Rich people already have human agents to do that for them - they're called tax accountants. They don't violate tax law, they just use corner cases and loopholes that you and I can't. What this will do is turn you and I into felons because we screwed up line 40 box C on page 5, something that today would only be a problem if we were randomly selected for human audit.

Since AI will be processing tax returns, it would be interesting if the processing of tax returns could be summarised in data so that we know how many billionaires use each of the various tax return loopholes and corner cases. A difficult job for humans, but since machines are processing the data and evaluating it all against "code" (law), it should be an easy output to produce.

Health insurance in the USA is ridiculous because of the profits that courts feel they have to raid when something goes wrong and a someone sues. The $100,000,000 wrongful death award drives up insurance because insurance companies don't want to be out of pocket when a doctor claims.

The problem then is the vertical stacking of health insurance also being health providers, resulting in a loss of competition because it is very expensive to provide health care. The same problems happens with Internet access - vertical integration creates monopolies. Law that prohibits co-ownership of different layers of the service stack (be it health care of telephony) should be considered mandatory to provide customers with the best value for money

This Internet thing is Elon Musk's price for assistance in the election, as regional people will now be herded towards StarLink.

And since the government communicates with citizens by using the Internet (via web services and any other manner of things), it is not possible to put any restrictions in place on how people access that communication. Passing any law that attempts to restrict access to government communication would fail a 1st ammendment test.

It's more than just what you eat - in some people there are biological mechanisms that aren't functioning correctly, such as the hormones that direct whether or not the body should store glucose as fat or consume it or even convert fat for the body to use. In some people, all calories are stored as fat regardless of how little they eat. and then there are hormones that tell the brain to eat less because the body has lots of fat reserves and new food intake isn't required.

drugs such as this are aimed at helping people with broken biological mechanisms that should be saying "I don't need to eat more food" but aren't.

for some people weight gain is a simple problem of eating too many sugary things.

for a small number of people, it isn't possible to not gain weight.

There's been a lot of very interesting research in this area published in the last couple of years, and simply put, two people eating the same diet may not experience the same changes to their body's mass.

Part of the "small town" thing is that a lot of the towns where he has had rallies in the past won't let him do more because he hasn't paid his bills from 2020. This is normal Trump - don't pay your bills unless sued. That's why he is doing small towns and open air spaces - the big cities and big venues won't let him back in because he won't pay his bills.

Think of it like this: the car throws an exception and it is up to the user to catch and handle it ... or crash.

The countries with advanced economies now nearly all have a different problem: couples can't afford to own a home (or barely), forcing both parents to work, thereby preventing substantial families from appearing. Summary: kids and housing now cost too much "in the west."

In Nigeria and other countries, I wonder how many of those 6.8 children grow up to be adults.

This is simultaneously why immigration (both legal & illegal) is saving the USA and why conservatives want to prevent abortion (and maybe contraception): effectively force the number of births to go up.

If the phones sold in China are the same as elsewhere in the world, it would seem that there's a ripe market opportunity now for someone in China to buy phones at RRP and sell them on eBay to other people new, for less than the RRP, and still make a profit.

Grey market imports (using mechanisms like this) used to feature heavity in (digital) camera equipment on some of the big name websites. Seems like a ripe opportunity for more of the same, unless Apple has bribed US customers to block such imports.

I have both Apple and Samsung tablets that cost about the same. Prior to the A9/A9+, you just couldn't get a Samsung tablet with acceptable performance at the iPad pricepoint and I suspect still can't. Apple have a very good CPU/GPU combination in all of their tablets. That or the developer environments just produce better performing games. At the iPad price point, the competition from others has been lackluster up until 2024. The A9+ is the first to come close.

But one area where Apple is still better IMHO is the glass and the way it feels under your fingers. That might be more subjective but your AI robots and chatgpt scripts can't write about the way glass feels when doing automated comparison reviews based on datasheets. It is a thing. They don't all feel the same.

Yup, digital currencies with public ledgers are an intelligence smorgasbord.

In other parts of the world there are agreements between facebook/Google and media outlets around the news outlets being paid for news content appearing on websites. Those media outlets haven't died due to a lack of advertising revenue. Think about what that tells you with respect to the value of advertising revenue and how much news outlets get vs how much Google gets. Your very argument ("what about traffic and advertising revenue?!") was raised before. The news outlets (with the help of legislation) called facebook/Google's bluff and got an agreement. Obviously those of us on the outside (you & me) don't know what really goes on.

I think the summary here is that advertising returns from Google do not pay very well - or at least not as well as some of us think - and not well enough to sustain a newspaper that pays its journalists

Correct. Its current velocity is well above that needed for escape velocity for this solar system but it won't escape the Milky Way without help.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

This is the way.

It's easy to subscribe, no hardware required, no technician needs to visit, nothing. When it comes time to unsubscribe, nothing needs to be posted back, no cables need to be disconnected, nothing. For many it is becoming more of "subscribe,binge,cancel" and the economics are compelling. Watch a show all in 1 week rather than n months. I'm waiting for streaming services to put limits on the "binging" to try and break that cycle. That'll be fun to watch if it happens.

If you want to capture carbon from the atmosphere, plant a seed of something. All plants take carbon from the atmosphere - that's how they grow. Get a pot and some seeds from the tomato or pepper you bought at the supermarket and plant them outside in the spring. Not only will you get food, but you'll also take carbon out of the atmosphere. If you've got a house, or big yard, plant bushes/trees. Every inch of every plant that grows is from carbon being taken out of the atmosphere. Isn't it time we stopped burning carbon and started growing things instead? Plants are really low maintenance. Some sunlight and some water every day. Of course this won't make up for your carbon producing car (1 gallon of gas produces 20lbs of CO2) that you fill up every week, but it will help.

For the unititiated, it takes only 100 gallons of gas to produce 1 tonne of carbon dioxide.

What this is really about is whether or not the government can buy your metadata or if it can only get it as a result of a court issued warrant. The problem we face, with modern technology, is that there's so much metadata available (in log files, databases, etc) that there's no extra expense required by the telco to provide it. If you wind the clock back to the 1960s or 1970s, providing call data on telephones was at an extra expense (how many of you old timers or your parents ever asked for itemized bills with the comensurate fee for that?) and there was no easy way for the government to process it. Now everything is different.

The collection of information by the mobile phone operators will happen. It is necessary for them to be able to operate their networks. The government agencies are exploiting a loop hole in the law where they can gain access to data if they buy it. Where in the constitution prohibit the government from buying such data? There's nothing. Maybe the 4th ammendment can protect you but the government isn't interacting with you, it is getting data from the telco and it isn't doing it in secret (such as tap'ing the telco's fibers.) Since GPRS is now encrypted, it would be difficult to make an argument that your phone is broadcasting information that anyone/everyone can receive.

The goal of the USA is commerce and telcos have found a way to engage in commerce with the government that's only appeared in the last 10-20 years. If there was a prohibition on the government engaging in commerce directly with telcos, what about data wharehouses that buy the data from telcos and then sell it to whoever has the money?

The only acceptable outcome here is that the government (all arms of it) should be prohibited from acquiring any data that can be used to directly or indirectly identify an individual unless a warrant has been issued. The government puts restrictions on what the people at large can buy/sell, now it is time for some restrictions to be put in place on what the government can buy/sell.