Pickling a cucumber sure has a lot of resemblance - a great cucumber is good fresh and great pickled, but a bad pickling brine can ruin even a great cucumber.
Are there economic reasons that support the decision making?
Are recruiting numbers really strong over the past year? Are they projected to remain that way? Is the military going to be using AI to reduce headcount?
Are they going to force a lot of older soldiers into retirement to make for a new younger cadre of loyalists?
In much of the US, internet companies run a racket. While there are often multiple providers to choose from, if you want reliable service at good speeds, you end up with two, or if you're really lucky, three options. One of those options is Starlink.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. They do have skin in the game, in the sense that their readers wouldn't want to pay for a newspaper that is consistently wrong. And, even if they don't, it doesn't mean that it's not valuable
That's not quite what "skin in the game" means in this context.
The Economist does not need to be right, they only need their readers to believe they are right. That's not quite the same thing, and that small difference is what separates "skin in the game" from not having it.
They can get readers to believe they're right either by being right, or by being ambiguous enough to appear right in multiple futures. Professions where there's skin in the game don't have ambiguity and persuasiveness as an escape to the same degree.
You can confirm their biases, and need to do that to a certain extent to maintain readership. The quality of the media really depends in the demands of the customers consuming it.
It's a classic case of regulatory capture. Only the biggest players can get away with fully implementing age verification — if Microsoft requires age verification to use its OS, most people will oblige. If HN starts doing that most people will probably just log off forever.
What is maddening is how often people think such laws are about limiting the influence of "big tech." Big tech isn't going anywhere because of these laws, you are.
Hypothetically, preemptive market recapture? This could theoretically make foss OSs non-kosher for any suitably large market (websites, games, chat platforms, etc), and serve to force foss OSs into a niche where theyre technically capable of being personal desktop software, but practically unusable because of lockout.
This is part of a large movement to end personal computing as we know it, and give all control over our digital lives to the mega corporations. It is already impossible to use some national ID or banking apps on non-Apple and non-Google phones. (say GrapheneOS), giving them an immense edge in the market, and they're using that domination to add more restrictions like installing non-play store apps on Android. This goes bit by bit, try to add a restriction, go back enough to quiet the backlash, try again. This new law is a foot in the door to achieve the same restrictions on PCs. PCs are the last open computing platform and bastions of personal digital freedom and thus they must be destroyed by capitalists and governments. Once the technical means have been put in place to restrict access to some services, the system can be hardened : impose that the age checks can't be tampered with by using a TPU module, impose a link to the individual's identity so that all online activity can be traced to anyone. Pretenses are easy to find : protect children, block sex offenders from accessing dating sites, and so on. At this point I'm pretty convinced we're geared towards a global totalitarian regime, and there's a lot of evidence.
It really bums me out that I fully believe this is it.
Megacorps seize the demand for regulation (to regulate them) in order to write regulation that purportedly does that, but in practice mostly closes the doors behind them and cementing their stranglehold on society. For Microsoft, Apple, and Google it's a small thing to agree to age verification if that means all the potential competitors will have to do so too.
The cheapest time to shut down a competitor is before they get to market.
Fear sells. Everyone is afraid of getting sued and being denied insurance. The answer is cameras!
Dividing people to vilify each other over race, religion, gender, ethnicity and even politics is incredibly profitable. Once they're afraid of their neighbors, they'll happily pay someone to protect them at every turn.
An underrated comment. But sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I think it's the fundamental issue with these cameras, that it takes pictures of us, but we ourselves cannot access it. Even though it was us who has paid for it!
If the government has access to it and it isn't otherwise publicly broadcast, yes. It is straight up illegal for the government to do it itself, just because they found a loophole of buying the surveillance they want from private institutions instead of using their own camera doesn't mean it is right or should be allowed to continue.
And you better believe Flock considers it a sales channel to also sell to data brokers and such institutions with the aim of having them be able to share data with agencies who'd otherwise be prohibited (and they also won't turn off such sharing functionality just because you're an agency in that state - that's not their job).
Department stores often play covers. I'm guessing it's cheaper than playing the originals. And now, with AI, they could play original AI creations for even less!
But if all they wanted was the cheapest music possible they could license generic songs from one of those massive online libraries. There's evidently value in playing known melodies
My supermarket plays music that they apparently commissioned. They play the same few songs over and over again.
One of the songs has themes around food and appetite and I thought they might have done it that way to make people hungrier while shopping. But the others don't, so maybe I'm reading too much into it ;)
