Not to mention the more recent discovery that commonly used lab gloves likely are contaminating samples with a chemical that can cause false positives. Microplastic pollution clearly is a huge problem. It needs to be carefully studied to assess the true scope. But be careful casting blame here. The scientific method often has errors. And gradually corrects them.

The plastics/petrochem industry has enormous financial incentive to continue maximizing their output and revenue because the burden of secondary costs doesn't fall on them. It's a classic "commons" economic issue where negative consequences are dispersed and delayed, but the immediate rewards are concentrated.

This kind of issue is a major area where free market/laissez faire capitalism fails to serve the aggregate common good.

Not perfect, but still very effective.

With all the flood of comments, this likely will never be noticed. But go to fcc.gov and read THEIR statements. Every third paragraph is about how the "DoW" and DHS can grant exceptions if they decide to. Example from FCC's Fact Sheet:

and

Who do we expect will be enriched by this process? When did Congress put DOD and DHS in charge of economic policy making?

that even in the best situation the publishers can't trust that IA can effectively stop the AIs from just scraping the content from there? The newspapers perhaps can block AIs from their own sites. But once the data is past their hands they have nothing but license statements for control.

Mind you I do think there is a fair use case for the AIs. But it's abundantly clear they are perfectly happy to play the "forgiveness is easier than permission" game. As well as "Hey the milk is already spilt, so whatcha gonna do about it?"

Meaning no interfering with dangerous and antidemocratic expression from the right.

On the other hand AI providers MUST enable mass surveillance of American citizens and use of AI for autonomous weapons and targeting.

Or more like "I haven't had my coffee yet dammit!"?

Is this how we signal "Not written by AI"? Or just "I slept through high school English class." ;-)

Would you like to buy a bridge?

. . . continuously enshittified the few remaining excellent products the company ever had.

Right. An Android app . . . I seriously doubt this product can be done on iOS. Seems highly unlikely Apple would allow a 3rd party app to have access that deeply into the network hardware. Think what more could be done by an app that can log and parse every bluetooth mac address that your phone can detect.

I certainly agree this is a compelling application, for good cause. But if Google were offering the same app, what do you expect it would also be doing what all that data?

"Submissive to power"? Or just submissive to reason. And science. And civility. You make it very clear that rational liberalism is not tolerable. "Batshit crazy liberalism"? It sounds like you desperately needed to get back to the MAGAfied USA.

Of course there is such thing as liberal excess. And there used to be such thing as reasonable conservatism. But the language you choose is the tell for where you fall on the spectrum.

+1. Came here for exactly this.

No, *Rump can't change his buddy's legal title. But Pete still identifies as Secretary of War. Regardless what he might have in his pants.

This goes to one of the larger problems with a "free market" that has no sanely enforced guardrails.
American politics has been systematically removing all the market guardrails as fast as it can since at least the Reagan administration in the 80's.

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And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others. " :-(