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

Humans are by fare the best automobile operators on the planet. Computers do not come close. That's fact. If you took the very best autonomous vehicle system existing right now and a trucker with 10 years of experience and no violations, the trucker would be more capable at negotiating more complex situations and at less cost.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that a couple autonomous trucks running on a couple EXTREMELY measured routes are either cheap or consistent in their operation.

We'll eventually have affordable AVs... but we're nowhere close to it yet.

I am the OP. Tragedy is 100% correct in my intent. I don't care about the seeding chemicals themselves. No one should be. The problem comes from the use of rain to clear the local atmosphere of the pollutants which creates abnormally acidic raid.

I'll say again-- I'm surprised this wasn't in the article. It's a genuine risk/cost of this type of solution to this type of problem.

I'll add to the concern: People tend to use repeatable short-term stop-gaps as long-term solutions, so we could fully expect India to seed, cause precipitation, and continue to produce acidic rain to the detriment of their people and their infrastructure. Absent enforced regulations on power generation, tailpipe emissions, and changing to a compost solution instead of burning their agricultural waste, they will be ADDING the problem of acid rain while not doing the very hard work of reducing air pollution.

1. Vintage 35MM camera
2. A journal
3. Water colors & painting book
4. A cassette tape
5. A fountain pen
6. Two pieces of hard candy
7. Two pencil sharpeners
8. A pencil
9. A pair of scissors
10. Hipster sunglasses

This is the "quirky girl starter pack" and is only missing a orange prescription bottle to be the "manic pixie dream girl" starter pack.

There is no economy for standard **game playing**. No one's games or game playing are being affected.

Instead, there is an unsupported, unsanctioned black market economy for the use of real money to buy cosmetic decorations in the game. And it's not like many people wants to pay these market-manipulated prices to USE the skins... it's a purely speculative market that's maybe 1% more rational than trading NFTs.

As someone who grew up in Southern California, I'm surprised this article didn't mention the risk of pulling down that ultra dense air pollution in bursts of abnormally acidic rain. The better option would be "pollute less".

Prior to the advent of social media, exploiters had to put in a LOT of work to market their scams to stupid people because mass, targeted communications was complex and expensive. Then comes social media which allows people to widely advertise their stupidity, congregate online on the basis of their stupidity, and for them to be easily targeted en masse by people who specialize in exploiting stupid people.

Now we have people who started stupid, self-identified as stupid, and have been taught by exploiters that their stupidity is a point of pride and a descriptor of their "culture". And the people are **numerous**.

24-hour news, Television, radio, newspaper, town criers, gossip-- All had an effect, yes, but nothing has the extreme ubiquity and constant stream of reinforcement of genuinely incorrect information of social media.

No. I assume nothing. I'm telling you that the bill doesn't purport to solve the problem you're accusing it of not solving.

Here's your firearm analogy: The state requires gun locks to reduce the risk of unintentional discharges-- particularly in the hands of children. That doesn't prevent the firearm from being stolen and used in a crime, but it's not supposed it. It's to REDUCE THE LIKELIHOOD that a kid will harm himself.

This law does not solve that problem nor has it intended to. This law intends to help parents semi-lock down (in tiers) their kids digital devices and reduce risk. Not eliminate all possible risk... reduce it. And to do it without introduce more risk from other realms (like the UK did).