That would depend on the regulation. Some are specifically designed only to apply to large or established companies. (Although you're not likely to find this type of regulation in the US, or anywhere else subject to regulatory capture.)

Rather than the typical industry regulations, what OpenAI is advocating for sounds more like a total rewrite of the social contract. They need to have something to point at and say "We're a responsible company." It's also more aggrandizement: "Our tech will single-handedly save society"

We know that behind closed doors - though they increasingly don't even bother to close them - the bros are materially supporting politicians they know will give us the exact opposite of short workweeks and an overhauled tax system.

The calls for regulation are not serious. (Like most of what else comes from over there.)

I remember a documentary from decades ago (1970s or 1980s) where they made the point that, at that time anyway, middle-class people had an equivalent standard of living in many ways to what turn-of-the-20th-century rich people accomplished only with a fleet of servants, simply because of technological advancement - we now had microwaves, toasters, instant TV dinners, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, automobiles, etc. etc.

This is mainly intended as a tangent, and is not intended to be relevant to the current discussion.

It runs MacOS and it's pretty fast, unlike any netbook ever.

Yeah it's got gimped specs but they will be fine for most users, unlike netbooks.

[learn to internet]

Everyone who cares about this already knows this

You don't actually care

So fuck off

I had, I believe it was a Galaxy A01 for a brief period, due to a job that required mobile Microsoft Teams. Their crapware was the only thing I didn't like about it. On their low-end phones it seems to serve the purpose of sequestering disk space, to make you think you need to upgrade to a higher-end model. They had it engineered so that you can install two or three apps you actually want on it, then you start getting disk space warnings from the OS.

The strangest thing was that, for all the crapware apps loaded, two basic applications (calculator and FM radio) were nowhere to be found, neither the vanilla Android version, nor a Samsungized version.

Right, that's why my karma is maxed and you have to post anonymously because it actually makes your posts more visible.

Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Especially since January 2025...

Bison don't produce as much methane as cows

I think you're confused. I'm not saying EVs shouldn't be taxed in general. I'm saying they shouldn't be taxed due to the oil crisis. Governments should encourage, not discourage, the use of alternate energy-sources when one of them has supply-chains that are threatened.

And I made no claim that treating EVs (tax-wise) like ICE vehicles is "punitive"(*). But taxing EVs more than ICE vehicles because of the oil crisis certainly seems to be so. But see below...

You make a good point about road taxes, but not much else. The virtue of taxing gas consumption is that at least it correlates somewhat with road use and environmental impact. Perhaps we need something else for EVs, but I can't think of what it could be right now.

(*) please note how it's spelled.

Good points. Execpt for one that confuses me:

We may be living in upside-down-world right now, but I can't imagine that even the current government would punish the use of non-oil sources of energy during an oil crisis. Maybe for some other reason, but not "due to" the oil crisis.

I've got the keys to their Rivian!

Well, it is definitely a politically-loaded question... but it doesn't seem totally unreasonable, at least based on population percentages. They said "middle class" not "rich"; this is for a family of three, which nowadays means two incomes in the majority of cases; and $133K was chosen as the very bottom of the "upper middle class" window.

Pew is considered rather less politically biased than the Wall Street Journal; but in 2022 they gave the following broad-brush definitions for a family of three:

Lower-income (28% of US population): Under $56,600 per year
Middle-income (52% of US population): Between $56,600 and $169,800 per year
Upper-income (19% of US population): Above $169,800 per year

There are certainly a lot of political side questions one could ask, like - should we really consider it to be "middle-class" if a person can't afford to buy a house?

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Where exactly does supporting 3 people on $133k/year count as 'upper middle class'? You could be doing a lot worse, and many are; but that's not just tons of money in a HCOL area; and that's also lower than twice the median salary for full time employees with bachelor's degrees; so you are calling either a single income household doing a bit better than median or a dual income one doing worse 'upper middle class'; which seems pretty ambitious.