Nobody should be working for any government, givernment jobs should be stigmatized, people working for government should be stigmatized, gobernments shouldn't have employees. People working for governments should be scared that other normal people will find out.

Looks like a truck/pickup body on a regular car platform. What they call a "Ute" Down Under.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

The only thing I ever got out of doing homework at Uni was a case of beer. The reward for our team coming first in an assignment to devise a strategy for maximizing throughput through a telecoms switch. A far as grades went, midterms and finals set them, 50/50.

But my high school was the same, come to think of it (though it was a Montessori school, a bit different from others). Teachers assigned homework, some even checked that you completed the work, but the only homework that was actually graded were essays. Teachers usually covered the homework quickly at the start of the class, pausing to clarify things if a student had questions. Seems like a good way to find out what students are struggling with, and provide some reinforced learning.

In other words: homework can be a tool to help struggling students to catch up with the class, not to punish them for falling behind. Grading homework is worse than pointless. And in this age of AI, grading homework only further encourages the use of AI.

Reminds me a little of the short story "Manna" about AI taking over all production, and 2 outcomes for society. As a staunch capitalist, I think that in an AI-driven world, or a "post labour" world or whatever you want to call it, capitalism as a means of distribution of wealth is not going to work. Yes, I think many would argue that it is already failing in that regard, but I would counter that the safeguards we have against people falling through the cracks still mostly work... and more importantly, that we have no better system to replace it. But if work itself pretty much becomes redundant, capitalism will only continue to work if we can find a good answer to the old question: who owns the means of production? And those means ought to include natural resources and land as well.

I am sure there are some good answers, and a way to organize society around that new reality. But I'm not at all convinced either that this is where we are headed. By the time governments would have to take action, they'd be wholly owned by the new aristocracy.

ChatGPT says all of this is completely possible.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6add...

How likely is it that Flock is not already using its network this way?

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

imagine how flock personnel uses flock network every day...AI allows drawing conclusions from mass movement information that can provide information far beyond just someone's location. It is probably possible even to figure out market moves based on movement of groups of people.

This is not just about following any one person, this is about information movement, following a group of people who work on the same project for example to undersrand when they are going towards the same site / goal. This is beyond dangerous.

The proposed EU age verification app is a good deal less intrusive than any of the nasty mechanisms that some social media is already employing. Most of those are a privacy nightmare. The EU app, in contrast:
- Site / App operator does not get your identity, only a proof of age.
- Government does not get to see which sites you visit.
- Actual verification takes place once, and whatever ID you use does not need to be stored (and can't be subsequently stolen)
- App is open source, so the workings can be verified.

I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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In the grand scheme of things someone being here illegally and working construction is about last on my list of priorities

They bother me.

They are taking up housing that US citizens could use....everyone keeps complaining about needing more housing, eh?

They are a burden on our schools and other public resources.

They are dead weight on our medical system...in many cities they overrun the ERs of hospitals making it difficult for true US citizens to get emergency care in their own country.

Just a few examples.,,....the US budget would save a lot of money if they were GONE.

It turns out that immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizen

There you go again, conflating ILLEGAL migrants with LEGAL migrants, especially those that actually wish to come legally and become US citizens because they want to melt in and believe in our principals ans way of life.

Add some guard towers with machine guns and the border is starting to look like post WW2 Berlin.

Except in Berlin they were trying to keep people IN....there's a big difference from letting people freely leave if they want....and invasion from foreign entities.

Frankly, iI'd be all for settting up our snipers, they could get some free practice...

And a No Man's land....complete with a field along the border of land mines.

Ok I have a name for the project...

Operation: Hot Tamale

Thank you...thank you....I'll be here all week...