This is the kind of thing that would have an impact. I'm sure the research is there to show that (subsidized) corn syrup and other ingredients are higher in the unhealthy American diet. Just start slapping warning labels on them, remove the subsidies. Ban advertising to children. Make people eat them outside in the cold with the smokers?

We know how to do this. It's worth noting that I guess tobacco company profits have apparently not fallen because of the decline in cigarette smoking? They just raised prices, moved to other markets, pushed vaping, and kept selling. But maybe less wealthy people die? Presumably the corn syrup people would figure out a work-around too. But if the less people die that would be good.

When I moved to Northern Virginia from Southern California I never, ever ran a yellow light I thought was iffy where I didn't have another car come after behind me. People were way worse about running yellow/red lights there. They'd also stop on highway on-ramps to wait for space in traffic. And leave their cars in the middle of the highway if it started to snow. They'd defiantly need to readjust the programming if they didn't want to have many more crashes when they started running robot cars in different regions.

I think alternately, they could start making it legal to have things like red-light cameras to give out automated tickets to start normalizing human driver's behavior. Now everybody hollers if they put them anywhere but school zones. Because everybody needs to be able to break the law in their deadly weapons all the time. But, speeding and stopping at stop signs and lights, and illegal turns and whatnot could easily be ticketed and there you'd go — we'd all be driving like robot cars.

But not everybody wants to drive like a robot. We have to ask why is is legal for auto makers to build cars that can go 180mph when you can only legally drive half that even on highways? Manufacturers should be liable for selling unsafe vehicles. The need for dangerous toys on public roadways is cartoonishly self centered. And yes I listened to that Rush song as a teen while driving unsafely through my suburb in the family car when I could easily have run over any child who ran out in front of me. If I'd been on a private track only endangering myself it'd be fine, but public streets should be as safe as possible. So go robot cars, go, I guess.

Gift link for that Washington Post article if folks want:

Is Taylor Swift finally big enough to affect the election?
In this particular election, it’s hard to say she couldn’t.
Column by Philip Bump

August 12, 2024 at 1:58 p.m. EDT
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Swift has 380 million followers on instagram, and got 35,000 people to register to vote with one post in 2023. Half the people in the country are fans, and 9% of American voters say her opinion would influence their vote "at least a little," so some people care.

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Since this took so long I don't suppose we'll ever see a class-action for the crackling audio on the M1 Macbook Pros. I've cost them more than I paid for Apple Care (maybe for the whole computer) by getting three logic boards and a couple of top-plate replacements. I might go one more round before my Apple Care runs out. We'll see.

Worst computer I've ever owned. Still can't reliably play an mp3 as well as my 2012 mbp. I think it's a flaw in their audio buffering that makes it act like a 14gb machine for audio purposes, before it starts crackling. You really need to get the extra RAM they told you you didn't need on these new Unified Memory machines.

At least on the M1 that was particularly bullshit. But you still see them selling 8gb RAM non-upgradable laptops. That should be returnable for fraud.

I think what we'll see in the short term is AI continuing to devalue the worth of authors and writers. Basically lowering the pay/word even lower than it is now after the book market tanked and journalism jobs disappeared as google etc vacuumed up all the ad revenue.

So AI books and writing won't be any good, but editors and employers won't pay anybody to write better than the AI would.

And the same will probably happen in other areas. I really can't imagine a lot of simpler developer jobs won't be threatened if people are using AI now for stuff. There's no way managers aren't thinking "why can't we just have the AI do it all?" And if the shitty product ever gets so it kind of works, and saves the quarterly budget than ...? But I'm a writer, so I have no plan B to offer. Just gloomy perspective. The mechanizing society has been leaving service and industrial workers behind for years. There's no reason any of us is immune.

Curious. When mostly white middle and upper class people get to experience the prison industrial complex that many strongly promoted to house 2 million mostly Black and brown Americans – suddenly it's a police state. "More Rich White People In Prison" really should be a call to alliance with Black Lives Matter. But I'm afraid people won't see it that way.

There's lots deeply wrong with this country. And plenty of systemic reasons why it's hard to change that. The fact that we are so divided is obvious. It's a choice whether people want to further divide themselves or come together to solve those problems. Personally I think that wealth inequality, widening obscenely since the deregulation and tax-cuts under Reagan have split our people more than any other factor. Most of my friend's kids will never own a house, or pay of student loans unless things change. That was different when my parents were younger.

I think (prediction) future President Harris is wrong when she says we should only look forward. There's things like cheaper education and housing (for some) that are worth looking back and working to bring back and expand. A message of bringing the good things back is what Reagan (and Trump) talked about. But what Reagan did was fire Union workers, export jobs, give tax cuts to billionaires, and watch over the creation of modern homelessness.

I think we can create higher wage jobs, cheaper housing and education for everybody (not just privileged kids). Blah blah, inspiration. But damn. It's easy to be angry and complain. Solutions are harder. And working together is a hell of a lot more effective than all this yelling we've been doing. /rant

I'd agree that it's hard to put this back in the box.

But it's probably going to hollow out jobs, not make lots of new ones any time soon. Automation put massive amounts of people out of work in industry, and those jobs never came back. And now it looks like that will happen in a lot of white-collar jobs too. If you work in tech or elsewhere, you'd better have specialized skills, because as much as you rely on AI, you're training your replacement.

That said, for the sake of this article on art. It seems to me that the Solomon's knot answer as far as attribution would be to make any result of unattributable sourcing open-source.

Hard to imagine courts going up against big-tech lobbying, but if they decided that any and all results coming from the AI Apocalypse Nightmare were henceforth freely available to the public, that might change the game.

I'm not a programmer so have no horse in this race, but when I read that comment it says, "I'm training this robot to replace me."

Certainly that's what your boss sees when he reads it.

Absolutely what they mean. It's dangerous is a mundane "defraud grandma" way they don't want to be liable for.

It'll be interesting to see how this goes. Bandcamp is a tiny company and this is a few people forming a local union. But in the music industry, they've got a relatively high profile lately with their "Bandcamp Fridays" making waves during the pandemic as the company gave over their share of proceeds to artists as a sign of goodwill. These millions of dollars made Bandcamp among the best earners for artists, and a "good guy" in many fan's eyes.

So people are paying attention to Bandcamp, and ideally it will end up with the workers being treated fairly, and as a result the company looking good and doing well. It would be pretty inspiring to be able to say "Hey here's the record company that treats its artists And its workers well." For once.

If they don't do that, it will cost them (and the workers too obviously)

I've never been a first post before. Maybe nurses not showing up to work isn't something geeks have much to say about. Makes me a bit nervous though.

So I guess my comment is about the lack of comments.

My impression is that the "high hopes" for this wave of tech is much shorter than earlier ones.

"Facebook is an infinite time sink, perfect for bored people."

Unlike, say, some other websites.

You could mention that Fox News viewers were more likely to die of COVID. So if they watch that stuff it might kill them.
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