There has been a sharp fall in birth rate in China in recent years. According to Google, it falls from 12.6 births per 1,000 people in 2000 to 6.77 births per 1,000 people in 2024. For comparison, the number is 10.5 in 2000 to 8.2 in 2023 for European Union. It is easy to see that a so called 996 work schedule would be a major factor contributing to the decreasing birth rate, as people have to spend more time in the office instead of with the family. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that Capitalism, in the form as advocated by some tech business leaders, want to sacrifice the future generations in pursuit of more corporate profits at the current moment.

It seems that downsides of AI as discussed by the professor appears to be mostly about social or economics impact. While these are valid points, they looked like discussion by a social science professor instead of a computer science professor. "Exploitation of (data) workers" is exactly the kind of words commonly spoken by social science professors. It would be helpful to CS education if there are more discussion about pitfalls of AI from a computer science standpoint. I can think of two main problems after taking a quick glance. The first is that AI may give inaccurate or factually incorrect answer, and the user asking the question would not be knowledgeable enough to know the answer is wrong. An example is a post in the OS/2 Museum website. The AI is asked about a model of old computer in the 1990s. The AI gave several different answers when the question was repeated, before finally answering that the specified model did not exist in the 1990s. However, in the earlier answers, some details about common computer conponents in the 1990s were described, so a less knowledgeable user may be tricked into believing that the answer was correct. The second is exemplified by the phenomenon known as vibe coding. Novice users may make use of AI to write code to solve programming problems, without properly learning how to do programming. And the code generated by AI may or may not contains subtle bugs that cannot be detected by a novice. This problem may also appear in other fields such as engineering, if an amatuer believe he or she can solve a problem by using AI instead of making the efforts to learn a skill properly.

I am not interested in discussion of politics, but I would like to comment on the statement "50% of the voting population fall on the left side of the intelligence bell-curve". This statement, by itself, is not sufficient to prove that a large portion of the voters are of low intelligence. Let's use an example, suppose that in a maths class in a school, the median score of a test is 80, and the range of test scores is from 70 to 90. So, the student with the lowest score is 70, and while this student's result is on the left side of the score bell-curve, this student's maths skill is not bad. Compare this to another class, where the median score is 50, and the range of test scores is from 40 to 60. In this example, the student with the lowest score in the first class has higher score than the student with the highest score in the second class.

While Trump may have done many things wrong, your version of the travel ban against COVID-19 was factually false. The travel restriction was not for Chinese nationals, it was for any non-US citizens who have traveled in previous 14 days to Hubei province of China. This information is readily available from news reports at around Feb 1, when the travel restriction was first announced. Therefore, it was not a racist move. The date of Feb 1 also showed that it was implemented relatively quickly after the news of the virus was announced in China. If one need to use lies and fake news for making criticism, then one have little credibility.

You have got the fact about the travel restriction wrong. The travel restriction is not for Chinese citizens, it is for any non-US citizens who have traveled in previous 14 days to Hubei province of China. This information is readily available from news reports at around 1st Feb, when the travel restriction is first announced. Since the travel restriction is not targeted only at Chinese citizen, but applied to all foreigners, your claim that it is being used for Trump's on-going trade war, instead of being a serious quarantine attempt, is also wrong.

It should be noted that the position of not making any editorial judgement is not incompatible with a desire to protect journalism. Using the metaphor of a book store, Google is acting like a book store, who does not make any editorial judgement on the books being sold. However, if the book store is disallowed to sell certain books, then the journalism produced by the authors of these books are certainly harmed, since it would be impossible to access these books via this book store.

Saying that Firefox is faster without extensions architecture, is like saying that a wifi access point can be made faster by reducing the number of users from 10 to 1. It is true that the wifi access point is made faster for the remaining 1 user, but for the other 9 previous users who are disallowed from using wifi, they would find that the wifi access point has become useless to them. Your statement exactly highlight the problem of Firefox. In the name of making Firefox better in a few aspects, it was made useless for a lot of people who have more different needs. Moreover, the extensions architecture used to work fine, it didn't work fine only after Mozilla has make a decision to not to support it.

The danger of vote buying is real, and you failed to understanding that a big part of the danger come from people who normally choose not to vote. It is a fact that in every election, many people choose not to vote. Maybe they think all the candidates are the same, or are simply not interested in voting. If some of these people, who normally do not vote, know that taking ballot selfies would allow them to get some money, they will simply vote the candidate who give them money, and they would not request any replacement ballot. In fact, vote buying is most likely to change the action of voters who do not have strong preference on any candidates in the first place.

And, No, banning ballot selfies is not about preventing people from expressing their political views on social media, it is about keeping election fair. There are countless way people can express their political views on social media, for example, using words to write which candidate they voted for, or post a picture of the candidate they voted for. Unless you want to claim that most people posting in the social media are liars, and their words cannot be trusted without showing a photo at the ballot.

When news about an oppressive and unfair practice in a far away country is shown in Slashdot, it seems that there are a number of posters who would rush to claim that US is also oppressive and unfair in some way. While maybe their purpose is to bash and criticize the US, their words also has the effect of trivializing the oppression and unfairness in the far away country, and thus defending the continuation of the oppression and unfairness in the far away country. If you honestly do not know the difference between Iran and US in this case, in Iran women cannot decide not to wear headscarves and cannot decide to be topless, while in US women can decide not to wear headscarves.

If Mr. Snowden had studied history in addition to studying technologies, he should have known that governments who wanted to "reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals" is not something new. In fact, in the country where he is staying now, namely Russia, the government of Joseph Stalin was one of the most oppressive government who worked hard to reduce the dignity of its people. Joseph Stalin did all these things before the invention of telecommunication technologies. Perhaps if Mr. Snowden would learn more about the country he is staying, he would learn the difference between governments who wanted to "reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals", and governments who are just doing their jobs in providing security to its people. While some of the things done by the more democratic governments deserve debates and perhaps reviews in courts, it should be noted that in world war 2, the oppressive governments' plan for world domination are stopped by organized efforts of the more democratic governments, not by anarchists who say governments can do no good.

I have seen the theory that all taxes are paid by individuals, either directly or indirectly, several times before. But an example would show the fault of such theory. Imagine a corporation which is run poorly so it has zero profit. In this case, the corporation would not have to pay any profit tax, so none of money paid by individuals to obtain goods or services from this company would become tax paid to the government. On the other hand, if the money is paid to a corporation run with good profit, then some of the money paid by individuals do become tax paid. This situation can be explained by the realization that profit tax is a tax on wealth creation. A profit tax has to be paid only if a corporation is able to create wealth or add value.

If one feel the need to ask why someone creating wealth should be taxed, the simple answer is that someone not creating wealth would have no money, thus unable to pay tax.

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Fire is something to be feared, and some people may have a valid reason to hate fire. But while fire can be very destructive, it can also be very useful if used correctly. In some way, a government is also like fire. It can be highly useful if run correctly, but can be destructive if run incorrectly. People should spend their effort to make the government works for the interests of the public, not to fear or hate a government.

Many government projects are done to satisify real need of society, and resources allocated in these projects are not result of politically based decision. On the other hand, in private business it is also not uncommon to have resources allocated politically, for example, to hire a subcontractor who is a good friend of the CEO. Hence, snch wastes can be found in both government and private businesses.

If you really believe that all government projects are unproductive activity, perhaps you can migrate to places like Somalia, where the government is very weak and doing very little. However, so far history suggests that places without a functioning government always fall into chaos and have very poor economics development.

In other news, it is reported that Secret Service is allowed to use guns and rifles. The fact that one does not see agents firing their guns everyday is simply because unless in "exceptional circumstances" there is no need, not because they are not allowed to.