Property rights, hooray hurrah, gotcha.

You may be conflating a landlord with a property manager. Many landlords also happen to work as their own property manager, but they're not the same thing. A landlord who is also their own property manager, plumber, painter etc would happen to be doing labor because of the other roles related to their property they took on to support their role as a landlord, but none of the labor is inherent to the landlord role. There are landlords who are just landlords and don't do any labor:

https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/comments....

Have to disagree, blahabl is more correct even if in a snarky way. The status quo or something like it is usually an option you can vote for, if a person wants the status quo they could vote for that. A person who abstains from voting is, maybe not standing behind, but at least signing themselves up to be carried along for the ride by whatever decision is made by those who did vote. They can have regrets about it just like those who voted for the winning decision could, but they likewise have to blame themselves for what they did on the day of the vote.

Actually only 37% of the British electorate voted for Brexit, vs. 34% who voted to remain. This is why it's important to vote, otherwise you end up like the remaining 29% who woke up the next morning and started frantically Googling various wordings of "Wut is Brexit?"

So probably at least 6 out of 10 potential voters in the UK would readily admit that Brexit was a mistake.

That's not specifically a landlord, that's a property manager. Some landlords are also property managers, some hire property managers so that their job is reduced to signing a cheque or document every now and then (which can be further reduced by hiring an accountant).

How much work is it being a property manager? Well here's a hint, career property managers who get hired by landlords have an MSP-like business model where they take on a workload involving several properties to make a full-time job of it. The only time a property manager would be occupied by one property is if it's something like an apartment tower.

All of these workers use their labor and expertise to deliver a product or service that couldn't have been delivered otherwise. A landlord doesn't do any labor and doesn't need any expertise. They receive money because legal ownership of a building is assigned to them.

In all the other scenarios, if that person suddenly dropped dead you wouldn't be getting the product or service. If your landlord died, depending on the property management situation, he may appear slightly less responsive than usual, but nothing would change otherwise. Depending on how tenants pay the landlord they may find themselves massively wealthier if payments stop going through. With the right corporate structure and property management arrangement, a person in a coma could do a fine "job" as a landlord.

If human activity was on a fixed time, that point in time could never be visible to astronomers, at least not unless LIGO was rebuilt on the moon. This doesn't necessarily offer benefits, but it would be sensible if this was a possibility that was considered.

True, it means we can't use gravitational triangulation, but the detector is nothing like close enough to being sensitive enough to be useful there.

Either way, between radio astronomy, optical astronony, and gravitational astronomy now being largely defunct on Earth due to humans messing things up, we really need detectors on the moon or on Mars before we can do anything significantly beyond what we've already done. Space telescopes are just too small and although you could precisely measure 3D positions with sufficient precision to do interferometry, it would not be easy.

Basically, each space telescope would need to measure acceleration with incredible sensitivity and time with incredible precision, record over a very long time, then have a means of collecting the data on physical media and bring it back to Earth for combining with the other recordings. Real-time interferometry wouldn't be possible.

You're much much better off building your telescopes on the surface of a solid planetary mass like the moon or Mars.

We're learning that hallucinogens can indeed do wonders for depression and can even result in some degree of brain repair, but they are also capable of worsening depression, causing further brain damage, and even creating whole new conditions the patient hadn't previously suffered with.

This has been under discussion for well over two decades, in both the US and UK, and, frankly, I'm horrified that there hasn't been much, if any, meaningful research in many of the substances, with the result that the horror stories rival the success stories in magnitude. We could have avoided ALL of that simply by finding out who benefitted (is there a specific set of conditions? a genetic contribution to outcome?) and who worsened. It was gross incompetence by the governments of both countries and the corresponding health research grant bodies, who damn well AUGHT to have done the legwork, because it was perfectly obvious to everyone that if nobody got told anything practical, people would start experimenting on their own. A far worse outcome, because now we've no idea of why the difference in results, nor what can be used to repair damage where damage is repairable.

Ignorance is useless. The craving of it is, in all honesty, extremely irritating.

By now, after two decades of calls, we should know precisely what genetic and experiential outcomes make which substance applicable and what the correct and safe therapeutic dosage should be. We don't. We don't know anything. Oh, sure, we know it helps some people, but we can't predict who, why, when, or how to repeat those results without messing things up. We've had two flipping decades to learn that. We didn't.

I am, as you might have figured out, not happy, although that might not be obvious to all.

I am not going to say substance X is good/bad/ugly, because (a) no substance works that way, and (b) nobody did the proper research to find out.

(Yes, there has been a little bit, here and there, but nothing I'd consider systematic - it's very piecemeal and not much of it has been replicated. But it's not enough to have any confidence in reliable results.)

Maybe we can use AI to fix Slashdot's code to support Unicode.

Or at least run the articles through an LLM to have it clean up the non-ASCII characters.

Stablecoins are widely used in Argentina due to currency controls. Nowadays the controls have been relaxed but up until 2 years ago, people working for abroad were forced to convert their hard currency (dollars usually) into pesos at an arbitrary market set by the government (50% less than market rate), forced to stay in pesos, and forced to pay 35% income tax from the remaining earnings

People just avoided all that crap

Nowadays with the new government the restrictions have been lifted, the banks are now forced not to charge international wire fees (most banks had a 0.2% fee with $100 minimum), and people are not forced to exchange to dollars. In addition, the non taxable minimum for income tax has been raised to a sane level. Needless to say, a LOT more people are now using the legal channels now that they're not being stolen every time they are paid.

ChatGPT is struggling to produce valid SQL even for basic stuff. I use it to produce technical stuff, but everything is checked against at least 2 other AIs and is hand-verified by me, because otherwise there are too many errors.

This is not even close to usable for anything technical.

On one project, after 8 months, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (combined) have managed to produce a technical specification that is as riddled with errors as a draft document produced by an engineer, so one could (I suppose) argue that it's not worse than a human, if given sufficient time. However, the specification has probably cost millions - if not billions - in electricity at this point. If the same amount of money had been spent on human engineers, over the same length of time, my guess is that the document would be of much higher quality and much closer to something that could be implemented.

True, I would never have been given that kind of cash, so it has democratised wasteful spending, but that's not necessarily useful.

You're not exactly wrong, the solution is both: greatly reduce carbon emissions by turning fossil fuels into a niche power source, and then use planetary-scale artificial carbon sequestration to start putting the carbon back underground somewhere near as fast as we took it out. Natural sequestration with trees etc is far too slow so artificial sequestration will have to do the heavy lifting.

Ocean acidification is the scariest aspect of global warming, it could cause an oceanic mass extinction that no amount of distance from the equator, coasts or forests could keep you safe from.

When we finally get our asses in gear to start the planetary-scale artificial carbon sequestration necessary to address global warming, we'll need to start by pulling CO2 out of the oceans, and the only good news is that this happens to be a very efficient way to do it.

Don't forget avoiding the number 4, to the point of not using it on license plates, room numbers, even skipping whole floors of buildings!

The point is that people are investing vast sums of money to create elaborately-packaged boxed sets that are simply too vast to be actually enjoyed (apparently, the new boxed set Thunderbirds will include heavily restored footage that simply wasn't capable of being included in earlier releases), and upscaling a puppet show to 4K and still have it watchable is far from trivial -- those puppets were never made to be seen on such large screens at such high resolution. The scale of investment into making this publicity stunt and boxed set is incredible, the cost of the set isn't low, and the value of the material that's in the set - even to die-hard fans - isn't nearly as great.

Goblin/Guardian: The Lonely and Great God is an even more extreme example and includes 270 minutes of backstage footage, a large pack of publicity photos, scripts, and a tacky plastic sword. It's an extremely limited edition special collector's edition and the resale market is pricing it as though it includes a couple of solid gold ingots. People will certainly binge-watch the episodes once or twice, which will undoubtedly be in much higher resolution than the rare streamed versions, but not even the afficados will be watching all the making-of footage and the scripts will doubtless be on the Internet somewhere. Unlike high-end sci-fi, though, the storyline is simple so the difference between the scripts and fan-produced transcripts won't be vast. (It was a very good storyline, I was impressed, but it was hardly a case where the tiny nuances matter.) But K-Drama is milled in unimaginable quantities, so much so that many series just can't pick up any kind of audience and are abandoned. It's not produced for repeated watching and the odds of any show, however good, being repeatedly watched (the way fans repeatedly watch LoTR or SW) is essentially zero. But someone had to trawl through all the footage to put together the set, make the booklets, etc, and that wasn't cheap. The boxing is elaborate.

The importance of storytelling is high, but none of these are sophisticated stories. They're all pretty much on-par with Smith of Wooton Major - a great little read, but not one I'd pay £500 for, even if they did throw in a plastic sword. I'm not convinced anyone is buying these sets for the content, even though the content is enjoyable.

The degree of investment is phenomenal, the sophistication of presentation is exceptional, and the fans are buying in quantity. I'm just not sure what the benefit is, on either side.