I think it's more "thanks, free market!" than "thanks, AI bros!". In a free market there is nothing to prevent this kind of phenomenon to emerge. Unless you assume that everyone acts for the good of the community. But one premise of free market proponents is that people act selfishly.

This story is essentially a demonstration of the negative effect of a marker that is too free. This could be solved with market regulation. Something like "require data centers to produce their own energy" or "tax energy sale to data centers" or whatever smart policy makers come up with.

I wasn't talking about wood in particular, but about your general argument that it's about freedom. You have not answered my question. I assume that you agree that it is generally sane to limit one's personal and individual freedom for the benefit of everybody else.

"not as bas as the worst peaks of the past 35 years" is not a rebuttal to "they are struggling". They could still be struggling, it's just not the hardest it's been.

Should I be free to burn toxic stuff next to your home if I'm your neighbour?

You wrote "no" and then did not provide any contradicting argument. I already know everything you wrote (I think we all do). I also think it needs to be made illegal. Your "if you don't like it, go work somewhere else" is exactly what I meant with "unlikely to happen in the US". It is unlikely to happen in the US because people would rather say "if you don't like sociopath megacorps spying on their employees, encourage the employees to lose their income" instead of saying "we need laws that protect employees against their sociopath corporate overlords". Somehow, for reasons that elude me, this kind of logic is prevalent in the US.

It's great that it works for you. I didn't try to convince you otherwise. We can all be happy that you are where you want to be. There's many people who have a different take than you.

I don't know about Canada but I haven't heard about Europeans doing this. That being said, if you have enough money, I think the healthcare is good in the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if some rich Europeans did that. But rich people are not a concern, they're going to be fine no matter what. For most people, US healthcare is bad, this is well studied. See for example this https://www.commonwealthfund.o...

This should be illegal by default for all employers, including for Facebook. There are boundaries to employment contracts, and that usually is because of the law. We still have human rights while working. Make it a human right to not be tracked to that extent, it is dehumanising. I realise this is unlikely to happen in the US but seriously, making this illegal is one of the best justifications for having a government.

Yes, that was my point. I'd rather be unemployed in Europe than struggling to make ends meet with two jobs in the US. Don't get me started on healthcare.

Including unemployed people

You make a generic argument for features in general. And I believe you have a point in general: companies shouldn't ask for permission before adding a "print" button to their product. In this particular case though, I don't think it is very useful to treat this addition as just one more feature. OP explains pretty well why this feature is unusual in its nature and in the impact it has.

Look at it this way: if the next version of Chrome starts mining bitcoins, does not make it opt-in or easy to disable for non-tech people and gives you 50% of any gain realised by this mining, will you still make the same argument?

I am not certain that this is the most useful perspective. Maybe cURL is just what the norm should be, the real issue being that a lot of software has bad development practices where it is privileged to develop new useless features quickly instead of slowly and steadily developing useful features. Firefox is mentioned further down and I think it is a perfect example. From that perspective, if Mythos is good at finding many bugs in Firefox, then it is just a tool to further enable bad development culture, by reducing some (but far from all) of the consequences of these bad practices.

The more likely scenario, based on exit polls, is that the husband got dumped because he voted for Trump. And Trump has eroded women's rights and downplayed the domestic abuse of women by men. If you're a woman who lives with a man who voted to reduce your rights, why exactly does it not make sense to leave that man?

Counterpoint: a unique solution also means only one workaround to find around it.

There is an issue of trust though. How do you know Chrome is not going to install another of these in the future, without asking for consent? This should be opt-in or not at all, and the fact that it isn't tells every company how much they can trust Google.

I was interested in what you wrote but you lost me there. If someone writes a book about "rules for life", they have delusions of grandeur and place themselves into the "guru" category. Regardless of their politics too, we agree on that.