Is there a link to the article without a Paywall or are we just accepting the summary as the basis for all discussion on the matter?

Put away your conspiracy theory hats for just a second and look at the big picture-- Credit card loyalty programs are helping to subsidize the price of airline travel by providing private transportation profits a source OTHER THAN airline tickets. This is a good thing for travelers (if still a bad thing for people who don't know how to manage a credit card).

If airlines weren't getting their profits from loyalty programs, they would need to increase the cost of economy airline travel because they're still publicly-traded companies and their shareholders demand profit!

The only risk is if the airlines have to STOP their credit card partnerships, their shareholders would revolt and probably force the airlines into destructive business practices that would harm travelers. The lesson here isn't "don't get credit card money", it's "transportation networks should not be publicly traded".

I disagree with your assessment. Let's go through my proposed analogy detail by detail because I think it works.

* Flo = Landlord
* App = Rental residence
* App terms and conditions = Rental Lease
* Flo User = Resident
* Using App = Walking around the residence
* Recording actions in the app = The landlord filming walking around the residence (which you agreed to as a term of your lease)
* Recording app open/close actions = The landlord filming entering and exiting the house
* Facebook paying Flo for details on how individuals use their apps = Someone paying the landlord for the film of you getting some booty

Mind you that Flo is an app specifically created to help women track menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, and as a result, pregnancy termination. TWELVE states have made it illegal to terminate a pregnancy. Facebook was buying personal, medical information from Flo and that information could then be used to track whether a woman has terminated a pregnancy.

I look forward to your feedback.

If I paid a member of your household to film you without your permission and send me the video, that family member would be guilty of a crime as would I.

This is a vague statement about social media and has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ARTICLE wherein people tracking their medical, health, and family planning efforts via an app, where they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, had that privacy infringed upon for profit. Moreover, given that some states have recently criminalized certain forms of family planning, these actions are seen as an extreme risk for the safety of those users.

Is there an article link or is this just a discussion topic?

California saw these efforts in the pipeline and has some legislation working through the process to nip it in the bud: https://leginfo.legislature.ca...

It's only 4 steps away from becoming law (Senate Appropriations, Senate Floor, Concurrence, Governor). It will likely pass and go into effect January 1.

Gridlock is a function of people not obeying the law, not signal timing. The solution to gridlock is providing actual disincentives (traffic enforcement) as opposed to what is being done right now (no traffic enforcement).

I agree, but that's not the concern anywhere. No one is saying that using AI in a measured manner decreases work or education value. Instead, everyone's concerned that AI work will replace human thought.

In an educational environment, over-using AI is devastating to the production of competent experts. Remember, the goal of education is to make smarter people. Completing assignments and exams is part of that process, but not the end goal. Yes, you can have a generative AI write a paper for you, but you will have failed the educational assignment of learning and exhibiting what you have learned. You might be awarded a degree on the basis of submitted work, but your will have cheated yourself out of actual competence and when you're asked to demonstrate your knowledge, you will be no more valuable or useful than any other person asking chatGPT to do something.

That's the risk. That's where educational programs have the opportunity to completely fail-- by not regulating the use of AI to prevent incompetent people from gaining a degree.

First, a vocabulary check--

Fertility: The measure of the number of births per 1,000 females.
Fecundity: The measure of the ability to get pregnant/give birth.

While people associate "being fertile" with "being able to reproduce", these statistical analysis measure the rate of actual reproduction. No one is saying that we are less ABLE to reproduce, but that we are electing not to.

Teen Pregnancy
Healthy economies have done well to reduce teenage pregnancy. In the US, births to teenage mothers have gone from 62 per 1,000 females in the early 90s to 13 per 1,000 in 2023. That's a half million fewer babies born per year in the US and well over 50% of the fertility reduction.

If the various influential powers REALLY want move local fertility, they need to make sure that people ages 20-30 are sufficiently financially stable that they will CHOOSE to have children instead of relying on teen girls getting pregnant and getting STUCK WITH children.

I would donate an embarrassing amount of money to Slashdot for the ability to edit my posts.

Do to changes like this, I foresee universities more loudly advertising that their CS programs are accredited because I'm pretty damn sure that using GPT to create a program will not be worthy of a CS degree in most peoples' eyes.

Americans do not fund protections against (or warnings for) low-probability events. They don't care if the severity is high-- a significant part of the population can't imagine something RARE happening to them and thus don't want to pay for it. Moreover, the idea of funding something that benefits others but not yourself is labeled as "evil socialism" by said population.

* Hurricanes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, highly predictable, and deadly. They get very specific warnings and calls for evacuations.
* Tornadoes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, moderately predictable, and deadly. They get regional warnings and calls for taking shelter.
* Wild Fires: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, seasonal, highly predictable once started, and deadly. They get very specific warnings and calls for evacuations.
* Earthquakes: Regional risk, Regionally high frequency, no seasonality, highly unpredictable, and rarely injurious. There are no earthquake risk warnings-- only alerts that earthquakes are happening or have recently occurred.
* Flash Floods: LOCAL risk (flood planes), LOW frequency everywhere, seasonal, and deadly. They get general risk warnings, but the primary protection is "Don't be in a flood plane".

They're complaining about stability.

Again, they're complaining about stability.

Remember-- these are people who make money from people buying and selling pieces of companies based on what changes they're able to foresee. If everything's stable, there's no money to be gained from sudden spikes in value or or shorting business failures. They will sometimes WANT mass layoffs because investors are taught that layoffs are simply reduction of expenses while maintaining output (resulting in greater profits).

These are vultures.

Most public universities aren't that expensive. UCLA, for example, is $15,700 per year. Is that worth it? Well, let's consider what you get-- UCLA runs on the quarter system (10-week terms plus a week for final exams) and your average student takes 4 classes per quarter at 3 hours per week. That's approx. 396 hours of direct education or examination per year, so if you want to break it down to the simplest cost-per-hour for education, it's $40/hour. Of course, there's much more expense that goes into the education that the instructor. There are the buildings and their maintenance, the utilities, the physical infrastructure of the campus (pipes, conduits, roads, walkways, etc.) and its maintenance, the landscaping, and all of the administrative work that goes into managing the extremely variable schedules, goals, and actions of 50,000 people on a single campus.

When you look at the whole picture, the cost of the university is pretty darn defensible.

Where I find the most egregious expense is in the cost of housing near major universities. All around these schools, you'll find a mass of investors (big and small, corporate and mom & pop) who buy up all the housing, turn it into rentals, and crank up the rent at every single opportunity. Food and housing is expected to be around $20,000 for a UCLA undergraduate this coming year-- and "housing" implies a shared bedroom among other shared bedrooms of an apartment or house.

This is why college campuses put so much work into building on-campus housing for their students and why some campuses (like UC Irvine) house the majority of their faculty on campus.

While there's a modicum of truth here, this the opinion of someone who knows nothing about universities. Honestly, a theater major will not have many job prospects after college by comparison to a civil engineering major. But, the arts are worthwhile and one's education at a major university is REQUIRED to be more than their major. History, math, writing, sciences, etc. -- those all take up ~1.5-2.0 years of a college education regardless of major as "breadth" courses or "general ed."

And then there's whole idea of "translatable experience". A person can go to school for a Computer Science degree, not actually like the exploitative patterns of the corporate world, and simply choose not to pursue the use of their degree in their career. Does that mean he's a useless human being? Of course not. There are MANY jobs out there that just require someone with an analytical mind to make/find solutions which those CS skills will directly benefit.

People with philosophy or English backgrounds tend to go into contracts, law, and policy because they're taught the importance of words, logic, meaning, and secondary effects. People with sociology degrees often move toward working with and for people in need. They use their education in more developed ways than simply being taught how to put a round thing in a round hole so that when they graduate they can put round things in round holes very quickly indeed.

I will say, thought, that too few students seek out on-campus jobs during their undergraduate careers. Yes, MANY do, but I think at least 80% of students should hold a campus job for at least 3 months prior to graduation. Mentorship, good wages, resume building, adjustable schedule, etc. It's hard to match that after graduation.

I don't know how many undergraduates you speak with daily, but I speak to at least 20. None of them have the expectation of getting a 6-digit salary right after graduation. Most of them are painfully cognizant of the financial future that's been created for them and most are just hoping to be able to make rent.

For those that DO hold out for higher pay, that's their choice and hopefully mom and dad support them in that choice.

We have had very different experiences. My 20 years of professional life have shown that people with a 4-year degree from a brick-and-mortar school tend to be those people that are able to learn on their own and will only ever ask for help when they're stuck. The ruggedness or grit of the person comes out in their work experience and interview as well.