So the US tech and financial sectors' acquiescence to Trump and his administration's Fascist ways are coming back to bite them. Good. "The more you tighten your grip, Trump, the more countries and income opportunities will slip through your fingers." (Apologies to George).

That said, I don't trust the European "commercial banks and payment service providers (who) would offer digital euro services to customers" - mostly because 'bankers'. Another Star Wars quote comes to mind: something or other about altering the deal...

Thanks! I hadn't considered all that concrete. Although I know producing it creates huge amounts of CO2, I tend not to be mindful of that in an ongoing sense. Going forward, that will be top-of-mind when it comes to evaluating the 'greenness' of projects and technologies.

Thanks for that. I was about to post a knee-jerk response about the fittingness of Orwell having been a Brit. And given some of the British government's excesses I've heard about over the past while - many of which sound disturbingly like thoughtcrime laws - I still think my reaction was appropriate. That said, I appreciate your reasonable counterpoint.

It's a tough balance for governments to strike. Sadly, I think that the British government is starting to strongly favour a bit of totalitarianism - so much so that I, as a Canadian, am reluctant to even visit the UK.

Fellow Ontarian here, and much less knowledgeable than you when it comes to our nuclear industry. How did our GG emissions end up increasing as a result of nuclear power plants?

Most insightful - I wish I'd thought of it. I guess I need to ask my inner cynical conspiracy theorist to up his game.

Actually, as per TFA the plan IS to have "at least four new international markets by 2040 and engage six to 10 new nuclear entrant markets over a 15-year horizon".

I can't speak for my government nor my fellow Canadians, and this news is a surprise to me. My first thought also was about solar and wind farms. But then I remembered something I've been pondering recently: with the not-reliably-predictable weather changes coming as a result of AGW, are wind and solar a good long-term bet?

Could weather become severe enough for windmills to start blowing over and breaking en masse, and for solar cells to fail earlier and more frequently because of heat stress? And when - not if - the AMOC fails, will the climate assumptions behind wind and solar planning be rendered invalid?

FWIW, as I write this I'm only 12 kilometres from the nearest nuclear plant, and 25 kilometres from the next-nearest.

It seems unlikely that they really thought this would go unnoticed. Maybe they just wanted to see how quick and loud the pushback would be.

Corporations are forever pulling shit like this to see how much they can get away with. "Gee - if we can get away with this, maybe we can get away with something bigger in the way of monetizing something that we never charged for in the past".

Corporations are slimy antisocial motherfuckers and are ALWAYS trying to pick up a little extra coin. All those little extras add up to a lot, if we let them get away with that shit. I'm glad they got slapped down over this particular attempt.

That may be true; but if you decrease America's incarcerations stats to account for that you'll still have nowhere near the factor-of-six discrepancy in incarceration rate.

Absolutely true. The education factor you refer to is especially important. But not just because of better access to post-secondary schooling: from everything I've read I gather that, on the whole, Canadian primary and secondary public school graduates have better reading and writing skills than American ones.

That difference may soon disappear though - toward the wrong end of the spectrum - now that so many kids are outsourcing their reading and thinking to LLMs.

Universal healthcare prevents a LOT of people from becoming criminals. Just try to successfully hold down a job when you're suffering from extreme shortness of breath or chronic pain from herniated discs. People in those situations can't even work as Walmart greeters because they can't stand up for hours at a time, if at all. No job, no money - so how do you eat, and where do you sleep? What would YOU do if you found yourself in that position?

Sure, many of those "too sick to work" people are also too sick to commit crimes, especially violent ones - but they may have dependent families who are also desperate. And even those who manage to get healthcare are effectively trading their homes and jobs for the "luxury" of having their illnesses treated. The illness may be gone; but so is the old job, along with the home that would allow them to keep their shit together long enough to get a new one.

Then, there are crippling psychological and psychiatric disorders. And again, the same downward spiral - no work, no money, no home, and crime to merely stay alive. For some people, crime is the only way to keep body and soul together between the time they can't afford treatment and the time they either die or end up in the "justice" system.

It's also not unheard of for people to commit crimes specifically so they can be put in prison, because they can't figure out any other way to get medical treatment and/or to be housed, clothed, and fed. Just let that sink in for a moment.

According to Wikipedia, the US has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 549 per 100,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Canada - the country next door which is very similar in broad cultural terms - comes in at almost exactly one sixth of that number. So maybe the States might get serious about addressing the huge social and institutional forces which are largely responsible for that discrepancy?

A good start might be to make prisons NOT part of the for-profit private sector. This incentive to 'create' prisoners seems to be a contagion which has spread into policing and the whole justice system. Then you could maybe fix the public education system and introduce universal healthcare. Again, a major culprit here is having ceded care of public-good institutions to for-profit interests. These jobs are neither simple nor easy - but they need to be done.

Huge corporations whose number one mandate is to maximize profit and shareholder return at the expense of all else - are a worldwide problem. We all need to be fighting that fight. And it seems that the US needs to be fighting it more than most other countries.

I've never experienced TikTok; but everything I've heard leads me to believe that even before AI became so pervasive,` the platform had way, way more slop than YouTube. Presumably, a greater affinity for slop in general implies a greater incidence of AI slop.

I hear that the National Street-level Drug Pushers Association is lobbying Congress for immunity against drug laws.

If asked to say which one I sympathize more with - the pushers of physiological drugs or the pushers of psychological drugs - I might have to flip a coin. OTOH the street guys are at least up-front about what they're doing and their motivations, so I might be tempted to give them the pass so I could watch the likes of Zuck hanging and twisting in the wind.

Now Adobe can leverage AI to more effectively steal IP from customers who were pretty much forced into their shitty and scandalous SaaS extortion scheme.

From what I've been hearing lately, I think there's a decent chance that Adobe will soon be an (admittedly lengthy) footnote in the publishing field. People who have used it for years or even decades are finding alternatives. And Adobe paid a billion bucks to Figma after their failed acquisition attempt - thereby hugely expanding the war chest of a company which is possibly their most dangerous competitor.

I didn't much like Adobe even 15 years ago; now, if they die I'll probably celebrate by buying a bottle of single-malt Islay whiskey and sharing it with some like-minded friends. Death to Adobe!

I agree with everything you said. I hadn't thought of most of those implications yet - I was too busy being happy that we at last have a story fit for nerds and geeks to chew on.

The technical details of this make for very interesting thoughts and questions around interpreting interference patterns among multiple sources of energy whose wavelengths are otherwise way too long for the level of detail promised. If this isn't smoke and mirrors then it's really exciting from a tech standpoint. It's also the kind of thing that serious hardware hackers could conceivably build in a basement in the not-too-distant future.

I was also kinda bummed at the scepticism you noted, but I get it. I think we're all a little jaded about tech claims just now, because tech giants are mostly evil incarnate these days. `When we've been gaslit and lied to so relentlessly for so long, it's hard to maintain optimism. For that reason, among many others, I hope the claims are real and that the product delivers on the promise.

Pick from any of the following:
-- Don't be good
-- Don't be sensible
-- Don't be responsible
-- Don't be averse to being a dickhead

It would be great if somebody sponsored a "choose a new motto for Google" contest. Maybe Louis Rossman - he'd likely have the balls to do it if YouTube wasn't so important for him. Hell, he might do it anyway - he seems like a really scrappy give-zero-shits kind of guy.