https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "... Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ...
        It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
      I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

Of course, an imploding economy would be a nightmare for Wall Street... So, not a very electable platform...

Netflix says "No." You'll watch what they want, from their catalog, on their terms. Until they discontinue it and replace it with their new stuff. Because they know that you'll keep watching. Something.

I find it interesting that the Avatar series is still being broadcast on the TV networks. This is something that I imagine the streaming only services are eager to put a stop to.

Free software hasn't altered the deal. Perhaps it's time for more people to hop off the treadmill and vote by withholding their wallet.

... of the AI infrastructure is electrical power, Trump should be looking for backhoe operators an linemen*.

*Line persons. But then that DEI shit won't fly in his administration.

They own the exclusive rights to software updates that brick systems.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

It's not that much of a change, though. The USA has only ever paid lip-service to its "allies" and always seen Europe as competitors. It's not a shift from "friend" to "enemy", just from "competitor" to "enemy".

... I've see that pro AI group somewhere.

But 5000 nits is nice on the deck of a yacht.

Funny how Google's role is basically a footnote at the end of Krebs' article. "Infoblox also pointed out that recent policy changes by Google may have inadvertently increased the risk"

Over 20-25 years Google pushed for and normalized a system which prevented domain owners from having any control over the content on their parked sites. That was marginally acceptable when it was Google controlling the sites, but now that they're gone it leaves the doors wide open to abusive actors.

Google bought Oingo over 20 years ago, pushed Adsense out to domain parking companies, raised payouts to force Yahoo/Overture out of the market, then started progressively dialing back payouts over the past 10-15 years. The changes they made last year crushed payouts to the point that nearly all parking companies had to switch to lower-quality ad networks or close down.

What do you think happens when there's a giant power vacuum in a multi-billion dollar market? Of course unscrupulous actors swept in.

No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.

If Apple is collecting money on your behalf, then they know how much you made. And they already have that money in their account, held on your behalf. So such an agreement is not a big stretch to imagine.

Smart people are not going to ask Apple to handle in-app purchases for them, now that courts have told Apple to f*k off. I wouldn't even link the same bank account, at the same bank to Apple's payment system. Keep a small account linked to satisfy Apples automatic deduction systems and manage your revenue somewhere else. Bitcoin?

I don't think Apple has to make anything up. Since the purchase of the app, plus in-app sales have to be reported to Apple*, they know what you make. As it stands now, Apple is the IRS of their own walled garden.

*Barring an uncucessful challenge of recent court decisions.

At this point in time, I believe Google is pursuing power instead of just money. And they are willing to make some questionable (from a profit point of view) investments to accumulate it. Establishing legal standing to play Internet cop on behalf of their users is just one ploy. We already have a DoJ to take care of that sort of thing. They need to get off their ass before private business weasels their way into becomming the law of the land.

At some point, I expect Google to parlay ther power into profit. When it takes a Google Certificate of Authenticity to have an email address or host a website.