For everyone's information, Kushner is bankrolling the Paramount hostile takeover deal via his private equity firm Affinity Partners, as well as additional investment and backings from David Ellison's dad, Larry Ellison, as well as the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Warner Brothers Discovery has a lot of powerful media subsidiaries, most notably CNN and HBO.

I wonder if Kushner's father-in-law might have some vested interest in controlling CNN and HBO?

"Ellison said he’s had “great conversations” with Trump about Paramount’s plan for its proposed news business". Yup, no conflicts of interest there.

If there ever was an economic time to justify the a Mission to Mars, it was the early 80's. National Debt to GDP ratio was at an all-time low, space program was at its peak, and the Space Shuttle program had just begun.

Instead, Reagan decided to cut taxes for the rich.

Now, with a national debt of $38 trillion dollars and China taking over the world, the penultimate thing America can afford right now is a Mission to Mars. (I would have said "the last thing...", but honestly, the last thing America can afford right now is more tax cuts for the rich.)

Just search for "Axis Network Dome Camera" on eBay. There's tons of cheap IP cameras for sale there that'll do exactly what you need them to do, no cloud necessary.

The medical industry already profits greatly from medical testing. Testing earns the industry lots of money; then, patients with positive results receive follow-up treatments, which nets the industry even more money.

Everyone screens for cancer now. Breast cancer. Colorectal cancer. Prostate cancer. The list goes on. (I'm even a cancer survivor myself.) And yet, to this day, studies question whether more testing results in longer life spans. Generally, it does not. Meanwhile, all the testing and treatments and post-surgery therapies reduces one's quality of life, especially the older one gets.

The cited article says it best: "How could it be that many cancer screenings don’t have an impact on overall lifespan? While screenings prevent some deaths from cancer, they don’t prevent all...At the same time, cancer screenings have associated harms such as false positive results, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment (not to mention the financial cost of all these cascade events). It could be that the benefits of screening that some people receive get washed out by the harms that others experience when looking at screening on a population level."

We are already pricing ourselves out of paradise when it comes to medical care, and full-body MRIs are only going to make it worse.

It's a hell of a lot cheaper too. I was spending about $10 / week over a decade ago on new releases at Blockbuster. Now it's about $0 at the library.

Tell them, "I got an invention that'll eliminate half of all the jobs in the world, then my investors get to keep all the money we used to pay them!"

Based on that logic, I'd love to see ChatGPT try to explain to Uncle Sam why they're not responsible if an assassin got instructions for how to successfully kill the president on ChatGPT.

AI = "Amalgamation of Information"

AI just uses probability calculations to amalgamate together an "average" of information on the subject. It's not smart. It doesn't think. It's not self-aware. It just is a digital hamburger grinder that churns out a paste of what gets put into its hopper.

You know this isn't about geothermal...Trump is trying to forge the ring of power.

You oligarchs aren't engineering AI to work for people. You're engineering AI to work for corporate interests. It takes far more than it gives in return. It's taking our jobs. It's taking our electricity. It's taking our wealth. It's taking our creative works. It's taking our data.

And what is it giving in return?

It's giving the executive and corporate leaders at eight companies on our planet a ridiculous amount of wealth. To hell with the dog-and-pony show going on in the foreground.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Search in Slashdot for "COVID19". Nearly every story has hundreds of comments to it. Meanwhile, this story has all of four comments at the time of this posting.

Boys and girls, Tuberculosis has killed over a billion people. COVID19 is only in the single millions right now. The only reason why this article received four comments so far is because it's not affecting the western world where the Slashdot userbase is most prevalent. It's destroying the developing world instead, but I guess nobody here really cares about that.

The world is in desperate need of new Tuberculosis vaccines. If you don't understand why, please watch this Kurzgesagt video on the subject.

My home tablet is an A9+. Got it on a Black Friday sale for $250 last year, and we use it to cast Netflix to our Samsung TV. My son also uses it for games. Works great. Not speedy, but we don't need it to be. (If you need speedy, get the S-series, but it's at least double the price.)

Fun anecdote: I visited the Philippines in 2022. I flew Cebu Pacific Air for a few domestic flights, and they had just setup an abundance of these self-check-in kiosks at their airport check-ins. While prior visits to this particular terminal would see six to eight staff working check-in counters, this visit only had two: one assisting with the kiosks, and one checking baggage. Wait times were long, kiosks were confusing, and people were agitated, but we all got through.

I just returned from another trip now in 2025. Flew Cebu Pacific Air again for my domestic flights. This time the terminal had only three self-check-in kiosks, they were shoved up against a wall aside from the check-in counters, and nobody was using them. Everyone was waiting in line to deal with a human. (In the consideration of both sides of this human-vs-machine argument, perhaps the reason why kiosks didn't succeed in the Philippines is because human labor there is very cheap.)

Regardless, the moral of the story is that airline travel is agitating. Companies that try to nickel-and-dime passengers (even budget airlines like RyanAir) by removing mature, reliable, human & paper & analog components from that experience in place of new, untested, anxiety-inducing digital counterparts may discover that the total cost is not worth the savings.

Engagement.

Every web algorithm now is curated to maximize user engagement. When users stay engaged, the advertisements get delivered, and the website earns revenue. When you disengage from the service, they stop making money. So stay engaged, and enjoy your soma.

When they could nix novels in Nepal next?