To mitigate tort liability and preserve financial partnerships.

No. The fructose in an apple will not harm you nor will drinking a can of Pepsi once per week make you ravenously hungry. Excessive fructose consumption messes with your leptin response.

No. Excessive sugar contributes to heart disease and other ailments.

These are over-generalizations that make it damn near impossible for the average person to understand what they need to do to be reasonably healthy. If you tell people that "sugar is giving you cancer", they either ignore you because they're unwilling to cut out ALL SUGAR or some poor saps will actually cut sugar from their diets so severely that they will actually cause problems because your body needs sugar... just not as much as we have access to on a regular basis.

Correct! TOO MUCH high-fat meat is a problem.

No. Gluten is hard for some people to digest properly (Bread in the USA used to be made with iodine. After the iodine fear craze, it's now made with bromide

Is all bread in the USA made with potassium bromate? No.
Is all mass-produced bread in the US made with potassium bromate? No.
Would bread be considered "ultra-processed" regardless of the use of potassium bromate or potassium iodine? Yes.

I don't know what this means. Are you saying that legislative advocates have corrupted the production of baby formula or that the corporations that mass-produce baby formula are gouging their market?

This CAN be true, but I think it's fair to say that very, very few people in the US are at risk of malnourishment and those that are cannot pin a sole cause of malnourishment on "flavorings". You're not going to develop scurvy because you consume a beverage that's high in citric acid instead of consuming an orange. It's so easy to get all your necessary nutrients that very few people in the US could actually benefit from a daily multi-vitamin.

I 100% agree. They manipulate the fat, salt, and sugar to excessive and unhealthy levels in an effort to keep their customers coming back and, in an effort to reduce expenses, they replace more nutritious ingredients with less nutritious ingredients. And sometimes they add unhealthy things to mitigate loss of product by extending shelf life.

But very little of the food produced right now for the US market is actually "dangerous". Instead, it's dangerous in excess. Go ahead and eat an Oreo. Eat a row of Oreos, if you want. However, one shouldn't make it a habit of eating entire rows of Oreos (or any overly-sugared treat). And if you want to start a non-profit that mass-produces genuinely healthy confections to replace Oreos as a go-to snack, then I will eat your cookies! But you will find it very difficult to compete with Oreo's low cost to produce and shelf life while maintaining the high-health content and low product loss.

One needn't be a nutrition researcher to understand the vocabulary issues.

The process (permutation) of foods is not the issue and every single description of why "ultra-processed foods" are bad, never actually say mixing, cooking, dehydrating, etc. food is bad. It always comes down to the addition of large amounts of sugar, salt, and fat within that process. The name "ultra-processed" has no association with the problem opponents of ultra-processed foods are trying to fight.

It would be like saying, "We need to stop transportation! Transportation leads to death!" and then further into the discussion stating, "The problem with transportation are the polluting of vehicle fuel sources and the unsafe operation of personal vehicles."

There is absolutely nothing wrong with food that has been processed via a variety of means and the term is confusing for EVERYONE as a result. Did you have a tofu wrap with kimchi? Congrats, you had "ultra-processed" food and now your life is in danger. (Ok, no, not really.) Let's just look at what the article itself says:

What is ultra-processed food?

* Fizzy drinks - Carbonation isn't a problem, it's the sugar.
* Sweets - Apricots are not a problem, candy is.
* Fast Food - Quickly produced grilled chicken is a non-issue. High-salt, high-fat meets and sugary breads are.
* Mass-Produced Bread - There's nothing wrong with making a LOT of bread. The cake-levels of sugars are.

What do these foods contain?

* There's nothing bad about fruit juice concentrates except when they use insufficient water to reconstitute the concentrate or if they remove too much pulp.
* Dextrose? Dextrose is used to treat hypoglycemia.
* Golden Syrup? Again... It's sugar!
* Gluten? Gluten is the problem? WTF?
* What in the world is wrong with dried egg whites?
* Monosodium glutamate is just a salt!!

Why does it matter?

And here's where we get to what it's ACTUALLY all about-- HIGH salt, HIGH sugar, HIGH fat. That's it. That's the problem.

There is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about mass produced food.
There is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about dehydrated food.
There is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about quickly produced food or with food with a long preparation process.

The ONLY ACTUAL problems are the unhealthy levels of SALT, SUGAR, and FAT.

So again, I assert We Need to Drop the Term "Ultra-Processed". Most people don't understand it and thus it's a useless term to improve peoples' lives.

I'm not even joking.

I am well aware of the Comcast's LONG-STANDING and VALID reputational issues... but the deal was too much to pass up. My offer was for 1Gbps at $50/mo. The price is locked in for 5 years and I'm not bound by contract. The gateway is included. This is in contrast to my prior ISP where I had one-tenth the bandwidth, paid 40% more per month, and had older gateway with less WiFi range.

We're better off today with Comcast, but I'm not loyal to anyone. The second they try to pull the rug, we're out the door, but we will have gotten ours in the interim.

Here's the ENTIRETY of what Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach is quoted to have said in the article.

* “It’s an overblown narrative, and it’s not true,”
* “absolutely not a headwind”
* “We are uniquely positioned to be one of the AI winners in the enterprise because of our incumbency, and lastly, because of the trust we get from our customers,”

So the CEO of a company, the person hired to continually convince people to buy their stock, said that their financial investments are good and definitely not bad. Let's just ignore every CEO statement about how their choice to invest in LLMs replacing human work is affecting their business unless supplemental insight from that company's customers and employees is included in the article?

Thanks!

Exactly. They're not dumping AI content. They're doubling down on making AI content indistinguishable from content generated by humans.

Remember-- CEOs are not accountants. They're managers with the EXPRESS obligation to continually increase investment. They must always be in the process of encouraging people to buy their stock.

The major CEOs will never say, "I was too stupid. I was taken in by the promise of large language models thinking it was actual, Star-Trek-level artificial intelligence. We increased our software expenses by 20%, reduced our workforce headcount by 20%, and it hasn't paid off. In fact, we're significantly less financially stable today and our position to improve is weakened by the lack of capable workforce. Oops."

No. Instead, they say, "I was right. The gains are coming," while trying to manipulate the perception of their business.

I appreciate the contribution and insight of the esteemed Slashdotter "BeaverCleaver", but typically there's an article link that comes along with a summary,

* 3D TV
* Motion Smoothing on everything
* Curved Screens
* Advertising-subsidized TV prices
* Now... AI Television hardware.

What a waste.

First, I haven't read the article.

Second, my first response is, "It's more complicated than putting more people on a plane."

-- More people = more weight = more fuel = more cost for all passengers
-- Currently, coach and business class tickets pay for their extra amenities and subsidize coach/economy classes. Like toll lanes subsidizing local transit by bleeding the people willing to pay for extra convenience, they're a net benefit.

Lastly, making airline travel less GHG-intense per passenger is a good goal, but there is other lower hanging fruit (passenger vehicles, light-duty trucks, shipping fleet, etc.).

The article is written by Mike Masnick, the founder of TechDirt and member of the board of directors for Blue Sky. He has a definite incentive to mitigate regulation that could reduce advertiser revenue into TechDirt and/or Blue Sky.

I'm not saying the guy's evil... I'm only talking about the guy's likely motivations.

Almost everything that is free to access online is free only due to the revenue from advertisers and data brokers. If regulation could potentially reduce use of those sites, revenue from advertisers and data brokers will drop and the financial viability of MANY online operations (including his) could suffer.

It takes a LONG TIME for scientific communities to establish consensus on human behavior (to the extent that consensus ever exists in science). Hell, even consensus within the HARD sciences can be difficult due to the extreme financial pressures of grant-based research (See: History of research on the addictiveness of cigarettes, oxycodone, etc.)

There has been comparably little academic research on the habit-forming/addictive nature of social media "engagement" tools, tactics, and strategies, so there is nowhere near a consensus on the effects.

However... ALL of these social media companies share the primary incentive and drive to grab and hold on to user attention, and when the user disengages, do whatever possible to get those users to RE-engage. All of THEIR research has driven them to use specific tools, tactics, and strategies to do just that.

So let's remove the term "social media" from the conversation. Let's call it a "slowly blinking red light". Let's say a bunch of companies developed a slowly-blinking red light expressly engineered to hold peoples' attention and, when the people disengage, they're feel genuine separation anxiety and are driven to stare back into that slowly-blinking red light.

Would that product be allowed on the US markets? No. It only serves as a detriment to the health of the users. What if there insufficient scientific consensus? Well, who gives a shit? We have unassailable evidence of the companies' intent and efforts to do exactly what we're accusing them of doing. Moreover, the effects are observable outside of a laboratory. We don't NEED fully validated scientific research to take regulatory action on stuff that is immediately evident.

From the article:

Cool. I think it's great that the author has functionally said, "It's only a problem for people with mental health issues." That's a great standard. Let's dive deeper there.

What percentage of teenagers are struggling with mental health issues?

I'm not asking how many are mentally ill, I'm asking about "struggling with mental health"-- low confidence, anxiety, bullying, school stress, future stress, family stress, fear for physical safety, fear of exclusion, etc. Anyone who remembers being a teenager will likely say, "Well... pretty much all teenagers are going through some level of mental health struggles."

So, if nearly all teenagers are susceptible to these companies' explicit and professed attempts to manipulate user attention should they be allowed to access these companies' products? Some countries are starting to say, "No."

What about people ages 20-30?

Their hormones are generally more leveled out and they've left the high-density social environment of K-12 education. Are THEY dealing with significant amounts of mental health struggles? According to the CDC's 2022 National Health Information Survey, over 25% of this group are anxious and/or depressed.

So, if nearly 100% of teenagers and 25%+ of 20-30 year-olds have professed and/or observed mental health struggles and those struggles make them particularly susceptible to forming unhealthy habits with social media due to the intentionally habit-forming tools, tactics, and strategies, isn't that sufficient grounds for regulation?

Closing Statements

Social media companies have courted advertisers with the research, data, innovative technologies, and promises to attract, hold, and regain the constant interaction of their current and potential userbase. It has never been a secret. They weren't "exposed"-- they proudly exposed themselves and enriched themselves at the expense of the health of their userbase and our political systems. They know (as do we all) that they intentionally engineer their product to be habit-forming on the basis of users' psychological response, not the users' measured utility of their products. They have been exceedingly successful to the extent that their networks have been instrumental in the disruption of multiple developed nations' political systems by malicious external actors-- not that they care because those external actors are customers just like traditional advertisers.

Any call for a scientific consensus in these findings is obfuscation. You don't need academic research to prove things that are both evident on the face as confessed as intentional.

What we have now: Laptops.

* Low power consumption
* Lightweight
* Variable keyboard sizes, but generally compact
* Self-contained battery the entire computer for hours at a time
* Easy plug-and-play with USB C docks
* Integrated monitor

* Price: $500 - $1,500 for most business/student laptops.
* Sales Pitch: A fully capable computer wherever you need to be.

What they're offering: Screenless Laptop.

* LowER power consumption than a laptop (no monitor).
--- This doesn't matter though because almost no one will ever use this without being plugged into an external power source.
* LightER weight due to smaller battery and the lack of a monitor.
--- This doesn't matter much, though, because no one complains about the weight of small, office laptops.
* Variable keyboard size, but smallest includes a 10-key.
--- This is good. MANY knowledge-workers prefer a 10-key and might prefer to have one without having to get a 16" laptop.
* SmallER self-contained battery.
--- Presumably, this exists only so that someone can move between hoteling stations without shutting down.
* Easy plug-and-play with USB C docks.
--- Same as a laptop.

* Price: Unknown
* Sales Pitch: Why pay for laptop monitors AND monitors at hoteling stations?