By customized deals they mean they offer a deal to a specific person but NOT to the next guy. In other words, they raise the prices to people from the wrong zipcode, or who recently searched for Mercedes, etc.

It's called dynamic pricing or, more honestly, 'surveillance pricing'.

Do you really want an AI deciding how much to charge you, or would you rather have consistent pricing so that you can fairly pick among multiple businesses rather than having the businesses get to pick their customers.

It is true that technology does eliminate old jobs, but there are an unlimited amount of jobs in the 'que' so to speak.

There is no set amount of jobs. Jobs are determined by people's desires. If you have money and a desire, those combine to become a job. Those new jobs create money. (basic economic theory - jobs create money, not the other way around. Simplest thing to think of me paying you lets you pay other people, who can pay other people, so $10 being spent once ends up being spent 4,5, or who knows how many times, thereby increasing M1 and M2, even with same amount of M0).

When technology destroys an old job, it frees up that money to create more jobs. A thousand years ago 90% of our current jobs did not exist - almost no industry, no media, few luxury goods, few 'high' art, no 'low art'.

Jobs come from people's desires, and those desires are unlimited. Trust me, you can always depend on human greed, lust, gluttony, envy, and pride to create new jobs.

Now, those jobs may require advanced training that is rare, and may be low paying crappy jobs, but there is always an unlimited amount of new jobs to come.

The trick is to make sure they are good paying and to keep being trained.

The entire point of vaporware is to claim it is going to happen.

Admitting something is vaporware defeats the purpose.

1) Arrest the people that run these chat bots and charge them with practicing medicine without a license.
2) Require anyone that 'assists' them, i.e. Meta, Google, etc. to pay penalties in excess of 10x the amount they and the chatbot made.
3) When they complain tell them they do not HAVE to host chatbots.

If you cannot do something legally, then do not do it at all. There is no "But I want to do this and did not intend to break the law" Exception to the law.

If your PDF has an opening paragraph, then it should already do this, better than the AI.

If the AI can summarize your form better than the database that the form gets entered into, then your database sucks.

If it is not a Form and does not have an opening paragraph, put an opening paragraph in that summarizes it.

The issues are:
1) Transmission of electricity is inefficient, so local = better.
2) Storage of electricity is inefficient, so time matters.
3) The worst forms of electricity (coal, oil, natural gas) were designed under the assumption they would be the main form of electricity so they cannot easily be turned off or turned down.
4) The best forms of electricity (wind, solar) are intermittent, so can not be depended upon.

Nope. No one is going to claim the crappy straw man argument you proposed. In general it is a bad idea to assume that people you disagree with are stupid, it reflects poorly on you for arguing with morons.

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

"The left envisions..." could have been "Some envisions..."

The difference are multiple. The first acts as an insult to the named political section, and attempts to push the right away from agreeing with the view point - even though some 'right' wingers might do so. Also it falsely implies that all left wingers agree with that statement - another attempt to use this issue for his own personal political desires.

Finally, it refuses to admit he works for the left as much as the right, (by law), and politicizes a discussion that does not need it.

If instead he simply said "some envision', that avoids the inappropriate behavior while saying the same thing.

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

Managers love to cut cost. But when the comp[any is growing, they find that poor employees are still needed, so they reduced other expenses. They finder cheaper vendors, come up with new, cheaper products and methods, etc.

When a company begins to cut large numbers of employees that means they are no longer growing - they are at best middle aged, if not senior citizens. They have no new locations, divisions, or products that could use an already trained employees that understands their culture.

Do not believe the bull about AI being the reason. AI lets them do the same job with less people, but it does not create new business. New business would need those existing employees.

Ever eat a Hass Avocado? Every single one of them is grown from a branch grafted from a single tree originally purchased in 1926. If you plant the seed from a Hass Avocado, it will grow into a totally different Avocado. Basically Mr. Hass lucked out and grew a gorgeous Avocado, so he started selling grafts from that tree, now it is spread throughout the world. All cloned from a single plant.

Same thing for a lot of other plants, including apples, pears, and most cavendish bananas.

They are all clones of one plant we liked, so we went over-board on it.

I will explain the "Ship of Theseus" method of uploading.

Part 1) Ship of Theseus: Ship gets damaged over time, carpenter slowly replaces each damaged part. After X amount of time, the carpenter realizes he has replaced every single piece of wood in the ship. Questions: Is the current ship still the original? When did it change? If there was never damage, just weathering and the carpenter kept all original pieces and re-assembeled it, which would be the actual ship of Theseus?

Part 2) How to actually upload a human mind: Do above with brain cells. First create a mythical super computer chip that works as well as a human brain cell. Second, grant it the mythical abilities to integrate and interact with your existing mind, powering itself on human blood while also have the ability to interact with external devices. Third, once a month add one such computer chip to your body. Fourth, wait until you age enough that your organic brain cells all die, but your mind continues to exist on the mythical computer chips you inserted into your body.

No copying was ever done, instead over time you slowly replaced your organic parts with inorganic ones. There is no point you can point at and say your mind was copied or replaced, it was a continuous long term project. The you that existed at each time was you with only an insignificant change less important than normal mental growth slash deterioration.

Step 1) Pick something from a movie/story that is fantastical.
Step 2) Find someone with a degree that is either unethical or stupid enough to claim that it will be done 'in the future'.
Step 3) Have the reporter pick a time in the future that seems reasonable to a layman.
Step 4) Pretend you did not do any of the earlier steps.
Step 5) PROFIT!

Their description of 'uploading' says "replicating", which = a copy. If you copy a human mind, you are not being uploaded, you remain in your human body. At best they have cloned your mind into a robot. If they kill the original you, you still die - even if they do it just after the 'upload'. Do not let them copy you then murder you , even if the copy hides the fact that they murdered you. (AKA the Star Trek Transporter Problem).

If you want to move your consciousness to a computer, you need a slow and steady partial replacement of bioware with hardware. Think "Ship of Theseus" methodology with long time periods - only replacing the organic parts with inorganic parts.

That would actually let you upload. But this technology does not exist in any way shape or form. Neither the hardware nor a process to meld them with our existing bioware.

The problem is they transcribe 'and' as '&' and then they reject it. The word "and" should never ever ever be transcribed as &. Not in a brand name, not ever.

THAT should be hard coded into every single transcription software.

I strongly suspect the transcription is being done by AI and the error catching is also being done by AI.

Human coded transcription software would know to do it the other way around - transcribe "&" as 'and". A human coded error catcher should replace all '&' with 'and', unless there was special escaping done to allow the "&".

Perils of stupid AI.