Honestly I don't care, I think if most men where offered to go to an Island with a lot of sexy women they that would have sex with them they would.

I doubt people there where exchanging IDs, Its not like these where 12 year olds, they where 17 and in many places in the west where its perfectly legal to have sex with a 16 year old.

The most likely scenario here is that Epstien invited rich powerful men to have sex with these girls in order to gain leverage over them.

from wikipedia regarding Prince Andrew:

Note it said Epstein paid here, not Andrew, she was 17, age of consent in the UK is 16. New York its 17, However its 18 in the virgin Islands with exceptions for closeness of age. It was quite possible Epstein paid her and the rape was simply they consider it rape because she young. It is likely she did not give any indication to Andrew that she was being forced Epstein to do so.

I am no expert here and do not follow this case in depth but it seems to me Epstein used young girl to entrap rich men so he could gain power. Otherwise why have so many in depth records? Could Prince Andrew or Bill Gates not afford to hire a high class prostitute if they so wanted too?

Why are they special and don't have to save for retirement like 99.99% of the rest of the world, the world does not owe them or anybody else a conformable retirement.

If there was no copyright companies would not have to do this at all I could go to a web site and download any show that has aired, because someone would have made a copy. (like we can now but illegally). I could put it on a flash drive for less than the cost of a DVD. We have limited access to old shows because copyright allows dumb things like the Disney Vault that allows companies to extort money out of the population.

Yes they would because sharing code is insanely more efficient than writing your own from scratch. It would be in their interest to do so, GPL is probably more of a reaction to people copyrighting things. And if a company can't compete with 14 year old code then it should go out of business if someone that is capitalism for you.

My question is why did Peter Jackson have to pay Tolkien estate anything? Did making those movies detract for Lord of the rings book sales at all? What exactly did he take from them? It added to the books not removed from them. Did the estate do any extra work to earn that money. I think you get to say I/My estate created book and if you buy it a percentage of the proceeds go to the original author for ever. A significant number people will pay extra for that, just like people will pay for Panadol over paracetamol but not insane amounts.

Just because you could of made money if copyright was longer doesn't mean that its a good or necessary thing.

Why would I care about obvious economic impact? If you made it 5 years these companies would project out for 5 years. They may stop spending hundreds of millions on shows and movies while people struggle to make ends meet. They may become more efficient and not hire people to link chain mail for 2 years https://www.facebook.com/watch... , something that only the most OCD of film goers would even notice. Maybe they would be forced to share graphics resources.

I think its actually the reverse is in effect. The more you pay, the more expensive the movies become to make if movies made half the amount then top actors would simply get paid less, oh no they would only get 1 million per movie as opposed to 10, I think they would suck it up. You wouldn't pay normal actors less because they still need to live. It would also drive down the cost of software so more amateurs could make movies because it would have to.

That is how capitalism works constant competition cost pressure drives efficiency up.

Its like asking a lion what it would like in its prey, you will eventually end up with fat lazy lion that can't hunt.

To me the problem with movies today is not the effects but the lack of interesting stories, and it makes sense when are risking hundreds of millions of dollars you are not likely to take risks

All this is, is fooling the customer into thinking they are paying a smaller price than they actually are.

So basically the company is deceiving the consumer about the price, and the people who deceive better win. So yes get rid of tips.

I have no problem for tipping for exceptional service, but if its standard it should be included in the price. Of course when I am in the US I tip because I know how the system works and its unfair to the people doing the service not to but I still think it sucks.

You could say that about most insights people have, business will not care as long as it saves them some money then you are out of a job, just like they didn't care when they sent jobs of to India, if it saves them money, its irrelevant, and any business that doesn't just loses and goes out of business.

I think AI will also be able to political wrangling, I am sure I read something saying its better at convincing people than people, https://www.technologyreview.c...
  and managing expectations, requirements gathering (that is what it does now you tell it the requirements and give you an output, it can just prototype its response much faster and say to the customer is this what you want in real time)

I see nothing wrong with the ad, sure its no masterpiece but most ads are not. For goodness sake we have infomercials, at least it was only 45 seconds of bullshit.

Sometimes being bad is good for a commercial because it makes it memorable.

The fact that you can still see the comment gives me a little faith in slashdot, I personally don't care what the score is, however the media on both side now simply silences opinions they disagree with.

Of course they have that right since they are private institutions, but people have the right to stop listening and believing them, and that is exactly what has happened.

The thing about trust is that is very hard to get back once you have lost it, they sold their soles for profit, now they are paying the price.

Of course its easy math have a lot of high quality candidates, of course they going to be good enough but they may not be the best candidate. Especially if you have stated goals like https://www.theguardian.com/us.... No conspiracy theory needed.

But if you have these types of goals then even if they are the best candidate the perception is still there if they are a woman that part of the reason they are their is because they are a woman. I don't know if it is the case but it is a possibility.

The math: at a rate of 1 in 1000-1400 you only need 9000 to 12600 candidates not a impossible task in a country of 330 million.

Also that rate is probably based on the size of the class, relative to the number of candidates, I assume they only have a limited amount of resources to train astronauts. If only 1000 people applied they would probably take who they can get.

for me AI is replacing the search engines, they have made the search so bad full with ads and irrelevant answers that I don't know if AI is that much better or search is that much worse. Probably a bit of both, but I am confident that the enshittification of AI will occur. We are currently improving AI but it won't be long before its entire purpose will be to sell me stuff I don't need.

I highly doubt the cost of books is what is preventing any significant number people reading them in Denmark. I assume they have libraries, and if you really want I wouldn't be surprised if it was very easy to pirate a book.

It just sounds like the government doing something that looks like they are doing something, but is going to accomplish almost nothing at a cost to the tax payer.

You have no comparison here, or maybe you do how as the cost of private universities going in the US?

The way I see it is there are some places that capitalism works very well, to me these seem to be places where the power between consumers and producers is relatively equal. Capitalism needs competition to function properly, health care (especially with monopolies offered by patents) you get the choice of dying or paying exorbitant amounts. The moment you introduce monopolies/oligopolies companies become just as inefficient as government because the have no incentive to be more efficient. In fact its the opposite high cost just become a justification for charging people more. Health insurance just makes the situation worse because you now separate the actual payment with the premiums so people don't care how much it costs when paying and won't shop around. You have 2 groups that prefer higher costs, the medical industry because they make more money and insurance because without high costs why would you need health insurance in the first place.

Of course governments organizations are like monopolies from the start, they don't have any incentive to be more efficient either, since they can just say we need more money from the tax payer. But at least they don't have the underlying goal of making as much money as possible.

From the summary the current world wide fertility rate is 2.2 and falling, 2.1 is the rate required to maintain populations where literally on earth are you going to find more people if falls another 0.2?

https://ourworldindata.org/fer...

That need jobs done, you know in the real world, if you have no tradespeople then they become very expensive, housing becomes very expensive, rent becomes very expensive, roads become very expensive, etc.

If you don't have tradespeople then society falls apart, if there are no gender studies, historians etc, the world goes on.

Wasn't AI meant to make things cheaper because you didn't hire those pesky humans?

Can't they use AI to drive their prices down?

Or perhaps its just a big scam to shove an unwanted feature down our throat.