âoeThe number of AI related regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years.â

Once it is clear just how small government can be made by replacing Betty Catlady (she, her, hers) in the Dept. of WTF with AI Betty, expect important Betty protections to fill the regulatory pipeline.

is like getting nutritional tips from cannibals.

One guess why they want to fatten you up.

Relax. You may have lost your Kardashian drip feed, but the CIA can still see you.

There is nothing "dying" or "stagnant" about the sector, which has seen explosive growth in the past ten years.

In fact, economically healthy centers like Denver and the Twin Cities are now overcrowded. There's been hypertrophic growth -- a very sharp and necessary correction is on its way.

Amazon's role in what will transpire is much more complex than your surmise about appy-fappy excitement to come.

By leveraging its clout and market-backed power (if not its own broken business model), Amazon may exercise vast power over distribution. That in turn has significant implications for the bottom lines of farmers and particularly for the types of smaller natural and organic growers who supply Whole Foods. Walmart has already beaten it in this area, but in a business with the thinnest margins there is always room for more degradation of labor.

By moving toward AI-driven workerless stores, Amazon can accelerate the pace of job loss that will soon swamp the retail sector with far-reaching social consequences. Even a public subsidy-dependent utopian like Elon Musk worries about what that will bring.

More generally, Amazon will be in a position to introduce to our food chain the types of values that have made it a hellhole for its domestic employees as well as a prime mover in the sweatshopping of the world. It's hard to imagine a more Stalinist corporation in the west, though Google
certainly competes.

And lastly, expanding monopoly power will lead inevitably to more regulatory capture. One day, that free cantaloupe of yours may be swimming in carcinogenic pesticides yet be called "naturally grown" (and heartily recommended by the in-house food writer at Jeff's WaPo).

Eat up. I doubt you'll know the difference.

"Because the little baby tyrants" *snip*

Brave words in defense of a social media platform that sees fit to disappear ideas and expression that it arbitrarily doesn't like.

You might give a little thought to the way Valley media platforms now shape public discourse along narrow lines and for what reasons; that is, if the Kool Aid is not too strong in you, young Jedi.

Only known moral uses of advanced AI (aka the GeorgeCarlin9000):

--deactivating the evil cyborgs on the "Presidential Debate Commission"
--time-traveling to 1972 to make the paddles shorter on Pong (Butterfly Effect: population-wide striving uptick!)
--reverse-engineering the Kardashian derriere for mass roll out

Otherwise, beware!

Apple's ability to sell its stuff both to well-heeled Boomers and debt-encumbered Millennials is the envy of many companies. Only booze skips across generational borders quite so effortlessly and merrily.

But it is in the timing of entry into the car market more than on any particular innovation that I think Apple may neatly capitalize.

As millions of Boomers prepare to go gently into that good night, an orgy of spending should accompany their last two decades. Health care, obviously, will account for the bulk of it, but before the worst medical bills are seen there's still time to clean out the estate in grand fashion. Quite a lot of this will be vanity spending, as current trends show, including age-defying creams, injections and implants. And little says youthful as eloquently as driving in an Apple Electric iCar to your hip replacement surgery.

Watching jealously from the sidelines with Lana Del Rey droning on the turntable, Millennials will take consolation from the fact that the job market will generally improve for younger folk. Keen after the lean barista years to live large, the iCar will be just the canvas on which to splatter their new affluence to greater effect than was allowed by iPhones, Watches and Mac Minis. That shit was tiny; this shit will be big.

To both groups, Apple can sell an idea as well as a vehicle. That idea is Your Own Personal Halo. The wish to consume with less guilt -- not reducing consumption patterns, but dressing them up in an ersatz techno-idealism (electricity is free! driving improves the climate!) -- should have tremendous appeal to those raised on Woodstock and Transformers cartoons alike. As Steve Jobs himself might have said, "Here's to the Panglosses..."

"Psssst. Hey, sick person. Try this. The first one's on us!*"

*Free as in Daraprim, not free beer.

I don't carry a torch for Rand Paul, but I am grateful for his act of resistance.

You ask what effect is achieved by his resisting. I will reply, unromantically, almost none.

We could argue about public education (did he really reach anyone new who doesn't already know the Patriot Act is evil?) and about self-aggrandizement (was he merely campaigning?).

To my way of thinking, we are living in a time when our votes count for little, our representatives do little for us, and against this condition of a democratic people isolated from control of the state, a sickening reversal of control is instead true: the security state is ascendant and it is our freedom that is waning.

If my apprehension of our position vis-a-vis the state is correct, this means that most protest will be reduced to a minor symbolic key. Its value, then, is in what it symbolizes, and I would say a filibuster on this point of authoritarian government power symbolizes a refusal to surrender casually. A refusal to be cheapened to the point of not caring; a defiance.

Quantifying such things is easy. What is the net benefit? Again, almost zero. But not entirely. A spark is kindled, or if you prefer, a flicker is kept going in a small and dull flame, with the hope that later we may fan it into something bolder and more valuable.

The value of this filibuster is sustaining hope.

Which gets me to thinking: with free electricity, wouldn't that be a great business opportunity, to build a cloud of servers in poorer Greeks' basements? Maybe that is the real plan behind the free electricity idea.

Hyuk-yuk.

It's not "thinking," you tone-deaf dolt, to joke about a nation that's suffering a severe depression. Your crack has the moral value of someone saying, "Say, 9-10 would have been a great day to short the airplane industry, har-de-har!"

It's simply you hanging your autism out before the entire board.

A reminder: sensible men and women have already voted on the merits of Congress.

As Gallup confirmed once more in its December 14 poll, Americans agree on at least one thing in our most divided land. We're led by idiots, chiselers, maniacs and fools:

Very good points.

I notice you don't mention Willits in your pantheon of id talents. Wisely, I'd say. His design stewardship of Rage -- and its resulting perfect banality -- was as much a lodestone around its neck as was one more advanced yet performance-lacking Carmack technology. Put together, the mixture was lethal.

There was an id fantasy game in the works, briefly, a decade or more ago; it was killed off in favor of another FPS retread. I wonder what might have been if a) the faction that wanted to keep cloning Doom and Quake hadn't won or, alternatively b) instead of id consistently shedding its most notable design talents leaving Carmack surrounded with people content to recycle the past, he had struck out on his own with a new group of talent and created something original.

Nor did I.

That said, as a longtime admirer of his pioneering work, I'm pleased he's on to a new and exciting challenge. Thanks for the memories, John.

My advice to brave Edward: you already know the ugliness of the machine, so why bargain with the ghost inside?

The impossibility of a corrupt system according justice to its whistleblowers is a good reason for Edward to remain in Russia. Moreover, he should know, and will know based on poll data, that his sacrifice is scarcely appreciated by our society of sheep, anyway.

You've done your share. You've paid your price in loss of home and comfort. F--- Washington; construct a life out of all the many rich possibilities that have nothing to do with this declining empire and its sordid leaders.

I hate religion as much as the next godless heathen, but really now.

Surely you don't think climate change is a direct result of belief? At worst, fantasies about the afterlife can make the world appear more disposable to the god-bothered, but I don't think it's churchy mumbo-jumbo that drives hyper-capitalism.

Something else has led the west to overproduce, overconsume, overbear and overlord. And the causes and reasons are rather more prosaic than heavenly.