carnagii

Yeah, they take that into account when calculating inflation, which is why CPI is quoted at 1% when the cost of housing, food, gas, health care, college tuition (i.e. everything you actually need) is more like 10%.

only half? I hope the percentage is higher than that.

sorry to s--t on your profession bro, but it is what it is.

People with money (inherited or won gambling) fall on the same intelligence spectrum as everyone else. There is a shallow end of the pool there.

There are plenty of smart business people who understand exactly what "AI" is and how to exploit it. That is the whole point of this article.

I see a lot of similarities between "AI", as understood by business people, and the pursuit of alchemy and the philosophers stone. It seems like a hustle to separate rich dupes from their money by promising them the keys to infinite wealth, immortality, mars colonys, etc. In that respect it is mostly harmless but it can be quite dangerous to the people who take it seriously.

> having to provide and record ID when entering a concert, restaurant or other public places

What do you think cell phones and credit cards are? In all of your examples you do have to provide an ID.

Yes, I agree with this.

I think that governments should provide a verifiable digital ID the same way they provide physical IDs and that they should provide communications platforms that allow people to communicate with these digital IDs in a way that protects their rights the same way that they provide mail service.

I do not think that governments should be regulating/banning activity on private platforms but should be offering an alternative where private platforms fall short. This is really nothing more than bringing existing government services (ID, mail, voting, parliaments) fully up to date with digital technology.

There is a big gap right now where governments don't understand what they should be doing or are incapable of doing it. They recognize the need for action because they see that things are going wrong but are not proposing or implementing the correct solutions yet.

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online.

Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion.

Private corporations have not done this, and probably never will, so government is the only option left.

The statute says "anything of value." Here the thing of value would be a person's contact list. The attempt to gain this thing of value through deceit (telling the person you are trying to verify their account and using the access they give you to steal their contact list) would be the fraudulent act.

The fact that Facebook put a system in place to obtain these contact lists is evidence on its own of their value, but that value could also be quantified without much difficulty.

The only real question is: was dropping the consent form without removing the feature an honest mistake or was it done because somebody decided it would result in a lower bounce rate and thus more money for Facebook.

> is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent?

wanting to fix is pretty obvious. capable of fixing is a different story. biologically there is no fix (genetic engineering maybe? but that is super sci-fi). so we can try to correct with technology or social conventions but those fixes never change the underlying biological defects so how effective can they really be?

Look at the social engineering aspects of organized Christianity. How well did those work? Look at the social engineering aspects of the U.S. experiment like universal education and literacy. How well did those work?

It is a little bleak but in reality universal literacy has been a complete failure (in the U.S. at least). Probably 80% of the population is at the level of what used to be called "knowing your letters" but they are functionally illiterate (they have never done any significant amount of reading in their life, and aren't really capable of it). That is not a popular opinion, at least not for public consumption, so we can't even begin to address the issue because we refuse to acknowledge that it exists.

Human cognition is riddled with exploitable defects. Biologically we are basically just highly pretentious and neurotic monkeys. All of human history is full of people looking for someone to blame for their condition (gods, devils, spirits, corporations, etc) but it never changes.

Keep in mind, from an evolutionary perspective we are exactly the same people who were burning witches at the stake and throwing people in lakes to determine their criminal culpability a few hundred years ago. We just have a different set of superstitions and delusions now.

In the U.S. a large segment of the population (100M+) is told over-and-over again that they should rely on the expertise and charity of the elite in business and politics to take care of them.

Examples like this just show how naive and detached from reality that self appointed elite is and how little value their "charity" provides.

The problem with "objective" journalism is that truth and falsehood are not as important as what the objective of the story is. If a propagandist can use the truth to achieve their objectives that is better than lies because people can detect lies easier. Objective journalism is based on the false premise that reporting facts differentiates you from agenda driven propaganda when it is really just the most effective form of agenda driven propaganda.

> Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied ... tend to rather just leave bad reviews when I'm not satisfied

This is basic consumer behavior. Receiving a good experience (either service or product) is not notable because you paid for it and expect it, whereas a bad experience is offensive and makes you feel cheated so you retaliate by taking your time to leave a bad review.

What this means at scale is that most positive reviews are fake except for the truly extraordinary products/services that are far above all their peers in terms of quality or novelty.

In order to get decent reviews you have to be able to verify that the consumer actually paid for the product/experience and then you have to apply some sort of sampling methodology and statistical analysis to arrive at a meaningful relative score to other products/services in the same industry.

No review site has any interest in doing this because they are just using reviews to generate free content for SEO, to put ads on, and to extort businesses into paying them to "manage" negative reviews in various ways.