Tech savvy groups have always included a significant amount of well established people unhappy with how technology is being implemented or used - who then, yes, yell at clouds. Hell, a lot of us still literally yell about the Cloud.

Paraphrasing a management quote I found a few decades ago - if the engineers aren’t complaining about something, it’s not because they’re happy. It means they’re complaining where you can’t hear them.

I mean, for half a billion years, the Earth’s surface was largely molten. Earth’ll be fiiiine…

Seriously, we’re getting as hot as it’s ever been while humans were around, and the change is accelerating.

(edit - got -> hot)

Eh, that seems to suggest it’s entertainment for or about misers, rather than misery

Wait… It just verifies the age of whoever initially activated the device? Which might predate the bill, implying a long activation time?

Do the authors of this bill even live with children? Cuz they sure aren’t actually dealing with their device usage

You don’t commit holocaust against a government, or it’s military. You commit it against a people, regardless of what they do or support.

That’s the reason for the pushback.

Well they aren’t meant to be an ID.

Mine still has that expressly printed on the back, “NOT A VALID FORM OF IDENTIFICATION” or something like that.

Wait, yours doesn’t say that?

Red Menace, Yellow Peril… Who’ve we got coming up for the Green Trouble?

Playing with https://telecom.samm.com/cable-reel-calculator, it seems like you could probably fit a reel or two on a trailer?

I seem to remember the current wind turbines need some specialized trucks for maintenance too, this doesn’t seem like it’s need much more - but I’m not an engineer!

Welcome!

You know, I almost posted that it specifically says on the back “Not to be used for ID”, because I remember that on mine. Looked online to be sure I was right, and couldn’t find it, so I didn’t post it

I had no idea that they removed that. It’s not like they changed function!

And people rich enough to stupidly link those AI agents to their bank accounts.

I need to pay more attention to how rich people are using AI personally…

At this point, I question whether they’re even experts in that kind of finance, or if they’re just connected to each other well enough, and have a few willing experts in hand, to maintain their position.

I honestly think the only thing most of them have going for them is that it’s their name on the accounts.

Yeah, I was just poking at what I assumed was a day off the cuff response. Didn’t occur to me they might have tried formatting it, and failed.

Thanks for breaking them out!

…what kind of game is that?!

And yet it still keeps finding ways to tear him down!

I absolutely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and completely disagree with the second! That said, stories evolve at least as quickly as the language they’re built from, and I’m sure every family that hangs up stockings has their own unique spin for Santa. But intentionally gaslighting your kids in order to teach an object lesson about how people will manipulate you seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about it, especially when the kid comes out ahead for it!

I think it started as a story to get kids excited, because that’s fun. In my family, the kids were brought into the act as they got old enough to understand that the point; and I assume this was very common back when kids had to help with everything as soon as they were old enough. The kids then get to practice giving without any intention of getting recognition for it, which helps make more charitable adults.

That’s not to say that the story doesn’t get used to enforce behavior - the existence of Krampus shows a long history of that! But I don’t think it’s used primarily for that anymore.

I was incautious with my phrasing, I should have said something like “humans have a singular capacity” etc. There may well be other storytelling species (in fact, I hope there are!) Whalesong seems like it could have the necessary complexity, for instance. I don’t think crows warning each other about particular faces quite constitutes a story, though - that seems more like spreading “we hate that guy!” without any of the context a story would provide. Would be easy to check for storytelling with the species that can imitate speech, though.

I suspect this is a big part of what we’re looking for when we’re exploring personhood in nonhumans, too - whenever talking to animals, aliens, etc comes up in fiction, people inevitably end up swapping stories with them. Suggests to me that storytelling ability is what people are actually looking for.

I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we’re storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.

Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it’s done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.

I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.

And not only did he see for himself, he wrote up and published his results.