Screen Culture in particular was spamming YT with fake trailers years before AI really blew up, and labeled them very, very deceptively ("Official Trailer Release", and such). YouTube should have banned them years ago, and the studios should have sued. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Yep. Similar to aircraft. There's a reason why planes that perform a specific function at specific performance parameters tend to look alike. Because the parameters demands certain shapes, airflow, capacity, etc, and you end up with planes doing the same mission but designed by different teams yet look alike. See the DC-10/L-1011 airliner situation.

Oh FFS. Trump is the most pro-nuclear president in four decades, including supporting fusion research and exploring new reactor designs: Trump Bets Big on Nuclear

"United States President Donald Trump is putting his money where his mouth is as he doubles down on efforts to accelerate the expansion of the country’s nuclear energy sector. The government will spend billions in public funding to reinvigorate U.S. nuclear power, following decades of underinvestment. Unlike renewable energy, Trump views nuclear power as key to expanding the U.S. electricity generation capacity and recently announced the target of quadrupling nuclear capacity by 2050.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to develop 10 new large nuclear reactors by the end of the decade. In addition, several tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, are providing billions in private funding to restart old nuclear plants, upgrade existing ones, and deploy new reactor technology to meet the growing demands from the data centres powering advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) loan office will dedicate significant funds to the nuclear energy industry to support the development of new reactors. This week, the Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “We have significant lending authority at the loan programme office By far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants — to get those first plants built.”

It wouldn't do jack shit, because no one watches CNN. Travelers used to be stuck with their network, as CNN used to pay airports to display their network, but that ended in 2021 as mobile devices took away that information monopoly, and CNN lost that ad revenue. CNN has half the viewers of MS Now, and only a quarter the viewers of Fox. CNN is way past their glory days, and essentially has become an Also Ran. And cable news doesn't have nearly the reach that the traditional US Big 3 news networks does. All the major cable news players combined still make up less viewers than the lowest rated Big 3 player, CBS, with 4+ million viewers. Which, btw, pales in comparison to ABC, with 8+ million viewers, and NBC with 6+ million. The idea that the Ellisons would "take over" American media is laughable on its face, even if they got Warner Bros. They'd still be a distant third in broadcast reach behind Disney and Comcast, hysterical wailing to the contrary.

OK. When? Because I've been hearing worst case scenarios all my adult life, and most of them are now past their predicted dates. Beginning with Paul Erlich's infamous predictions of mass-starvation in the 60's and 70's, nearly every year the press is filled with credentialed experts that tell us the end is nigh and that the point of no return is almost here. If you want to know why most of the public is so Meh about these doomsday predictions, it's because we've been inundated with the Boy Crying Wolf all of our lives. Would you like a timeline of all the point of no return predictions over the years? It's readily available.

Uh, no, it isn't. Post COVID, some companies are trying to guilt trip customers into tipping all employees in every job... I'm looking at you, fancy-pantsy coffee shops like Starbucks, Dutch Brothers, 7-Brew, etc.... but the vast majority of employees do not ask for nor receive tips as part of their jobs in America. And in jobs where I'd like to tip them for extra service.... grocery pickup, for instance... they're generally not allowed to ask for or receive tips.

Tipping is fine for waitressing, because if the service is good they can make considerably more money. But the post-COVID attempt by some companies to normalize tipping in their industries never took off in the US. Americans resented the push and saw it for what it was.

Look, I know "nuclear device" is correctly generic, so that RTGs and things like them, legitimately count. But let's be serious: right around the very same time this real stuff happened, some really great fake stuff happened too: the movie Goldfinger.

And once you've watched Goldfinger, "nuclear device" is just a euphemism for a bomb. So don't go calling RTGs "nuclear devices," please.

it is pretty clear trump would pardon or vacate any fine against a right winger org.

The president does not yet have pardoning power over civil judgements. Maybe a constitutional amendment to do that is coming, but we haven't had a vote on it yet.

Some good has come from promoting more user speech online, but also a lot of bullying, harassment, echo chambers, doxxing, stochastic terrorism, and so on.

You make it sound as dangerous as a 1775 soap box that people like Sam Adams would stand upon and shout from, or a pamphlet-printing-press that someone like Thomas Paine might use, where in both cases the goal was often to rowse the rabble into protest and action.

But is the internet really that dangerous?

"The platforms" are, at best, a percent of the internet.

Sign up for a linode, put up any sort of website you can imagine on it, and explain why you would choose for the algorithms you write or install, to work the way that you fear.

It doesn't have to be as bad as you say, unless you want it. That's essential freedom.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion

It will result in suppression of all anti- power/wealth opinion, i.e. all criticism of government or big-pocketed business.

This change is sponsored by litigious motherfuckers. Trump is only the instance-du-jour, a few percent of the overall threat, though very much a shining example of it.

It's not just Germany. Most of Western Europe has been trending this way since the end of the Cold War, and the roots of such thinking were there long before Hitler was even an itch in his daddy's pants. A lot of Americans seem surprised by this. But Europe isn't America, and European governments have always had a more paternalistic view of their role than American political philosophy allows for. Further, most Europeans are fine with that. Americans gasp when they see such things, but this is just the latest line of code in the old European We'll keep you all safe, comfy, and warm under the blanket of *insert European capitol here* script. European thinking sees the welfare of their people in totality. So it's not just social welfare you get from such systems... "free" healthcare, subsidized housing, schools, etc... but you also get the rest of the "protection" philosophy... that you have to protect people from themselves. Speech codes, bans on anything the government deems "extreme", they're all part of the paternalistic view that you're protecting and providing for your people. Father's job is to feed, house, and keep the kids safe. Part of that is disciplining and setting rules that they have to follow, for their own good. With a few exceptions, this is No Bueno is most of North America, but again, Europe isn't America. It has a considerably different mindset.

Did you even RTFA?

"Our analysis takes advantage of administrative data from a large, urban, public college system "

The analysts are from Columbia, a private Ivy League school. Not the students. Since they're NYC based, the students they were studying were almost certainly from the public City University of New York system. Not at all hard to get into, and no need for "nepo baby" admissions.

There was a movie called Kill the Irishman, starring the late great Ray Stevenson, that had a similar plot point: Danny Greene borrows money from the Mob to start a restaurant. The courier tasked with delivering the cash decides to take it and buy heroin with it, re-sell it at a profit, and keep the difference for himself. Except the sellers are Feds in a honeypot scheme. The money is gone, the Mob demands Greene pay them back, he refuses, so the order goes out to "kill the Irishman".

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.