The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Although there is a right join, no far right join has ever been defined and there's no signs that it would in fact be possible.

Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.

(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)

You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".

Yeeees and no. It matters in terms of loans he can get from banks. A trillionaire gets an awful lot better deal than anyone else.

So although he cannot liquidate a trillion dollars, there's a decent chance he can borrow at exceptionally low interest rates enough to do pretty much whatever he wants because he has the moniker.

It's not hard to be morally superior to a childish self-righteous socipoath.

He's not bright, he's not clever, he IS abusive, and he is exceptionally rich. However, only an idiot equates "rich" with "better".

I would say more than half of Slashdot can match or exceed his intelligence. And that's despite the fact that Slashdot has attracted pet rocks as users in recent years. Actually, truth be told, it's because of that. Back in the younger days of Slashdot, I'd say 95% of the regulars were smarter than Musk.

All Musk has is money. And I can understand you envying that. But here's the thing. Smart people don't talk their company's value down. Smart people invest their money. Musk throws it around, such as buying Twitter and destroying the userbase.

Musk is not your friend.

RAW, video, anything that grabs stills in real time...

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.

Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.

If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.

It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.

The number of accidents you have depends far more on how you drive than how fast you react. If you and Claude are correct about AVs having slower reaction times that just highlights the importance of driving style over reaction time, because AVs have fewer and less severe accidents than human drivers.

The main thing you can do -- and AV systems do, generally -- is leave yourself more space and therefore time to react, which includes driving slower in areas where sudden incursions into the roadway are likely.

That said, I expect AVs to react faster as their systems improve. All of our AI is excessively compute-heavy right now, but we know that isn't essential because our brains do more with less in spite of the fact that our wetware runs on a significantly inferior substrate. As we learn how to build more efficient AI systems, that should reduce AV compute requirements and make it feasible for them to "think faster", and therefore react faster.

The one thing that is clear is that AVs will continue improving on their already better-than-human safety records.

Ostensibly, Apple could open source the code running on their own baseband hardware (Apple C1). I'm pretty sure the hardware requires signed code for FCC compliance reasons, so you'd never be able to modify it, but as far as I know, nothing prevents them from making the code available.

You're missing my point. To the best of my knowledge, you can't buy a phone that has an entirely open source operating system now; the phone hardware vendors provide closed-source bits preinstalled, and nuking them is problematic at best. More importantly, even if that were not true, you still would not be able to buy an Apple iPhone or iPad with an OS that is pure open source, which makes your concern entirely irrelevant in this context.

This discussion is about what Apple would need to do to satisfy people with privacy concerns when it comes to third-party replacements for Siri on devices that Apple makes. Arguing that you don't trust Apple because parts of the OS are closed source is irrelevant, because you won't ever trust their device in the first place (or any devices, in all likelihood).

Either way, the automatic presumption is that if a consumer does not trust the device maker, that person will buy a device from some other manufacturer. So for the purposes of this discussion, the decision by the consumer to trust Apple is in the past. It was made when they bought the device with a preinstalled OS. Thus we can presume that the consumer in question therefore trusts Apple to a great extent.

What remains, then, is what Apple, as a presumptively trusted party, would have to do to continue to maintain that level of trust in their devices while allowing third parties to inject code that deeply integrates with every app on the system in a highly invasive way.