Models have the North Pole arriving at the Bay of Bengal sooner than anybody would expect. Christmas will be awkward until we change our vocabulary..
Presents will be delivered by the jolly Buddha and eight tiny elephants?
AI is a tool with many uses. It's actually creating a new industrial revolution so it's better to have a positive attitude about it, but whatever....
I don't know why you think that calling it a new industrial revolution should make people feel better, or why people should adapt to it rather than fighting it. The industrial revolution eventually improved lives for many people, but it also came with a horrific price. People, including children, were forced to work in dangerous conditions that they rarely encountered while working on a farm. The lack of infrastructure led to breakdowns in sanitation, and spread of deadly diseases. The life expectancy in Liverpool and Manchester before the industrial revolution was about 30 years. In the early 1800s, life expectancy for urban workers dropped to 17 years in Liverpool and 19 years in Manchester.
The industrial revolution fueled the rise of Marxism precisely because it caused so much harm to so many people. I've spent the last year learning about AI and encouraging people to do the same, because understanding the machine is necessary to mitigate harm. But that doesn't mean that we should allow AI to consume half the world's electricity, or that we should gleefully embrace every opportunity to use it.
You might get a different answer to the survey if you changed how you ask the question. Would you rather have a data center as your neighbor, or would you prefer to live next to the breached containment pools of radioactive water at Fukushima?
I do not oppose nuclear power plants because of their impact on my quality of life. I oppose them because the long-term dangers outweigh any short-term benefits. I simply do not believe that humanity can responsibly operate nuclear power plants and store their waste products for thousands of years.
The evidence so far is pretty clear. In less than one hundred years we have had a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, an explosion at Chernobyl, and a massive disaster involving multiple plants in Japan, where radioactive material escaped into the environment. Those are just some of the power plant accidents. There have also been accidents in the storage and processing of nuclear material, weapons testing disasters, and the theft of nuclear material that could make its way into the hands of terrorists.
I think the party should go straight for the jugular. The Democrats should push for a 95 percent tax on anyone with over $100 million in assets, then use that money to balance the deficit and shore up social security. Any money left over should be distributed back in the form of tax rebates. The only way for Americans to regain control of the country is to eliminate billionaires.
Nobody earns a billion dollars.
A failure of judgement or lack of expertise on the part of the contracting organization doesn't mean they were engaged in fraud. I think we can apply Hanlon's Razor to this:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.
This sounds obscene until you see what it costs to educate people in the public school system. New York City is paying $42K per student.
New York State is paying about $33k per student. In the listing linked below, the states with the highest tuition rates are for the most part, blue leaning states. I note that the state I live in, North Carolina, is near the bottom of the ranking. In my experience our expenditures track with the outcomes.
The rights that you are asking about are primarily copyright protections. If the work was written by the employee of an organization, the right to copy would belong to the employer first. Otherwise that right would initially belong to the author. Of course, copyrights can be bought and sold, so we don't know who actually owns the copyrights at issue. But I don't think copyright matters in this case. Not that it's irrelevant, but it probably doesn't come into play.
Trademark law doesn't let you create rights out of infringing use, so if McConaughey were violating someone else's copyright, that could be a problem. In this case, though, his use of the phrase is presumably lawful under copyright law, and trademark protection would be based on whether consumers associate that delivery and recording with him - not on ownership of the original script.
What would be protected here would not be just any use of the phrase, but one that imitates his own unique delivery. Trademark law would not prevent anyone from using that catch-phrase. It would only prevent its use in a way that implies McConoughey as the source or endorser, and that triggers consumer confusion. It is the likelihood of confusion which is the core trademark test.
I'm not a lawyer, so this is just my understanding of the laws at play.
According to Statista 53.76 million Americans traveled internationally in 2024. That's 15 percent of the population. Besides the pure numbers, business travel matters to our economic prosperity. Isolation is bad for business.
Asynchronous inputs are at the root of our race problems. -- D. Winker and F. Prosser
