Even English isn’t English! It’s from all those French and German people who moved to England in the Middle Ages. Send ‘em back, I say.

Yeah, sure, I guess that is a “claim” that I am “advancing”. If you’re going to try and turn this into a weird Reddit-style debate that you can “win” then I’m not interested. If you are curious about how other systems outside of your own function, then you can go read about them.

So, which part of the US are you from?

I expect doctor’s visits to not have bills.

Those last three words, “in their billing”, is the real terrifying part. The AI is only making easier the bit of the job that shouldn’t need doing in the first place.

Also the Washington Post actually pays its writers.

That reads like AI slop

The perfectly alienated and isolated liberal approach that changes nothing. Festooning a suburban house with solar panels is like washing your oversized pickup truck with those unbleached brown recycled paper towels.

However, advocating for vasectomies and such gestures towards eugenics and eco-fascism.

If you borrow a DVD from the library for free you don’t need to pay for whatever streaming service is holding that particular film hostage, if it’s even available at all. And if it’s a Blu-ray Disc it will have better picture quality than a compressed stream. Making copies is also very easy if you have a computer with a drive, and doesn’t require paying for a VPN to avoid facing the risks of online piracy.

I’m a foreign bad actor.

Yes, EU policy is clear. Foreign companies deliberately undercutting European business to monopolize whole sectors is only ok if they’re American, not Chinese. Amazon good, BYD bad.

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

Th DRM is the real issue, especially when viewing habits are taken into account. The most watched shows on Netflix for years have been repeat viewings of old sitcoms. The re-watching of shows like Friends, The Office, Seinfeld, etc is especially energy intensive because of DRM. Viewers download the same episode again and again and again, only for the DRM to automatically delete the downloaded file every time. If Netflix was just a folder on a server of DRM-free .mp4 files it would be very efficient.

But it isn’t. Instead, capitalism demands an inefficient over-engineered mess of a system, with a confusing algorithmically reshuffled interface of self-destructing video files so that people can be charged money every month forever and ever.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.

Hang on, how did a US soldier give Donald Trump the freedom to say stupid shit? Who was going to take that freedom away, and perhaps the most bizarre part of all: why did the soldier stop them from taking that freedom away?

This article from a Washington DC-based publication is doing its very best to frame as bad some extremely mild examples of the EU standing up to these largely unaccountable American megacorporations. It’s not like the EU is doing to Meta & Apple what the Americans are doing to Huawei & Bytedance/TikTok — but perhaps the EU should.

You, when you’re looking at Google Maps or whatever other mapping software you use. They’ve all been compatible with Galileo, Glossnas, Beidou, and GPS for many years. But a mapping app tends to not tell the user which brand of satellite they’re using at any given time.

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

I think we can all broadly sympathize with the complaints about politicking, but this rant also includes a lot of red flags. For example, saying that you have “never had any interest” in things like “being agreeable when you disagree” suggests that this person is just another one of the big ego assholes in the department, a full-of-themselves “rockstar academic” who can’t even be bothered with basic human kindness.