No one can possibly think that a one-time tax like this is a good idea. Even if you want higher taxes on the wealthy surely (a) you want recurring revenue not a one-off (b) you want to actually collect the taxes not just scare the tax base out of state.

But this is the key part:

The way the ballot process in California works is you can propose terrible legislation, pay for signatures, then get what you want in return for withdrawing it (which you can do even after submitting signatures, which is ridiculous).

It's become a very broken system.

Well I am sure they are not wrong in that they have legal cover to refuse the bounty.

I think they probably are wrong in excluding all config related bugs from their bounty program. Chained exploits are becoming increasing attack vectors so "you need elevated privileges" is not the moat it used to be. And GCP takeover is a big cost to bear. "We can prove it was your fault for not reading our docs carefully enough" will probably not be the salve their customers want in case of exploit. Security is hard and protecting customers from footguns is often worth doing.

But if Google doesn't want to know about these kinds of issues that's up to them. Keep it in mind before purchasing their services, however.

Companies will hire under skilled cheap foreign labor just fine and not worry about them learning from more skilled in office domestic workers.

Companies are lying as per the usual.

Companies think AI makes up for incompetence when in reality, it just magnifies it.

This is tantamount to misinformation. The regime cut the Internet on January 8th. It was *never* turned back on for the general public. Iran started allowing some country-wide intranet only, with heavy censorship and *no* outbound communication (except for regime figures). There has been no way to communicate with people in Iran anytime since except (a) Starlink (illegal, extremely risky, and subject to jamming) (b) outbound telephone calls (monitored).

Because it started January 8th, it is clear the initial purpose is very different than this states. The protests themselves started in late December. The internet blackout corresponds with nothing else but the regime crackdown in which they murdered tens of thousands of Iranian civilians. The obvious main purpose has been to keep Iranians from sharing about the atrocities.

Is the war related? Of course. It has become only more important as Iran has sought to seize a diplomatic high-ground (or at least equivalency) to maintain full narrative control. And it is true there is an intelligence aspect as well, but more than cyber attacks (how is downing your *own* Internet a win there?) the concern is likely that the Iranian people have been happy to share information to help target the regime, as they did during the previous 12 Day War.

It is malpractice to quote "officials" - if those are indeed "Iranian officials" - and then offer their uncontested view, when they are the ones who blacked out the Internet specifically to be able to offer an uncontested view.

The big lie is that everything that needs to be built is being built by big tech.

Meanwhile, we need nuclear power plants to keep up with massive growth in electricity demands.

We need desalination plants and people to dump salt in the middle of the ocean to replenish water in local ecosystems.

Those are just two obvious things.

We also need the arts, and more people reading books.

Capitalists only care about the profit in their own silo. The oligarchs are preventing more silos from being built.

That is why you tax their profits at 99% to force them to actually invest their money or pay it out to other people who can find better things to do with it than hoard it.

The myth that AI data centers are using up all the water comes from some incorrect citations that have then swept through sensationalist and poorly fact-checked (looking at you Washington Post) news stories. One major contributor was Karen Hat's "Empire of AI" which overstated the usage by three orders of magnitude. (She did publicly correct that, but you can guess how many people are interested in the non-sensational numbers).

For proportion, California almond growers use 90x the fresh water of all US data centers combined.

Which is not to say that a data center can't still be a strain for some communities, but not in a more extraordinary way than e.g. the local university wanting to maintain a golf course.

But "AI IS SUCKING UP ALL THE WATER PEOPLE NEED TO SURVIVE!!!" is a wonderfully concrete - if completely false - complaint for people uneasy about the recent advances in technology to latch onto

So this has nothing to do with the building being a "data center" at all. The water used if for construction and it could just as well be a stadium or an apartment complex. But since people are talking about data centers using water we'll take any opportunity to jump in on that even if it's amplifying a misconception by mentioning it in adjacency to unrelated events.

Can you answer the question of why he would lie about either exactly? What is his sourced motivation? How does that stack against his incentive to not blithely throw away his career as an accomplished academic?

The actual explanation is much simpler. He is a world-reknown biologist, not a computer scientist or philosopher. He sounds dumb talking about what he is not an expert in.

You (I assume) have some developed expertise in the AI tooling. You (quite obviously) do not have any expertise in biology, or even the context of Dawkins statements you are alluding to, so you sound at least as dumb characterizing what he has said as "anti-trans crap."

The same IEA has warned repeatedly of the precarious position Europe has put themselves in with regard to fuel dependence. The Russian war on Ukraine and subsequent sanctions should have made that tangible but Europe just switched over to Gulf suppliers, exacerbating the present problem. In fact instead of reacting to increase domestic refining and reserves just last year Europe shut down 4 refineries (~400000 barrels per day) of capacity. It lets politicians pretend they are being green while actually just paying someone else to do the dirty work.

The US does all of its own refining and is able to send both crude and jet fuel to Europe to offset at least some of the deficit. The markets are rerouting and many of the global tankers (especially from Asia) are headed to the US to resupply, with the US set to almost double its exports. Unfortunately extra-crude doesn't help Europe's jet fuel problem much since they can't refine it.

... until it affects rich people.

People giving up their thinking abilities is nothing new.

What part of that fiction has any connection with the reality of the 1%?

The social media platforms would rather have it treated like an R rated movie that kids can't get into than simply not run ads or show content for people they aren't explicitly connected to on the platform.

Because most people would opt for that.

Imagine only seeing content from people you follow and who follow you back.

The British traded spice. They didn't use it.

Even if we want oil to be the currency we use to manipulate the world, us using it is a very silly way to go about it because it just makes us susceptible to manipulation.

We're supposed to want OTHER people to be dependent on oil and for US to control it.

Instead it's just us shooting ourselves in the foot constantly. We're supposed to be hoarding oil to drive up prices. Not consuming it.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.

Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

Stuff like this effectively winds up very economically progressive because people for whom that discount matters will go to the extra effort to get it and people with high-incomes won't care and will effectively subsidize the low price. What do you think that $2 coupon from the newspaper is doing? Setting up exactly the same $16.99 vs $14.99 price differential.

Conversely, consider on Saturday the person who absolutely needs the tomatoes to finish a dinner already in progress can pay the high-demand price and the person who was just thinking about things nice to keep stocked in the pantry can wait, vs pricing low so that the item is already out-of-stock from indifferent shoppers when that person who really needs it walks in.

It's easy to sell people a story in which price differentiation is a means of screwing them over but it is just as often to their direct benefit. People implicitly accept the good of this for things they already experience like coupons, but anything new sounds scary.