Not saying that this company is not legit, but most of these startups looking for investors claim to have some special doohickey or exotic process. To reassure investors: we are unique, no one will easily copy us, and even if we can't make it work there might still be a valuable patent in the company.

Well, if you need cat piss, I got you covered.

The app receives a token when you present your ID, and uses that token in subsequent age verifications, it does not need to contact the central authority each time. The scheme and app are open source, so you can verify what data is communicated when and with whom.

It is not. Or they get hold of their dad's passport, or whatever. No system is going to be proof against a curious teenager. Does it have to be?

The system now being trialed in the EU is promising. You don't have to present ID every time you visit an adult site, you do it once and receive a token that's stored on your device. That token is used to prove your age to a website. That means:
- No 3rd parties get a scan of your ID, only the government age verification service does (and only once for every device)
- Websites don't get your identity or even an identifier, they get Kid / Adult, and nothing else.
- The government (nor anyone else) does not get to see which websites you visit.

"If you the same programmer can be x20 more productive"
That's a big "if". Most studies show a 50-100% increase in code output at best, and code produced with AI assistance requires more rework. Measuring end-to-end, AI increased developer productivity by 10-30% or so. Sure, the tools are still improving, and developers are still learning how to use them to best advantage, but we're a long long way off from a x20 increase. That will likely require a breakthrough rather than incremental improvement of AI coding tools. The only other way this will ever make sense if the cost of running AI decreases dramatically.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

IIRC, a "recall" is a notification of a defect in a car that needs addressing. If that can be done OTA, it's still a recall.

With the right hype, and a high enough price tag on the machine, the coffee snobs will be all over this.

Small difference: drugs are known to be harmful, and illegal. The harm of social media to developing children has only recently been documented

If it is known that social media harms kids, then doesn't the state share some of the blame? Why is there no law?
If it is not known (or only recently came to light), can you really blame the social media companies? You could blame them for trying to block relevant legislation, but not for harm done in the past.
If the harmful effects were known to the companies and they kept it quiet, then you'd have a case, morally speaking. Bit like the tobacco firms.

So how about closing that particular loophole, and make them pay capital gains on the profits that they do realize? For instance, by taxing such loans with no "normal" repayment schedule as dividend. We've had similar issues, with business owners borrowing money from their company with no intention of ever repaying it, thus avoiding dividend tax. A new law caps these "non market conformant" loans at 100k.

A cash grab like this is pretty sickening. Even in the rather socialist leaning country I live in, this would probably not stand, local courts and the ECHR might well consider similar taxes to amount to appropriation, and illegal.

I'm also not opposed to the idea. Not because of a supposed concentration of wealth. Musk does not have a trillion dollars, taken from elsewhere, sitting in a giant warehouse somewhere; it's all stock in a massively overvalued company that he built. His riches do not make us poorer. And I don't envy him his wealth, he's welcome to it.

What I do have an issue with, is the concentration of power this represents. Wealth, whether in actual dollars, publicly traded stock or private stock, represents an undue amount of influence in politics. If we're doing a tax on large companies, or a wealth cap, this would be the reason I'd agree with it. Not a sense of "fairness".

"OpenAI hasn't had their IPO yet, so couldn't they just find some kind of workaround to avoid this?"
Not necessarily. The tax could be paid in stock, in fact that would not be a bad idea. So that the control of important companies does not remain in the hands of a handful of individuals. Again, the only justification of this would be to prevent a concentration of power.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Not just "the future", but the future of AI. If you go by future projected revenue as predicted by SpaceX (which is the only projection that justifies their valuation), they are an AI company with a small space division. An AI market in which they are not at all well-positioned. Buying Cursor may improve that somewhat. Maybe that's the plan - buy every promising AI startup with stock, until they hit gold.

You're right, but our current economic systems are not well-equipped to deal with stagnating population growth. Personally I think that is one of the more difficult and important problems that we're going to have to address.