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  • It also means that the people are being treated with meds meant for animals, not for humans. That means the audience / reader never knows if the meds are going to be effective, or if the dosage is going to be correct.

  • Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. People grieve in their own way. Some people throw themselves into work to avoid thinking about tragedy. Some people get drunk or high. Some people perform grief in an outlandish, over-the-top way because they want to be the main character.

    We don't know if maybe she was happy and excited at this moment, and then once she was off the conference call the reality hit her again and she was sobbing uncontrollably.

    But, here's the thing. Most people don't try to monetize the death of a loved one, and as a result they're not in the spotlight during their period of grief. Most people step back from the world and grieve in private, where there aren't as many people judging them for how well or poorly they're dealing with the loss of a loved one.

    Erika Kirk brought this spotlight on herself by trying to monetize the death of her husband. And if people's harsh criticism of what she's doing means that the next person doesn't try to monetize the death of a loved one, that's probably a good thing.

  • Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

    That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it's not as bad as feared.

    Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That's the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won't grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

    For a typical car company that's well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

    Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

    So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla's stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn't as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.

  • It's a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.

    It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot's fault. With this ruling, it's the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they're misled by the chatbot. That's excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.

  • Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don't have competitors, you don't have to work as hard to provide search results -- especially if you're actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they're interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn't responsible for the decline of search quality.

  • Yeah, this is why polling is hard.

    Online polls are much more likely to be answered by people who like to answer polls than people who don't. People who use Duck Duck Go are much more likely to be privacy-focused, knowledgeable enough to use a different search engine other than the default, etc.

    This is also an echo chamber (The Fediverse) discussing the results of a poll on another similar echo chamber (Duck Duck Go). You won't find nearly as many people on Lemmy or Mastodon who love AI as you will in most of the world. Still, I do get the impression that it's a lot less popular than the AI companies want us to think.

  • There's another one of these with Sean Connery and Brodie Sangster both (according to the post) 34 when the pictures were taken:

    I'm sure that there were young-looking 34 year-olds in the 1960s, and there are old-looking 34 year old actors today. But, it's also a sign of changes. People started drinking younger, men didn't have skincare routines, the world was more heavily polluted, Hollywood selected for old-looking actors vs. more pretty actors today, etc.

  • I mean, that’s such a broad take, any system can change, doesn’t mean it’s inevitable

    It also doesn't mean that they're all the same system. So, if capitalism is one of the many systems that can backslide into authoritarianism doesn't mean that authoritarianism is a part of capitalism, despite your claim to the contrary.

    We have had systems of feudalism and monarchies that have stayed steady for hundreds of years. In pre history, people lived in communes for thousands of years.

    Yes, in the modern world things change much more quickly. Technologies didn't change for thousands of years. That meant that the number of people a farmer or a plot of land could feed stayed constant for thousands of years. That meant the maximum size of a city was pretty constant. That dictated the kinds of governments that were stable.

    It was technology that has made systems unstable, not capitalism.

  • Good point.

  • Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold. There was nothing magical about being on the gold standard.

    Money is just IOUs created by the government. The government uses them to pay for goods and services it wants. If the government wants someone to guard a building, they pay in IOUs. Then, every year, the government taxes everybody in the country and demands that they return a certain number of government IOUs to the country. It's this obligation to pay taxes that gives their IOUs their value.

    The person who was paid to guard a building is left holding a pile of IOUs. Fundamentally, they're worthless. But, there are other people in the country who have to pay taxes and aren't doing jobs for the government. So, the guy with the IOUs goes to the farmer and says "I know you're going to need to pay taxes and don't have any IOUs, I'll trade you some of my IOUs for some of your vegetables". After that exchange the farmer has enough IOUs to pay the government at tax time, and the guard still has enough to pay his own taxes.

  • If they were "toys" of the government, they wouldn't so easily be able to bend the government to their will. They were hardly "made by the government".

  • You're claiming that if capitalism tends to backslide into X, then X is part of capitalism. My point is that every system can backslide into something more primitive where a strong man makes the rules. They're not all the same, so your idea that X is an inevitable part of capitalism is wrong. Capitalism is what we call it when it has a certain set of characteristics. If it no longer has those characteristics it's no longer capitalism.

    I’m claiming that capitalism in particular is one of the most corruptible systems

    And you're wrong. There's nothing about capitalism that makes it more corruptible than feudalism or oligarchy. In fact, those systems are much more corrupt in general.

    It tries to harness the power of greed and turn it into positive sum games

    Whereas feudalism doesn't even try to do that. It just skips the positive sum games part and accepts greed. At least with capitalism there's an attempt to make things better.

    I think greed driving society maximizes corruption

    Maximizes corruption? You think capitalism is more corrupt than a strong man system where everybody is forced to constantly flatter and pay tribute to the strong man? A system where the rules are whatever the strong man says, so bribery is baked into everything?

    think we should replace that with something else

    Sure, let's do it, what do you propose? And how do we get there from here?

  • Was ad number 2 about how to get immigration papers as an English-speaking person in Poland? I imagine Poland doesn't have a lot of immigration from people in English-speaking countries. Especially not from people who haven't figure out all the legalities necessary to gain employment in Poland.

  • I guess you'll just have to trust me when I say that I had no idea what the ads I was seeing were supposed to be about.

  • I lived in a country where people don't speak English. There's a sizable expat community of English speaking workers there. The ad targeting was so useless that I was constantly shown ads in a language I couldn't understand. This was on an Android phone where everything was set to English. With every single interaction I with any app or web page I was broadcasting the language I know, and yet they couldn't figure even that absolutely critical detail out.

    This targeting was so bad that an old fashioned newspaper ad printed in ink next to a story would have been more effective. At least a publisher is going to put English ads in an English newspaper, German ads in a German newspaper, etc.

    If the ad companies can't even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.

  • Really? You mean the ads I'm shown in a language that I don't speak work on me? How is that? Do they emit mind-control rays or something?

  • The ads companies hate the government too. They don't want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.

    There's no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.

  • Nothing is inevitable. Backsliding is always common. Most forms of government tend to backslide towards a strong-man at the top who is above the law. This is exactly what's happening with the American democratic republic that was previously a mix of capitalism and socialism. That doesn't mean that a strong man is a natural element of capitalism or democracy or republics or socialism or capitalism. It's that a strong man who's above the law is a common feature of human communities.

    Pretty much every form of government that allows for more participation by the people being governed tries to put constraints on the rulers. The US called theirs "checks and balances". The British started with the Magna Carta.

    It’s like saying you like playing monopoly but then after all the properties are bought out you turn around and say it’s no longer monopoly.

    You're talking about monopoly, the board game, previously called "the landlord's game", a game designed to teach about the dangers of monopolies?

  • It's not baffling when you realize that there are only 2 remaining car manufacturers in the US, and fewer than 20 worldwide.

    Look at the number of car companies established just in 1900:

    • Auburn: 1900 to 1937
    • California Automobile Company: 1900 to 1902
    • Massachusetts Steam Wagon Company: 1900 to 1901
    • Dodge: 1900 to 1928
    • Friedman Automobile Company: 1900 to 1903
    • ...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Vehicle_manufacturing_companies_established_in_1900

    When there are only 2 manufacturers in a space, it's no surprise if they ignore certain consumers. If there were a hundred different manufacturers like there were in the early 1900s, then there would almost certainly be someone offering something closer to what you want.