That would have been an interesting angle, but I don't see 24/7 as the crux of the problem. The police-state/authoritarian personality is not crucially dependent on surveillance. If that were the case, then East Germany should still be going strong.

I can actually recall a stop-and-frisk scenario that convinced me the cops can find SOMETHING to make an issue of if they search carefully enough. Asking for a friend who feels lucky the police settled for a hundred bucks?

My own feelings are mixed. I'm a big believer in the truth and I don't have sufficiently negative words to capture my true feelings about liars. However I also think there are cases of "You can't handle the truth" and some of these cases might even involve police officers.

Still spanned about a quarter of the discussion...

That's why they stink?

Oh, wait. I meant "spell", but they and their "you can't blame me if you don't know who I am" ideas do stink, too.

I should include some flavor of the old joke about mud wrestling with pigs, but that would take effort and the propagation only spanned about 1/6 of the discussion (by ye olde scrollbar metric), so such effort isn't justified.

But a joke related to the story? Can AIs solve the AC slop crisis? Or a joke about prison for ACs, coming real soon if'n AC actually lives in the wrong place.

Just joking. It's already arrived in a couple of places. I just don't want to name them because I might get put on a (yet another?) list.

Sorry about the obvious typo.

Are you talking about the average child-molestation-sentence compared to the average sentence for testing fraud of this scale, or are you cherry-picking cases?

Also, context mayters: If you are looking at the average child molestation care, is the average case one where a 20 year old is busted with a 15 year old girlfriend (where you could make a case for 35 months being a reasonable average sentence) or is the average more like a 50 year old serial rapist who molested dozens of people 12 or younger (where 350 months may be considered too lenient)?

What would really make them worth something is an easy upgrade path to an operating system that was still getting security updates.

Google, Apple, and the major phone vendors could score big PR points be extending security updates to 10 years on products introduced since 2016. In the long run PR points can translate into customer loyalty which can translate into "Step 4: PROFIIT!" in a non-sarcastic way.

There is a market for parts that aren't crypto-locked to or residing on the motherboard.

Cheap small usable high-quality camera for my next project? Yes please.

is and always will be impossible.

A coffee snob? Just the human to ask in lieu of an AI (which will just tell me whatever it thinks I want to here).

I've been wondering whatever happened to percolated coffee. I'm guessing it tastes bad, but I didn't start drinking coffee until decades after I last saw a percolator.

Okay, I think you deserve the Funny mod but I also think it was a weak FP.

Yeah, my Subject is worse, but... The thing that is going wrong is that we are all part of a mad experiment. Some of the people doing the experiment do have good intentions, but the Waymo robotaxi that tries to follow that road... Well, you know where that road goes.

But it's a much bigger problem that the humans controlling the various flavors of the experiment have only one intention: MORE MONEY. They already have more money than any human needs or can possibly use, but they need more money ASAP. I personally rate Thiel and Musk as the top poster children for that madness.

And what is the main experiment? Daily exposure to alien intelligence that too often seems smarter than we are. Not difficult to seem smarter than me in the robotaxi case since I was never a great driver. I'm even remembering a tractor accident in a construction area... Which reminded me of a truck accident involving construction stuff...

Along the lines of the response I might have written if the reply you are replying to was more substantive and cohesive. The inline response format basically lacks sincerity and is mostly used these years to break things out of context in search of cutting responses to "win" the "argument". I only noted one area of possible agreement that might have justified an attempt to respond. I think he [young? MIPSPro with an 8-digit ID] was saying "We can't get there from here", and we would probably agree that "there" is some sort of better place and "here" is the status quo, but the underlying philosophies remain completely incompatible... Dare I say incommensurable? In particular I didn't detect much comprehension of my ideas or any requests for clarification. Rather it sounded like he thought it was a chance to grind his axe and you identified the Libertarian axe.

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

You got me to do the research. Turns out the major accomplishment of the YOB administration is reviving Sharpie manufacturing in Tennessee. Take that, you foreign adversaries and heathens!

c/I came to mind/came to mind/

Minimal edit, though I was probably thinking of writing something like "came to my mind".

Too bad the longer discussion apparently generated no Funny. At least not according to the precious moderators.

NAK