There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.

Cable TV was the first stage of this phenomenon. People had more channels such that they selected ones that fit their preconceived notions the best.

Internet was the second, where social networks and search engines keep feeding people what they want to be fed.

Now we got bots that reinforce narcissistic behavior. Those who are easy to "yes-men" up will fall for it.

I hope those mentioned are merely posts from a few troll-bots rather than it be that we humans will encounter something worse than mass Qanon and MAGA movement, with people chopping up "lizard people" at 3am, etc.

What really killed it is pointy headed morons replying "JuSt GoOgLe It" to every damned question. As a result, any attempt to google it just returned a few pages of said morons and no useful answer. If there was an actual answer on stack overflow, it was a needle in a haystack.

> a large IP pool owner can spam you with requests from a million IPs without any spoofing.

Aren't owners required to publicly register their IP blocks?

If there is lots of traffic from a single owner, it can be throttled.

Why is it so easy in internet- and phone-land to spoof the source? Our infrastructure if focked up; it should just not be that easy. Send cruise missiles up cheaters' asses, send a message. And/or make a better standard.

Maybe via the Broken Window Theory of economics. The anti-scrape-bots will need to use AI to get around the scraper source spoofing tricks, creating a never-ending cat-and-mouse escalation pattern where AI experts on both sides make buck.

It's like the military-industrial-complex, they get rich by encouraging our leaders to moon dictators, and their counterparts on the other side are doing that same.

Except, none of the proposals to replace it make any sense

Yes there is: God-did-it!

An omnipotent magic being can do anything by definition. It's a theory so easy even a Republican can understand it.

Testable? Well, if you control your sexual urges and sing it kiss-up tunes you will allegedly find out after you check out. I volunteer certain politicians to test...

You left out the "Weekly World News". It's my favorite in that mode.
(Actually, does The Register fit in there? I don't follow it, but it's been interesting the times I did read it. BOFH was an occasional treat.)

The real problem seems to be that it's very hard to test large-scale forces that are too weak to study locally. We can study gravity because we can actually test in a lab: a giant cement block slightly pulls at our measuring devices, for example. We can put materials in between to see if it blocks gravity, and change the material of the big block to measure any pull change. We can do some of these with Earth's gravity also.

So far none of the "Dark X" forces can be measured in a lab, and so we have to surmise by studying distant objects. That's not only less precise, but those forces may be affecting the very image or signal we receive, making it hard to know what is affecting what. It throws more possible variables into an already murky soup.

It's like a circus house-of-mirrors: it's hard to know if and how many mirrors you are looking at, nor which one is causing distortion. It's even harder if you are not allowed to move much relative to the mirrors' position. The best you can do is keep collecting clues and hope they someday point to a clean and testable model.

I'm sure that there are things about China that are communist. There are in every country I know enough about to have an opinion. And there are also things about them that are free-market. I'm generally in favor of "less government control", but not always. Some things should be run for the common good. People just end up disagreeing violently about which. (And about whether they can trust the government to do it.)

Well, IIUC (no guarantee) China *is* a centrally planned economy, just with low resolution. They say things like "We need more steel mills" or "We need better chip factories", and then they plan incentives to cause those to appear. (Sound familiar? It should.)

Not near the equator or Louisiana, fur to friggen hot.

Period! If it has problems, it's the human editor's fault.

That "duck and cover" was never right about nuclear weapons. But I'm not sure setting them off in their silos would do much damage. I think the dust needs to get up into the stratosphere.

Unlike yours, which doesn't work due to too much lead-eating.