The Zucc has only himself to blame for being perceived as an out-of-touch villain.

I mean, I guess he could try to blame MSN. But that would just look like the whining of a sad, morbidly rich manchild, digging his own hole deeper. So I hope he doesn't try to use that excuse. And if someone else were to come furnish that excuse to us on his behalf, that would be even sadder.

People always talk about a minimum wage, but I think a maximum wage is more important to preserving democracy and an economy.

Look at it as a sanity check. When the numbers are out of bounds, you know something's gone wrong in your application.

"...we started paying for female attention.."

Do you know what the oldest profession in the world is? I think it was before the internet.

I think the idea was to have the party power structure vet candidates at all levels, and the Electoral College being a bunch of smart guys having essentially a veto on the Presidential election, should some charlatan somehow elbow his way up there.

Of course, none of these institutions stepped up to the job. It would seem fair to say America is a nation of mentally, morally, and spiritually weak individuals. Hopefully they're ready for some pain. That's the feeling of weakness leaving the body.

They've spent at least the past half-century chasing anyone who is bright out of their circle. The result is concentrated idiocy. The same can be said of their voters - concentrated, curated, weaponized idiocy. These people don't know how to build, only destroy. Toddlers on a tantrum. Problem is someone gave them guns and nukes.

They added legs, turns out they got used to run for the exit.

It would seem they determined the user-growth in smart glasses wasn't happening, or wasn't important enough, compared to their data-collection/AI endeavors.

If they don't have an official one, chances are a local news or gossip organization is filling in the gap.

But again, this is all beside the point. They have your "mug" from 10 other sources already.

Not only are they a public record, many police departments go out of their way to publicize and distribute the photos on an ongoing basis. The AI companies have already been scraping Milwaukee PD's website for mug shots. What they're asking for now is a formality, to provide the appearance that they got the data legitimately. The cops call this technique "parallel construction" when they employ it in an investigation.

But it's beside the point too, they already have your mugshot from social media, DMV, DHS, your school, and anyone else you've given your picture to. This is just more/more accurate data to add in.

Where I live, cities are not allowed to reduce the police budget for any reason. The state has made that illegal. An initiative championed by the party of freedom, small government, and local governance.

I was thinking Myanmar. The sad thing is that, in both these places, you have the military either not prioritizing rescues, or actively killing first responders.

In this same post, you can observe the phrase "multi-million" employed as a way to wave away safety concerns. The symptoms point to Stockton Rush Syndrome, co-mobid with Dunnig-Kreuger.

I think the origin for the belief about the batteries is that consumers hear a lot about "Charging degrades batteries", which is true, and they take that to mean charging is the only way to damage a battery.

He was talking about "normal people", to whom it is definitely a web site.

I'm not saying mass adoption of some locally-computed AI feature can't happen, but it certainly hasn't.

Framing it as "everyone gets to be a manager" sounds less on-the-nose dystopian than "you get to fire all the workers".

It caters to the mental retreat from reality that business owners are already so good at. The C-level physically and mentally surround themselves with other managers. Put the workers on a different floor, in a different building, or in a different country. Make sure none of them can get promoted to the managers' club, either. The goal is to be as out-of-touch with the work as possible.

Needless to say - they're not going to make all the fired workers into managers. But if they wish hard enough, and say it to everyone and have it repeated back to them, I guess that improves the mood or something. Less frowns in the boardroom.

I'm willing to believe both the mixing and the average person's playback system have deteriorated since the 90s.

When you bought a full-sized CRT for your living room, it typically came as a cabinet on wheels, with full-size speakers integrated underneath or beside the screen.

Flat-screen TVs come with tiny garbage speakers installed. People who opt to upgrade the sound get sold a "sound bar" that also sucks. Oftentimes these sound bars advertise themselves as "surround sound" but will downmix a discrete center channel. And/or do some other processing to mess the audio up in an attempt to simulate surround.

The average person going into a store looking for a "widescreen, surround-sound" entertainment system will probably get sold much worse audio today than they would have a couple decades ago.