They are no longer required to fully fund pensions:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The reason for the rules seems like common sense to me. There is a certain distance needed to stop or change lanes when driving at highway distance. If the truck breaks down just over a hill, cars won't see it early enough unless the warning signals are put further back where they can be seen coming up the hill.

I seriously doubt that these rules were just shit someone made up. The NHTSA has so many studies regarding road regulations and guidance. They might be outdated for modern technology, and might be worse than newer alternatives - I don't doubt that hasn't been studied yet - but I would absolutely wager that there were studies done to justify the original numbers.

Furthermore, when congress delegated regulatory power to these agencies they included laws dictating how the rules needed to be determined, specifically so you can't have a bunch of political hacks changing them on a whim. Changes to the regulation need to be justified, and there needs to be comment period to gather any information and concerns that the agency itself might have overlooked, respond to the comments and incorporate any changes as appropriate. I don't want regulators to be able say "this is just some crap" and change rules every four years because they shoot from the hip. That means that changes take 1-3 years depending on how complicated and motivated the agency is, but it is worthwhile to end up with better regulations and avoid being constantly jerked around.

> And, in that case, why add a new law versus just adding to the CCPA?
It is an amendment to the CCPA. Websites covered by the CCPA are required by law to honor the opt-out, and browsers are required to implement it.

23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

I've never seen a cookie banner ask for consent to collect and store my IP address. If that is their reason, they completely failed to obtain consent in a manner that meets the law.

The reason for the banners are simple - a court case ruled that cookies are covered by GDRP, but they haven't explicitly ruled on other tracking mechanisms. So ad companies pushed the minimum and most annoying method of conforming with that ruling without changing their practices, and continue to ignore the fact that all the other tracking they are doing without consent is blatantly illegal.

Even though it whitelists the IA crawlers by default?

Anubis has worked well for us to get rid of most of the scrapers from our wiki, including the ones faking regular user agents.

It's not just data centres, many of the requests from regular broadband IP addresses. I think they're using "services" of bottom feeders like Scraper API, or buying from the authors of malicious web browser extensions.

The Switch 2 pricing was announced well after Trump was elected, and undoubtedly included *some* additional markup for tariff increases from the get go, since he had been talking about tariffs the whole campaign, even if it has been a continual game of roulette trying to predict the *exact* tariffs. So it makes sense that the Switch 1 prices would be more sensitive to the tariffs than the Switch 2.

You mean the JFK documents that were released containing hundreds of social security numbers of federal employees? Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

Maybe from NOAA? (at least until they get defunded)