No one fed it to me I figured it out myself.

It wasn't hard. The isps are pretty open about wanting to do away with net neutrality and what they're going to do if they pull it off.

Companies have these things called industry groups where they get together and talk about all the nasty things they want to do to us. It is generally out in the open because a lot of folks, yourself included, don't like to think about all the nasty things that they would do to us if we didn't have a huge number of laws against that and a shitload of bureaucrats policing them.

Incidentally you have also been trained to hate bureaucrats. That is on purpose. White collar crime is not enforced by a gun and a badge it's enforced by a clipboard and notebook paper.

It is hardly a surprise that a criminal would put effort into undermining or bribing whoever is enforcing the law. It's really obvious when a cop is on the take it is less obvious when a revolving door makes a bureaucrat look the other way or worse and honest bureaucrat enforcing the law gets fired and replaced by a corrupt one by a political appointee...

That was the entire purpose of the law it was to maintain the status quo which is net neutrality.

The purpose of the law was to put isps on notice that they would have a fight on their hands if they started violating net neutrality. And while they have poked at the edges laws like this have mostly prevented them from doing the really nasty stuff.

What you have here is called a chesterton's fence. It is a fence that you don't take down unless you understand why it was put up. I'm not talking about net neutrality I think at this point we all know it. I'm talking about this specific law. You don't take this law down without knowing why it was put up and I explained that above so I think it's safe to say we don't want to take this law down.

I am of course taking for granted the Trump is wrong but I think that's one of the safest bets in human history. The Man known as the king of debt who is bankrupted everything he's ever touched and is only not homeless because he was laundering money for the Russian mob is not someone I would seek legal advice from.

But thanks for the useless outrage porn. They will sue and they will win because the letter of the law is pretty fucking clear here and Trump does not have the authority to do this but they will waste a huge awount of energy fighting Trump.

Voters will get angry at democrats for doing nothing but not at Republicans for actively harming the country.

This is something Democrat strategists have been complaining about. Specifically if you're a republican you can get up on stage and yell God and country! And get votes.

The exact same thing does not work for democrats. Democrat voters could care less about your religious affiliation or how stupidly patriotic you might be. Democrat voters expect results and that would be fine if the Democrats could deliver results but it's really hard to do that when the other party is actively sabotaging the country and has been since newt Gingrich created the contract with America as a unified policy of blocking the Democrats from doing any good while doing active harm whenever the Republicans happen to get any power

And because we have all been conditioned to revile partisan politics when you point this out people just dismiss it. Almost as if someone was actively trying to do that for a reason ...

I'm not a conspiracy theorist I'm a conspiracy analyst.

AI automates 20 or 30% of all jobs. This causes a feedback loop. There isn't enough consumer spending and enough tax base anymore to maintain civilization. Police and fire can no longer be funded and things basically collapse. The ultra wealthy take their ball and go home which is to say they take all the money and all the civilizations and they use ai-powered drones to bomb the shit out of anyone who shows up looking for scraps.

Eventually a demagogue comes along and organizes the masses into an army. We have a massive war that makes world War II look like a slap fight.

Sooner or later a bunch of religious lunatics get their hands on nuclear launch codes. The missiles on to maintained but they can be launched and it doesn't matter where they hit there are so many that they can completely fuck up the environment making it uninhabitable for the human race. You could basically set them off in silo and it would still Doom us all they are so powerful and so numerous. We have of course while things were collapsing somehow come up with the money to build more nuclear weapons.

Anyway those firecrackers go off and a bunch of religious lunatics celebrate the Apocalypse because they misread a holy book and we all die. In 300 million years raccoons evolved and take over and do the whole thing again

Space was supposed to be the one place humanity didn't fight in for lots of reasons.

It's not even hallucinations it's pump and dump it's all just a scam to loot our 401ks.

Go to YouTube and look up Patrick Boyle and SpaceX. The entire thing is a scam. There is no path to profitability except through taking your retirement savings. The whole system is designed to force you to invest in a company that cannot possibly be profitable enough to pay back the investors except for the people at the very top who have been structured to make sure they get out with lots of your money.

Who wizzed in your wheaties?

And I stand by what I said. Practically no phone that still works at all does it at the low level of a capacitor anymore.

Trump knows what he's doing is extremely unpopular and so did a republicans. He knows that there are limits to how much he can screw over voters. His base will vote for him no matter what no matter how bad their lives get because of him that's only about 30% of the population. Voter suppression can make up another 5 to 7%, but that's as much as you can get out of it before it becomes obvious that your election system is rigged and the courts can't ignore it anymore.

Trump is hoping Iran would have their state backed actors do a terrorist attack and he could ride that into a third term like Bush road 911 into a second term.

We know this is the case because right before he attacked Iran he gutted several US anti-terrorism agencies and put a 22-year-old kid who used to bag groceries in charge of what was left.

There are limits to incompetence. At a certain point it's malice.

We also know that Bibi knew October 7th was coming and let it happen. You can probably guess why.

The real problem for Trump is Iran didn't take the bait. They have much better control of their assets and they prevented them from doing any unnecessary attacks. So now they control the straight and all the cards and all Trump can do is try to wait until after the midterm and then give them $300 billion US taxpayer dollars in reparations to open the straight again.

Want to get us all wearing glasses because we'd be walking around creating a surveillance network. Americans don't like the idea of the government running a surveillance Network so we're building our surveillance Network with Private industry and then the government taps into it with private contracts.

Americans have this weird thing where they don't care how much they are oppressed or how much the boot is on their neck as long as it's a privately owned boot. The idea of that the billionaire is getting together on their golf course is a de facto government is way too complex and abstract idea for most people. And try explaining a power vacuum to them or what happens if you don't have a powerful central government...

The way I've tried to explain it to people is imagine that in the center of the town is a giant box of guns and ammo. And anyone can just pick up the guns and ammo. And you decide that guns are dangerous so you don't pick one up. That means a handful of your neighbors can grab all of those guns and now you have to do what they say.

Large governments are the box of guns. They are an inevitability. They are up there with the nuclear bomb as inventions of humanity that once we got it we were stuck with it. You either pick up that gun and take part, which is to say you take an active role in your state and federal government and understanding it is best as you can and the systems that need to be built to make it functional. Or somebody else comes along and takes all that power for themselves and uses it against you.

The solution a lot of people come up with to deal with government is the same solution people come up with to deal with nuclear weapons which is just do away with them. And yeah that would be great. Sit down with a real anarchist sometime and they will tell you for hours how great that would be.

Except it never works because sooner or later some rich asshole builds an atomic bomb or sets up the same power structures as government and doesn't call it government.

Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

To get out from under the SEC regulations then they are going to be buying a presidential election for anyone. Elon Musk dropped a quarter billion just on Trump's last election and he's going to spend the same amount of money getting the Republicans the midterms. Maybe some more.

Years ago I saw an interview with a multi-millionaire woman who was complaining that she couldn't get the time of day from congressman anymore because the billionaires could outspend her. That's the level we're at.

It's not just that you and I don't matter. If you've only got a few hundred million to spend that's not enough anymore to buy an election. That's how much money and power we have given the billionaires. Or should I save the trillionaires...

Because they know the next county over will hire them in a heartbeat to avoid paying the money to train another cop. We made it stupidly expensive to train police because we made it the corrupt mess like we do with everything...

So they will just pick a case that's open and tie it to that and move on.

If you want to make them accountable you have to change how you vote. The lack of police accountability is a political problem. You can't solve it with a few minor policy tweeks

Dole whip is not frozen non-dairy dessert. The term Frozen non-dairy dessert means a very specific and very unpleasant thing when you are out shopping. It's how you spot fake ice cream. Dole whip is pureed Frozen pineapple. Well yeah that's technically Frozen non-dairy dessert the term is not used in marketing Dole whip. It doesn't have to be because you don't make Dole whip with palm oil...

If you see those magic words on a bucket of something pretending to be ice cream turn and walk away. I miss Klondike bars too....

It's not that they really enjoy it it's that they have some health or ethical reason that makes them settle for what they don't actually want.

And that market isn't really all that big. If you look up the current state of the impossible burger and beyond meat both companies are struggling...

As for AI yeah there's a market for people who just want slop in endless supply. But it's usually people with nothing going on who just need limitless content to fill a day. Like a lot of old farts I've got a bad back and I'll admit that I consume a lot of garbage while doing a ton of physical therapy. Crap I never would have bothered with if I wasn't spending a couple hours a day doing PT and I needed something to listen to to get my mind off the misery of it.

But that's not really a big enough market for anything but niche producers. Right now they can survive because AI companies are burning through cash giving away free service but that's going to stop pretty soon.

And marketers have already looked into it. Those folks have absolutely no morals whatsoever and they don't care what they sell as long as it sells. And AI slop doesn't sell. The only thing that's useful for is scams and it's only useful for that right at the moment because the lower quality is a good thing Nigerian prince style and again it's being heavily subsidized by venture capital.

I think it's more a quality difference. China's film industry is much smaller so anything that needs special effects of any kind doesn't have the kind of budget to make it to the point where a casual viewer is going to be turned off by AI at the level you can currently get it at.

China does have some big budget films but I suspect those aren't going to use AI much or at all.

Here in America even TV shows have ridiculously high budgets. Some of that is the actors but a lot of it is the cost of doing and redoing CGI with human beings modeling everything. And even that was a cost-cutting measure over practical effects because CGI companies are non-union.

For a smaller studio with a lower budget and an audience that's used to your output at that level you can probably get away with a bit more. If they tried that in one of those big period pieces China does every now and then though I bet it would stand out like a sore thumb and people would hate it. Like I don't think they would get away with that in The Forbidden Kingdom.