In many cases they have blown past “the customer will like it” all the way to “our data suggests that 90% of customers will not leave and profits will slightly increase as a result.”

I mean, at this point enshittification is a widespread business plan.

Yeah, it should probably be a progressive rate but with the catch being that the rate never stops increasing!

So maybe we start very small – a 1% tax on wealth over $10 million. And that $10 million is also our magic number below which the wealth tax cannot drag you, which will be important in a second.

Then there are a few tiers above that which don’t need to be fancy. Maybe add 1% to the incremental rate per $100 million.

But then at $1 billion, the incremental rate becomes 100%. So if you end up over the limit you essentially get set back to $1 billion, which is further taxed according to our imaginary progressive rate.

I also wonder if it might be a good idea to provide a strong incentive for the individual to disburse their gains to charitable causes rather than the burden of administration always falling to the government. One interesting thing might be to introduce one or two even higher brackets that go above 100%.

Say that at $2 billion the tax on each additional dollar becomes 150%. That means that if you get lazy or just want to hoard wealth short term, you not only get knocked back down to $1 billion but lower than that.

Honestly though, we don’t need that complexity. 100% wealth tax on anything over a billion and the government does extravagant shit to honor the top payers each year and names buildings after them and whatnot.

It looks like the transfer rate of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway is back on the menu, boys!

In a country that has been building its infrastructure around personal automobiles for decades, we cannot make that necessary function of daily life be an automatic consent to targeted analysis.

I get that cameras pointed at intersections and highways are here to stay. That means there will be records of what happens in public places that can be analyzed for a certain person’s movements once there’s a warrant.

That’s the whole fucking point of warrants and 4th amendment protections. Just because the technical ability exists to analyze somebody’s Personally Indentifiable Information doesn’t mean you just get to do it. Just like you don’t get to listen to any phone call you want, or plant bugs and trackers on everybody you are curious. (A group of three-letter agencies enters the chat, lol)

I think they mean the corporate veil that is typically assumed, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

It provides a layer of liability protection for the personal assets of the humans behind the company when it comes to debts. But it also provides protection from criminal liability in many cases when it comes to horrible non-financial crimes.

I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.

Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.

I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.

My engagement terminal???

Maybe they meant the end of “the United States as we know it,” which could be right. Or, arguably, already is.

But as a lifelong resident of the US, your point about how long regimes can last is extra scary. Two of the biggest facets of this country’s identity have been that we have a lot of money/resources and that we have a lot of weapons. Plus we have our special brand of “fuck y’all; got mine” culture.

It seems like a nasty recipe for a fascist regime to isolate and turtle up and just grind along for half a century.

Well, if the output varies in a way you can’t predict, then even if one of the inputs is “don’t do anything negative” it might not always follow it exactly.

Live TV is so bad that I would take $65/mo of corporate streaming services over FREE cable.

I choose neither, but if those were the only two options there’s no contest.

However, if someone went to a phone store with a stock graphene on display and anything else next to it, which one do you think they’ll choose?

Given the past couple years I’d like to think the fraction to choose graphene would be multiple times what it would have been 5-10 years ago. But not close to a majority.

“How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”

Spoken like a true sales/con artist. I can almost hear the brand guidelines poking through… Always mention safety before privacy, always treat safety as a given and privacy as the buffer zone in which to find compromise.

The compromise is how far each town chooses to go above security tier 0: emergencies with immediate threat to life or property.

• tier 0 is defined as covering 100% of law enforcement requests of all agencies with jurisdiction in the covered area.

Yeah it’s less like something new and more like “Thank you, ancient me, for deciding it was always a good policy to go heavy on the RAM.”

Even if generated images originally could be traced to the training data, I think that maybe just maybe the shady gigacorps would have some incentive to remove or obfuscate the copyright & IP violation paper trail from their trillion-dollar toys.

Oh no, I will be sure to keep an eye out for these scary vandals invading my peaceful town over these next few days!

I mean, you never know when a passionate young person needs a “thumbs up” to brighten their day and boost their confidence.

And in case any of them want to step to me, I can threaten them with all the old power tools I have in my house that they could learn to use.

Oh they’ll give “answers” alright. They could just be wrong or untethered from reality.

Go after the companies

Sir this is a Merica.

That quote makes it sound like he really understands why the users might not want him to destroy reddit.

Which also makes it sound like he is fully aware of his own conscious choice to destroy what could be a valuable resource for millions of people just so his sorry little ass can get slightly richer than he would have already been.

It would be nice to be able to consider more asian brands than just japanese and korean when next replacing a car and ignoring everything American.

If I may achkshually your achkshually, I believe that heat is the energy in the collective motion of particles of matter, and infrared photons are one way that energy can be radiated away from one body and absorbed by another.