Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

If you set up a market, and multiple people who actually had $1e100 put in a bid of that amount for your stupid crypto, then at least for that instant it was worth that much. It may not be worth that much later, but it would be NOW.

FFS, how can you have such a hard time understanding such a basic concept?

Luckily for the Chinese, they're allegedly communists.

"From each according to his ability" - that would be the robots.

"To each according to his need" - those millions of people.

We'll see whether it pans out.

Shoes create a lot of rubber pollution too. When the tread wears off on your shoes where do you think it goes? And don't get me started on all the problems associated with bicycles.

I mean these problems are MINUSCULE compared to the measurable environment problems in industry and agriculture. But let's not ignore them, that's because it's fun to argue about absolutely unhinged stupid shit on the Internet.

Range Rover Velar has electronic flush door handles and a 5.0L V8. So I don't know if you hate EVs or hate being burned alive inside your car.
Maybe that's just a one-off? Well there's the Cadillac CTS-V, with a 5.7L V8.

Tesla S is just one of many EVs. A few others go with those silly flush door handles and several others do not.

Which is why I'm against politicized tariffs or high tariffs (either is bad)

It'll work fine with a 65 watt charger. You might possibly be able to note a charge time difference if you completely drain the battery and use a stopwatch, but I doubt it. Apparently 20 W phone chargers also work fine, although more slowly.

Lol. AVS is part of the USB specification. It's not proprietary. In USB PD 3.2 it's required if you want to deliver more than 27 W.

Not if you're even further right.

Visa on arrival is still a thing in parts of China. And it's how I visited Shenzhen. It's around $120 for the 5-day tourist Visa for Shenzhen (and perhaps other economic zones, I don't know).

The vast majority of Americans don't travel outside of North America and not only don't care about the power of our passports, but likely don't even hold a passport.

If only I had a world wide communications network that I could layer some decent services on, then I could replace the World Wide Web or Internet with my own idea!

I think the problem that would face is a lack of users ready to buy things from the ads they click on. Which was the same problem we had in the first 20+ years of the Internet. Most people really didn't spend money on there if they could avoid it.

The 1993-2023 Internet is definitely dead. But I don't think anyone should miss it or even care.
The 1983-1993 Internet could rise again, and in a way it continuously pops up in obscure little corners. Like a virtual particle in quantum physics.

Convenience is why we use BMI. Measuring body fat percentage directly is a bit of a pain. The technology is there to do it in a doctor's office (there are several ways). But when height and weight are already taken with patient vitals, the BMI is basically a free number.

Sometimes BMI does correlate with body fat percentage, but sometimes it's way off. It's both a great metric because it's simple, but also a terrible metric because it frequently misrepresents patients and cannot paint a complete picture of health.

BMI will be gone in a few years. Unfortunately you are going to be horrified what we replacing it with:

AI trained on body images that will estimate your body fat % with a few faceless in-your-underwear images taken from your phone or in doctor's office (faceless meaning a below the neck picture)