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Comment Re:Oh holy shit (Score 0) 83

Everyone I know who makes my equivalent AGI, except for my household, has 1+ dogs, work crazy hours, and have been told that their dogs are lonely and depressed.

Not one or two people.

EVERYONE. Dozens upon dozens of my clients, colleagues, peers, friends from grade school, etc, have a dog or two, and then they have to have someone come spend time with said dog when they're putting 10+ hours away from them.

Wag/Rover/etc is part of their crazy consumer spending. I always am shocked to hear they're spending $1000 a month on their pets.

Americans are insane about their pets. Instead of buying a dog, I invest in corporate veterinary hospitals, because it's crazy profitable.

Comment Re:Be careful what you ask for (Score 2, Insightful) 206

It's not quite so simple. In many cases, they're complying with somebody's laws

Oh yes, some governments love the idea of censorship-by-proxy: instead of issuing unpopular laws against free speech or free commerce, they come up with rules to make companies responsible for countering money laundering, human trafficking, or what have you. Rules with vague criteria but very stiff penalties, in order to scare companies into erring on the side of caution.

But in this case, it is quite that simple. Banks and payment processors should be declared to be a Common Carrier, especially since their services should be considered essential, these days. Which means they cannot deny service to anyone, unless there is a clear indication that they are running afoul of the law.

Comment Re:The number of working homeless is skyrocketing (Score 1) 195

> I think it's too miserable and unpleasant a thing for anyone around here to be willing to think about. The idea that Civilization does not progress on a line and does not always improve.

I am perfectly fine thinking about it, and I do think that after studying the topic for a long time, civilization is in a decline in the sense that life isn't really getting better for more people. I mean, it's not really a logical consequence that just because some technology has made life better, that continued innovation will always improve things. After all, the power of a tool is proportional to its potential for misuse, and the probability of misuse is proportional to the complexity of the society. So I think it's actually quite likely to experience severe decline with the invention of AI.

Personally, I think Ted Kaczynski was quite right.

Comment Re:Please! (Score 1) 66

A tiny handful? The problem is that they pretty much dominated the Blockbuster niche for the past decade or two. The kind of movie many of us turn to for a few hours of dumb escapism: usually with a simple but solid plot, some explosions and eye candy, uncomplicated characters, but big ticket actors and good production values. For those of us who enjoy that sort of thing, but dislike the premise of superheroes, it has been woefully slim pickings the past years.

Comment Re:I'd pay 2k or so (Score 1) 233

That stuff left in the 80s and he'd have to build it up from scratch

It's doable, if he gets a couple of Chinese engineers to help. Designing and building factories is an art in itself, one we've largely lost in the West. But in China, they know how to set up an automated factory, producing goods to the right tolerances, and applying automated QA. They do that pretty much every day.

Comment Re:The American Dream (Score 2) 19

The way to do it is to drum up hype for some fantastic product or service, but disclose enough uncertainties to make it a long shot. With enough hype, enough buzzwords and slick videos, and a few big ticket celebs to endorse your launch, investors will still come. They figure it as a high risk/high reward deal, they have several on the go and hope that one or two of them will pay off to make up for all the others that fail. When your business inevitably fails, you'll have extracted enough money for yourself from it (there's several ways), and your investors will chalk it up as just another loss on something they didn;t do sufficient due diligence on.

Outright lying about your product though... that's bad enough and opens you up to prosecution. But lying about the numbers? That is a big no-no... They will come after you for that, with a vengeance.

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