when to kiss your ass goodbye or not...

They'll get their money refunded...oh wait, no one fucking pays for that service. A quick google puts estimates of only 5% have paid. I've missed the dating apps, for better or worse, by meeting my wife in college, before they were a thing, but my single friends tell me OKCupid is a sewer of married men who don't want dating app charges appearing on the credit card statement and broke losers. Ever female friend of mine who tried it said they were instantly harassed by the lowest quality garbage men the local area had to offer....and LOTs of dick pics from strangers...and that ANY service offers a better experience.

So yeah...if you're not the customer, you're the product. No one is going to let you get laid for free. They want your data to resell as well as sell you ads. OKCupid is a shitty dishonest company....but I also have limited sympathy for the fake outrage..."OMG...you mean that free app that helps me smash isn't respecting my data and misleading what they're doing with it?"

Sorry, if I was single, the last thing I'd want to do is spend time looking for women too cheap to pay to find someone. If you can't pay $20 to meet your future husband...something tells me you are either too young for me to be dating or have issues that will surface later.

Finding out that OKCupid is not fully on the up and up is like finding out those hot dogs that roll on the heaters at 7-11 for hours, if not days, before serving are bad for you.

Of bad stock into your 401k. The YouTuber Patrick Boyle has a detailed video on the subject.

Basically SpaceX is going to be valued at 1.5 trillion. However it is impossible for it to reach that valuation in the real world.

SpaceX already has all the launch customers that can possibly get even under the best case scenario. And in unfavorable administration would almost certainly start looking for alternatives because Elon meddled in a war.

So the only possible growth sector for SpaceX is launching its own satellites, specifically the ones for internet.

But that's a dead end too because there aren't enough customers who can afford high-speed internet and also do not have access to some form of landline based internet like cable or DSL

the only other growth sector would be AI bullshit but Elon has lost most of his engineers to other companies. SpaceX got this huge boost because Elon had a mystique and he was talking about going to Mars so a shitload of rocket engineers took lower pay than they could get in any other job and work longer hours to work for spacex. That isn't happening with elon's AI companies. So he can't compete and the stuff he's building is barely better than what you could build yourself and run off your own GPU.

Everybody knows this, at least everybody who is investing that kind of money, so in order to get the kind of money he wants he's doing a weird stock scheme that limits access to the stock in order to drive up the price. Basically a few insiders will get all the profit and it's going to leave a huge amount of worthless stock that needs to be sent somewhere.

Normally it would be dumped into public pensions but those have been maxed out with bad stock already. So we are 401K is going to get hammered.

This is just the largest of many scams that are going to loot your retirement and there's basically nothing you can do about it except vote for pro-consumer politicians who want to regulate Wall Street but that's going to be annoying people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC and Bernie Sanders and frankly people don't like them... And in politics likeability is basically everything now.

What I'm saying is that if you are retiring or even if you're just retired you're a fucked. You have money and somebody wants it and they're going to get it

This is veering close into MAHA territory, in my view...treating minor lifestyle details and major health factors. You just stated a lot of what appears to be impressive scientific data. While I don't WANT microplastics in my blood, how can I quantify the actual risk? I know that's not YOUR job, you're just the messenger presenting what appear to be facts, but that's why I am skeptical. Having been burnt by bullshit science + media hysteria telling us red wine will prevent heart attacks and tooth decay causes them, I am not ready to get alarmed. You say, people with above-threshold level of nanoplastics are more likely to get heart attacks, but given I've heard a half dozen of these bullshit things in my life, I have to ask the correlation vs causation question.

Much like red wine drinkers...in that Americans who enjoy wine are more likely to be wealthier or have lower stress in life than those who don't (the poor can't afford it and blue collar folks drink other things). Are microplastics worsening their cardiac health?...or are people with more realistic contributors just likely to be exposed to more microplastics. For example, if you're poor, you're probably not replacing plastic food containers that's heavily worn down. And being poor or stressed out will kill you waaaay faster than microplastics can...I am sure we both can agree on.

So my question to the scientific community, and I know you're just the messenger, is can we show epidemiological among regions? I think it's safe to say that not every region is exposed to microplastics at the same rate. Do the Southern Europeans use as much plastic? When I visit France and Italy, they seem to prefer glass...do they have less microplastics in their blood than North Americans or the Chinese? What about Africa or rural Asia...do they have higher levels or lower ones? Can we see holistic trends there?

The world spent 20 years chasing down trying to figure out the Blue Zones paradox...only to find out it's just coincidence and bad record keeping. Food is not medicine. I know the MAHA crowd would like to disagree, but it's true. Abusive eating can be poison, but switching to the Mediterranean diet from an otherwise reasonable American diet is not going to cure your heart disease. Similarly, if microplastics really caused heart attacks, it would be quite easy to prove.

In the end, I know microplastics aren't good for you, but I also am not convinced they're highly harmful. I will wager that if scrutinized, the data will show a much stronger correlation between the classic heart disease factors, which to my knowledge, in order are: genetic predisposition, smoking and drug abuse (booze, illegal stuff), stress, obesity, being-out-of-shape, prescription-drugs(like ritalin) and legal stimulants...then a far, distant.....EVERYTHING else, including microplastics or environmental toxins.

In the end, I am all for avoiding microplastics, but I put that in the category of things that "MIGHT" be bad for you, but we're not certain it's significant, like artificial sweeteners, caffeine, non-organic produce, etc.

It constantly demonstrates that there has been a dearth of competence at the management level of IT for a long time.

In this case it would be easy enough to calculate how much anything would be off and then use the existing data.

Remember we're not talking about science here we're talking about public policy. So yeah the scientists can go ahead and redo all the experiments just to confirm the numbers and that's something scientists will want to do.

But we're not going to find all of a sudden that micro plastics are good for you. Neither are we going to find that they are in such low quantities that they aren't harmful. At best this is going to slightly skew the results.

But this isn't like radiometric dating where there are are all sorts of caveats because of how that science works. At the end of the day you've still got a brain full of plastic it's just potentially slightly less plastic.

But as usual just like when cigarettes were discovered to be killing people the plastic industry is going to hammer us with stories about this and slow down and the attempt at reform for at least another 50 years. And just like the cigarette industry, assuming our civilization survives what's happening right now that is, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back at this time and say what the fuck was wrong with those people?

Best isn't the question. Sales is the question. If you do a poll of photographers, the names you'll hear when you ask what they shoot with are almost always going to be Lexar and SanDisk. Sony won't be in the top five. IMO, that's mostly because they spent a decade with their own Memory Stick nonsense while other manufacturers were claiming the SD and CF card market for themselves. It's hard to force your way into an already crowded field where everyone has already picked favorites.

Yeah, but approximately nobody uses CFExpress. It was an attempt by the CompactFlash folks to stay relevant after the SD card standard ate their lunch. No still camera I've never owned, nor any camcorders (including fairly high-end 4K gear from major manufacturers) uses it. Everybody uses SD. Even most cinema cameras (which as far as I'm aware, are approximately the only gear that *ever* used CFExpress) mostly use SD cards now, or else have removable backs with SATA SSDs or similar.

Put another way, today I learned that somebody still actually made CFExpress cards. I thought the standard was thoroughly and completely stillborn. This is a tiny niche of a niche. And saying that Sony is price-comparable on something that is so niche that it is compatible with only maybe a dozen cinema camera models built by two or three companies within a narrow range of years doesn't exactly contradict what I said about suspecting that nobody uses them because of the cost. I doubt any other CFExpress cards are affordable, either, because economies of scale basically don't exist for a product that's so low-volume.

When I go to buy SD cards — and yes, at this point, almost everybody uses SD cards — I'm not even looking at products made by Sony. I'm looking at products by SanDisk and Lexar. I would be okay with Kingston or Transcend in a pinch. I guess some folks also like Samsung, though I've been burned by other Samsung gear often enough that I don't trust them with something critical like an SD card. Sony isn't even on my list. And pretty much every photographer and videographer I know does the same.

Given that Sony screwed around for more than a decade with their own proprietary "Memory Stick" format, they basically missed the market for SD cards, and other companies claimed that market.

Based on that, at least in my mind, I kind of assume that the people who buy Sony flash cards are probably the ones who have always bought Sony, because it's the only name they know and trust. Most of those folks probably started on Sony back in the 1970s when their products were actually built to last for decades, were top-tier in features, rather than being hobbled by pressure from their entertainment division, and when repair parts weren't priced so high that a power switch costs more than a whole new camcorder (not kidding). They're probably the ones who used to buy overpriced Sony headphones for $150 that fell apart instead of the $50 Koss headphones that didn't. They're also probably the ones who still have analog land line home phones, and most of them are probably retired or dead by now.

*Maybe* some of their mirrorless camera purchasers from the last few years buy Sony cards out of some bizarre sense of brand loyalty, but I'd imagine most of them talk to other photographers and ask what to buy, and again, I'm pretty sure Sony won't be on anybody's list.

I'm just struggling to imagine them having much of a market except perhaps in niche products like CFExpress or in cheap CF cards sold at Walgreens or CVS for high margins to people who don't know any better.

But maybe I'm wrong.

No, they would only consolidate their product line if they thought that doing so would make it more profitable. That would require a high enough volume of sales to matter. Companies don't usually cut entire swaths of products because of the price point. They usually do it because the product line makes so little money that it isn't worth the extra effort to keep it going.

About losing those lawsuits. They can absorb the fines and work around them. After a little bit of finagling the dollar amounts involved will not be terribly large. But on the other hand, and they have called this out in their sec filings, this basically makes it borderline impossible for any competitor to go up against them. In the long run it's probably going to save them money because traditionally the way they survive is by buying up whichever competitor of theirs the kids under 15 flocked to in order to find a place their parents didn't hang out

It's like how Microsoft lost their antitrust trial and the "punishment" was to give away millions of dollars of software to schools which they had been trying to get to take their software for 20 years...

I don't know what the opposite of a pyrrhic victory but I believe we've found it.

You will find that every single one of those age gate laws was written by a lobbying firm tied to Facebook.

There is no question that the age restriction laws are coming from facebook. Also Planitir. They are also behind some of the funding for lobbying for the laws. They use what's called template laws where they write a legal template that can be sent across the country to form the basis of laws that pass everywhere.

No we don't exactly know why. But it doesn't take a lot to figure out. It doesn't really drastically improve their tracking but what it does do is let them know that you are real. That's why we know it's about detecting AI slop.