The Democrats take corporate bribes just the same as the GOP so how can you say one is better than the other? Because one is more pro-LGBT? Which is a sideshow of a sideshow when it comes to really what is wrong in the US.
They take bribes to ignore corporate power, they will bust unions but just behind the scenes rather than openly like the GOP but they still do it anyway. They are two faces of the same coin.

Anyway I believe the elites are kind of worrying about us having free and open access to the Internet, they want to take it away from us. They have reacted very late to it but now their response is coming. They've seen what the people having access to free comms does, esp. in Nepal recently - so they want us all having a China style Internet where we must authenticate our real names with no anonymous posting at all.

The UK's Online Safety policy is a big beta test of the beginning of it - they have seen there was no real pushback to it, so they will start rolling it out in the US as well. Red states first, then country wide. Then they will widen its scope - socal media, eventually everything.

Then crack down on VPN's - in the UK you can easily bypass the safety act with TOR for adult sites but social media will be different as they can tie your account to a location. So VPN's won't really matter as what they care about is the people being able to mobilize. They then cut off all non authorised social media (so no Telegram or other services with anonymous access) and they can police everyones comms.

And they may well get away with it as well, do you think the people are smart enough to use PGP? George Carlin saw all of this coming and said - we get the govt we deserve - if the American people are stupid enough to vote these people, (after all there could always be a mass vote for a third party) - well you get what you deserve.

In the UK now the ruling uniparty (Labour + Tories) are starting to sweat as people are mass voting for a new party Reform. But I'm sure they can find a way to infiltrate and control Reform if they want to. Can't see something similar happening in the US as people seem bound to their Party as if they are football teams (like you seemingly are with the Dems) which allows them to divide and conquer. In the UK the people know the parties are clowns and have little loyalty - Labour totally lost their working class support long ago.

Amazingly it is true, in some Southern states anyway; America never ceases to amaze me.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublications.aap.org%2Fp...

It is only used in 4% of US public schools however and seems to be a "paddling" that gets administered, so perhaps not the old Victorian birching but still it says a lot about the psyche of the US south that this is still going on.

I get that "Experiencing Interruptions?" popup on my home machine with uBlock origin, and my works machine with a run of the mill corporate filter - but I don't actually get any interruptions - Youtube works just fine. I suspect they know they can't identify adblockers 100% correctly - so they can't put a "You are blocking ads!" popup on when it might affect normal users who are behind filters.

Their last attempt at blocking uBlock worked for about 6 hours before it was business as ad-free usual. They would have to embed ads in the video stream itself to really block them.

Not me, but it does seem like it could be a troll, as AI is notoriously bad when it comes to legal issues - they have been known to hallucinate non existant case law, etc and have gotten some lawyers in trouble - if you wanted to point out the pros of AI use, saying you use them for legal issues is probably the worst thing you could use them for

Vote for any of the smaller parties. I've voted for small far-left parties, right wing parties, joke parties, single issue parties. Anyone who votes for the Big 2 (or 2.5 in the UK) in my opinion is an idiot and is directly resonsible for the state the UK is in now. Maybe go so far as to call them a Traitor to the People of the UK.

People say "muh wasted vote" - half of it is about showing the big parties they aren't invulerable. If enough people went out and voted for the smaller parties the large ones might, perhaps, take us more seriously - or be replaced. But people are stupid, they say "I can't believe the Tories/Labour did this thing that negatively affected me" then the very next election they go out and vote their standard Labour/Tory. When I point this out I get the usual "buuu my dad always voted X". Carlin was right really, he did say we get the politicians we elect, this is what we deserve if we are too stupid to change it.

When you're paying thousands of $$$ to attend University because HR drone says thou must - and you see your money being horribly wasted - how is that a personal gripe?? Universities are losing money and ultimately customers - why? more and more people see them as no longer worth the money/debt - and this is a great deal of why. Luckily I'm old enough to have gone to University for free (UK poster here and our crooked Govt even took that away from us, no lowering of taxes to compensate though!) - I'd have been very upset had I gone in debt for it - it wouldn't have been worth it.

If I had the choice between: an EV I could charge up at home or indeed anywhere that has electricity, even via my own solar panels - or a Hydrogen car where I'm dependent on stations owned by a billionaire cartel + taxed heavily by my authoritarian government - why would I want hydrogen ?? Even if the two had identical performance?

Do you really think they would have 12 chargers will be running constantly all together? I'd imagine you can set a queue system up, 3 at once or whatever - you plug your car in, and while you go off to pay/shop when one car is finished it will start charging yours, by the time you get back to your car yours would be almost done.
Added to the fact that gas stations typically have the chargers all together because the infrastructure mandates it, with electric chargers not so - you don't need a huge tank installed underground - small convenience stores could have 3 chargers outside whereas for them to have gas pumps would be a non starter.

Now I know America has lost that forward thinking intelligence that made it great but surely you could sort something out? (Not hydrogen, I agree Hydrogen sucks)

Such a shame there isn't a -1; Hopelessly Naive mod.

Yeah I worked for dial-up / cable ISP support as well. Our performance wasn't even evaluated (as in you got no bonus whatsoever) so incompetent call handlers didn't really get dealt with (They would hire people out of High School, give them 2 weeks training in how the UI of Outlook Express worked, then push them out on the phones)

If you had a bad call and a customer phoned back to complain, the only way the bosses had to track it, was to check every single users workstation for the call history drop down list, and match it with the customers name. But it only showed the last 10, so you'd just open 10 random users. They were running PII's on Windows NT 4 in 2007.

They would try to bully us into coming in 20 minutes early for our shifts, so the computers would be ready to answer customer queries. Yet if you were late by over a second, you were punished. So most people, for the first call of their shift, just stalled and lied to the customer until the computer was ready. We had the same bathroom break / lunch break thing as well - had to ask which I'm sure violates labor laws.

So with the calls mysteriously dropping out - I tried to be the best worker I could be, but after almost a year I was basically burned out - so when I'd get that angry customer shouting and swearing, I'd start speaking "I am sorry you are ha-" then press to hang up. Did this for 3 months probably once a week with nobody noticing or perhaps caring, before I finally found a real job.

The problem was maybe the fact it was outsourced. The outsourcing company really doesn't care if the ISP's customers get angry and cancel their contracts. They have no incentive to spend money for better machines, training, and employees - why cut into their profits? And as far as the ISP is concerned, if the outsourcing is still cheaper - it's all good. And if it isn't - how would they even know? For the bosses it is easier just to outsource and be done with it, even if it cuts into company profits.

And this was one of the better rated call center because it was on shore! We'd have people without accounts phoning up for computer help because of the "not useless" reputation (which we would generally handle as it was a premium rate line though only a dollar every 5 minutes or so)

Yeah I have to agree - those "smart" people who get caught up thinking things will work because that is how things should work in an idealized world, when in the real world things are messier - those "smart" people are not smart at all. They are not considering all of the variables, accounting for human nature etc - in short, not thinking over everything.

My own example being the "smart" sysadmin working in a school - installed digital signage in school coridoors, with the power sockets and on switches at shoulder height, because "that's how it is elsewhere" Totally not understanding that with the off switches being easily accessible, the students will mess with the power and the digital signage will be off more than on. His reply "Well the students shouldn't be playing with the power switches". Would you class this guy as smart???

If people don't consider all the variables, how people act in the real world, all of it, in my books they aren't smart no matter how middle class they try and make their accents sound.

Yeah, and AI has a much less chance of sabotaging contractors like we saw with the latest M&S hack (outsourced Indian tech support were bribed), or looking through your private data out of boredom.

So if I google for the answer to a question, I could either a) use the AI summary which takes 10 seconds of reading - or b) spend 2 or 3 minutes per query opening the paywall, signing up for an account, verifying my e-mail address, potentially entering in payment details... just for a chance the article will answer your question and not just be 5 pages of waffle with 2 good sentences in it as they so often are.

And people wonder why these sites are dying? For me I am staggered they even show up on search engines at all - they don't really provide the quick answers you are looking for after all. I think these sites would have slowly died even without AI as people learn quick - when you do a Google Search, these are the sites not to even bother clicking on due to the paywalls. To the extent there are browser plugins to remove them from appearing.

Do you have a modern (11th, 12th gen) Intel CPU? They have a hardware design fault that makes them crash often - mostly in heavy calculations (e.g. unpacking video game textures) - there is a tool online you can run to see if your CPU is affected and you may even be able to RMA it if so.
And Windows doesn't save data on the fly so it would be affected similarly (though they are changing this - Notepad saves on the fly now - the youth are used to phones and think having to File - Save As every time is laughably crude)

Yes - perhaps their Google traffic is dying largely because people know - if they click a Google search result for one of these sites e.g. NYP - they will get half an article then a paywall blocking the rest? When I see one of these news sites in the Google search results, I won't even bother with it - I bet that'll cut most of their traffic, the rest of it being people who haven't learned yet, clicked it, then clicked Back as soon as the paywall appears.

They basically offer nothing of value, why would they be suprised that nobody clicks their links?