Agreed. Here's are some more questions to add some nuance:

Should these organizations be stopped from getting "too big" so that they can fail without taking down the entire economy/internet/industry? If so, that would mean reigning in "boom" economies and industries, thereby risking the accusation of "stifling innovation" (the most common retort of large-scale financial scammers).

Should their failure be managed to ensure a soft landing? This was the practice for Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Wachovia which all collapsed during the Mortgage Crash/Crisis.

You are a hero.

Who is willing to provide an option for those without a 404 Media account?

It DID crash the economy, but then the federal government stepped in, implemented the "too big to fail" doctrine, and blunted the damage into a recession instead of a depression. In that process, though, they exposed their weakness: the government will step in to rescue companies on which the US economy most relies.

This is particularly relevant when, amidst a widely acknowledged AI investment bubble, Google CEO Sundar Pichai says in the same breath that AI investment is at least partially irrational and regarding a bursting bubble "I think no company is going to be immune." That's not a warning... that's a threat and a dogwhistle to the government effectively saying, "If you allow this bubble to burst, everyone will suffer".

This is that "moral hazard" about which economists and political scientists warned during the mortgage crisis. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard) They know that they won't bear the harm of the risks they've taken.

I think it's a good key indicator to include in evaluating the health of the lived economy (not the stock market). Here's what I watch:

1. Credit card delinquency (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCCLACBS_
2. Sub-prime car loan delinquency (https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/12/a-record-number-of-americans-are-behind-on-their-auto-loans)
2. BNPL companies like Klarna not meeting earnings expectations from their PRIMARY business (as opposed to propping up the business with speculative investment). Incidentally, Klarna has an earnings call tomorrow.

In California, New York, Hawai`i, and other high-cost areas, you'd be spending 4x on electricity to run this thing could expect to return in revenue.

Am I the only one that sees the irony that a company called Robinhood is preparing to deliver wads of riches to well-off too lazy people and hoping someone doesn't attempt to rob said rich people and give to themselves?

Context is Everything! Before people start going off about how dumb of an idea this is, this is about SINGAPORE.

In the US, light-duty trucks (pickup trucks) emit nearly 5x the total annual GHG than commercial air travel and a huge proportion of those pick-up trucks are vanity vehicles. This airline levy isn't nor should it be a high-priority levy for the US.

For Singapore, where it's very difficult to own a car ($20k/yr + fuel + parking), vehicle emissions aren't really their focus and commercial air is.

An ILLEGAL monopoly (in the USA) requires a person/organization to use anti-competitive measures to attain and/or retain monopolistic control over an industry. This can include predatory pricing, predatory mergers, intentionally driving competitors out of business, and the refusal to deal in normal circumstances.

Steam is a LEGAL monopoly that gained its market share by getting in early and being consistently foresightful, considerate of their customers' needs, and competitive in the industry.

So why is an article at all? Because of the distribution fees. You pay two ways to distribute a game on Steam. First, you pay a one-time $100, but you get that back after $1,000 in sales. Second, You pay a 30% commission on all sales, but that drops to 25% after you bring in $10 million and 20% after $50 million.

Is that unfair? Probably not. Consider how much it would cost to print a bunch of CDs/DVDs, boxes, get stores to carry your game, etc. And if you don't want to do that (no one does), compare it to the cost to distribute your game elsewhere and what features that system has (or more likely, doesn't have).

GOG, Microsoft, XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, has no one-time fee, but has a similar revenue share at 30%.

EPIC Games has a $100 listing fee but has the lowest revenue share I could find at 12%.

So Steam is comparably priced, has a MASSIVE marketshare, isn't attempting to absorb smaller competitors, and they provide a great, stable product.

So is there a problem?

Look, I absolutely despise the use of AI art by massively profitable companies who are literally just trying to keep more money in their pockets instead of paying people to develop animations themselves, but this is not a particularly ugly piece. Here are the issues I see:

1. The people look large by comparison to the trucks.
2. The license plate numbers are AI-weird. Normally, license plates can be used to reference something seasonal, but AI doesn't work well with text rendering.
3. The wheels on the trucks don't spin 100% correctly in all of the shots. Most of the time they work, but if you look for the problem, you'll find it.
4. Standard AI-weird eye-sizes and movements.

The problem is that if you haven't trained yourself to look for these flaws (like 99.999% of the people who will see the commercial), you won't notice them as flaws but "design decisions" or "the human touch". Heck, if AI weren't a thing, You could explain away all of the flaws I found like this:

1. The people look large by comparison to the trucks. -- Artistic intent. The scale of everything is so large to get the view, that appropriate human scale would force the people out of focus.
2. The license plate numbers are AI-weird. -- We decided not to put in a custom plate and make it a bit more standard.
3. The wheels on the trucks don't spin 100% correctly in all of the shots. -- That's what happens when you use a small studio!
4. Standard AI-weird eye-sizes and movements. -- The kids LOVE cartoonish animals!

Ya, it sucks from an ethical standpoint, but let's not act like it's anywhere in the "low quality AI video" pile.

The autonomous vehicle liability puzzle is yet to be solved. Massively centralized liability will obliterate a dominant manufacturer of autonomous vehicles if the vehicles aren't operating close to perfectly. Let's consider actual numbers:

1. In the US, there are approx. 42,000 road deaths per year.
2. Imagine that Waymo has achieved a pure monopoly of people transportation on the road in the US and has, a result, reduced road deaths by 95% resulting in only 2,100 deaths per year.
3. Can Waymo survive the litigation directly liable for killing 2,100 per year?

Hint: You don't deserve credit for NOT killing people. That's what you're supposed to do. You WILL, however, get punished for everyone you DO kill.

What the Waymo CEO is trying to say is, "The robot did it, not Waymo and that people will accept that."

But we won't.

We know that these robots are not sentient. We know that these vehicles are acting at the express instruction of Waymo. We know that when they end up killing someone, Waymo should be liable.

Others are accurately hammering this home and I feel compelled to pile on.

A company cannot be innovative if all of their innovative ideas require guarantees financial of success. If you lead with the demand of financial success, you're forcing people who are scared for their jobs to avoid risk and simply replicate the last big thing. And when the safe project brings in less revenue than originally estimated (because everyone is competing using the same safe items), they can point back at their market research and say, "We had all the reason and data to think that this would make us money."

Innovation is a gamble. If a company wants to be innovative, then they need to risk their own money on projects lacking the certainty of success and keep people employed despite the lack of extreme profit margins so that those people feel sufficiently comfortable to innovate.

People who are scared for their jobs will not innovate . "Firing people until innovation improves" is not a thing.

Thank you for this and I agree. There's insufficient information in the article to suggest that there's an increase in fraud, but there is the suggestion that fraud is using AI-generated receipt images.

Having finally read the article, wow this is just a bad article.

That can just mean that some people are using AI to generate fake receipts instead of printing/modifying their own.

So (potentially) 30% of companies have seen "a rise" in false receipts. That rise is not defined.

So only 10% say that they know that their company has seen a falsified AI receipt while 70% think it despite having no evidence. That says a lot about the CFOs (not good stuff).

I do not have a $120/year subscription to the Financial Times. Can someone just post what percentage of SAP's 80 million monthly compliance checks are showing evidence of fraud using AI?

It's not "higher education" or the supposed "industry" therein. It's individuals at the top who are being pressured to:

1. Adjust to reductions in staffing costs due to the massive financial attack of the federal government (they hope GPT will be a force multiplier)
2. Find operating revenue from other sources
3. Adjust for the reduced quality of incoming college students
4. Spin all of the above into something that could potentially gain notoriety for the university and themselves