And my popcorn inventory is disappearing fast!!

Interesting FP branch, but I think it mostly missed the boat. I think it's mostly about the money and that's how we got fscked.

There was a kind of "golden age" of journalism, but I would argue that was an aberration linked to a weird financial model. Started with radio where the frequencies created a temporary monopoly and the government licensed the monopoly with mandates for "free" news. That created the illusion that news could be separated from who was paying for it. Two interesting contrasts: (1) In newspapers before radio the ads were fully visible so the readers could assess the money flows. (2) TV started with the radio model of journalism, but cable and the Internet broke the funding model.

I largely blame "60 Minutes" for the first successful "for-profit" model of journalism. CNN showed where that leads and FAUX figured out how to disguise the real advertisers behind fake ones...

I used to fantasize about solution-oriented journalism as a new funding approach, but now I think "We can't get there from here", where "here" is any substantially better state of journalism.

Mod grandparent funny, though the parent Subject seems better for the joke? Generally misfiring of the Funny on Slashdot these years?

On the story, I think the "use" should be in the more active sense, but 'I don't have to work no more' [sic], so that part of the story flies over my head, but I sometimes find AI a useful tool and use it accordingly. About two days ago an ancient website crashed and I couldn't get some information I wanted. So I used an AI to quickly create a little tool to generate the information locally. For what it's worth, the new local version runs faster than the website version, though I see the website has recovered again...

I actually tried to create the tool myself, but my first attempt failed, so I invoked the AI. It's response clarified the security risk of my initial solution approach, so I can't complain about the AI's recommended approach.

I'd love to see multi-decade studies following the thousands of subjects over their adult lifetimes.

Are you sure it's not 1 in 6.44?

Sure it's legal. Just read about it in the newspaper. You still subscribe to a newspaper, right?

No dead tree? Okay, so look it up on your smartphone. Oh wait. You don't have the right smartphone. Yet.

I would like to see some historical research correlating mentions of national leaders with various job-related metrics and divided up by geography.

Easy example: Little Kim gets LOTS of extremely favorable public mentions in North Korea. From near zero to HUGE in a few days (when he became established as the successor)--and at some point his mentions will approach zero again. But outside of North Korea? Not so many and not so favorable. Ever.

The YOB case is (relatively) interesting because he had quite a lot of name recognition even before 2015. Media and even book references that still surprise me. Like ghosts from the past? (To be compared with books written before and after perpetual September? Circa 1995?)

My reaction to the story was "Tell us something we didn't know." News is supposed to have some element of novelty in it. You know, novelty as in new.

However, I think the phishing scams disguised as fake upgrades are more annoying, and probably more dangerous, since the sucker is primed to expect something to get installed. As regards this story I thought there might be an element of novelty in it. Perhaps a new scammer's pitch to enter your credit card number to validate the unsubscribe request? Something along those lines.

Solutions time? Why do I persist in hoping the direction of criminal change in the Web can be shifted?

I keep imagining a website that helps potential suckers aggregate the targeting data so the scammers can be found and stopped more quickly. Hopefully definitively, too, as in throw them into that lovely prison in El Salvador. Get some good out of it?

So now to flog that dead horse!

The basic idea would be an iterative website where you would paste the scam and then help parse the meaning to guide the response. Of course these days it would be enhanced with AI, but the key idea is that each iteration would clarify what is going on and what should be done about it. Per this specific story, that so-called unsubscribe link would be studied to see how malicious it is and the human being in the loop would confirm the threat or provide feedback about what the website got wrong. And of course the website would be amalgamating the results to provide stats that guide the prioritization of the responses. A dangerous new threat that is producing lots of reports needs to be dealt with ASAP, though I doubt the "new threat" of this story would merit much priority.

More details available if someone is interested. NOT a new idea. Or let's hear your better solution approach. I'm sure you have a big wad of better ideas stuffed in a pocket somewhere.

(But actually my primary focus right now was provoked by that awful book Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie... Linkage is complicated, but now I want to see some exploratory research on how much and in what ways each nation's top leader is mentioned in the media over time. Easy example: Little Kim of North Korea. LOTS of favorable coverage inside and not much mention outside, with what there is being not so favorable. Any leads?)

Many people could also produce text snippets from memory. I dispute that reading a book is a copyright violation. Copying and distributing a book, yes, but just reading it - no.

If the book was obtained legitimately, letting an LLM read it is not an issue.

I don't know, ask ChatGPT.

Why would I want to pay down a 3.3% debt when I can make 10%?

If new borrowing were to cease entirely today (i.e. if the government were running a slightly-in-the-black budget with enough money to pay off debt as it matures), the existing debt would be retired bit by bit as existing debt reaches maturity and are paid off.

If they run a budget that is merely balanced without enough to pay off maturing bonds, they will have to borrow at current interest rates to pay off the maturing bonds.

You do raise an interesting point: If the GOVERMENT can get 10% on a safe investment while continuing to pay off low-interest-rate bonds, it shouldn't rush out to buy back the bonds at a discount on the open market. It will need to look closely at whether it makes more sense to buy back the bonds at a discount or whether ti makes sense to invest elsewhere then pay off the bonds when they mature.

But either way, as a citizen (or non-citizen permenent resident) I have a moral obligation to future generations to pay off that debt, or at least keep it stable (vs. some reasonable metric, like % of GDP).

Government loans (up to a per-semester maximum) can cover tuition, books, and the cost of living. Remember, most full-time students are either working part-time McJobs or aren't working any paid job at all, and they still have to pay rent (dorm or otherwise), eat, and pay other living expenses.

In Europe, at least, people absolutely *do* have an expectation of privacy in public. Recording someone without their permission is generally illegal. There are only a few exceptions, for example, crowds around a tourist attraction.

You're in the US, which is somewhat lax regarding privacy. In Europe, even recording people in *public* is illegal.

What bugs me at least as much is: how are you supposed to tell the glasses what to do? Is everybody supposed to wander around, talking to the air? Seriously? Much more likely, the glasses will be managed by a phone app, so they will more likely become an appendage of the phone.

As someone who uses both (LibeOffice personally, MS Office for wirk collaboration) MS Office offers more eye candy, but the useful functionality is equivalent.

That said, using Office365 together with OneDrive (or whatever the browser-based versions are called), is pretty horrible. Sure, it's great that I can use them from Linux, but even the simplest operations can become really difficult.

Lt. Col is the typical end rank of a 20 year career.