nickff

I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.

>"why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens"

Not the user you were replying to, but they clearly asked why it was done at high-level, and without a vote; you are completely focusing on the latter, and ignoring the former.

I am not sure I agree with that comment, but you shouldn't straw-man it.

The voting issue is problematic, but the limits on shareholder class-actions seems like a good idea. Do you know of any shareholder class-action lawsuit that actually benefited the shareholders? They only ever seem to benefit the plaintiff lawyers pursuing the case.

No; there have been a number of (controversial) pardons for people who were either not charged or had not been convicted. Gerald Ford set something of a precedent by pardoning Richard Nixon for activities related to the Watergate cover-up, and Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his whole family.

These applications of the pardon power have been controversial, but never successfully challenged.

This article is about the EU food supply, and does not appear to attribute the contaminants to US exports. Why are you bringing American cultivation practices into this?

If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).

>"So then enforce the rule on the receiver side: people in your jurisdiction should have the right to be free from spam, and if you want to serve customers there, you need to comply."

Every anti-spam regulation or law has this provision. The problem is that laws and regulations are rarely enforced, especially against people outside the jurisdiction which created the rule. Look at how infrequently GDPR is enforced outside the EU; it isn't even enforced rigorously against entities clearly violating it inside the EU!

>"It's nuts and I can't believe it works."

The success rate is low, but the problem is that it's an arms race, where every competitor is spamming, so each new entrant (or non-spammer) must try to spam even harder to compete. If one elects not to spam, they are at a competitive disadvantage. If there is an anti-spam law or regulation, this just benefits competitors from other jurisdictions, where it is difficult to enforce the rule.

Telling people the reason is also likely to provoke an argument, which is often heated, and may become violent.

In additional to the car dependency (and related issues), the USA still has many immigrants (legal and illegal) from poor countries, who likely have health issues that pre-exist their US residency.

Driving everywhere has the collateral effect of ensuring that people get less exercise. Mexico has an astonishingly high obesity rate (a bit higher than the USA last time I checked), and this increases the risks of many non-car-related causes of death (and illness).

What is the benefit (to the company) of paying to train a junior, which costs their wage, along with a significant proportion of a senior’s wage, if there is no long-term savings on the junior’s wages later on? This seems like a prisoner’s dilemma where every company counts on another to do the ‘apprenticeship’ training.

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.

I agree with you, and think that despite all the hype about targeting and data mining, platforms like YouTube are horrible at determining people’s interests. Re-targeting does seem to ‘work’ better, but it is also extremely wasteful because many of the people seeing the ads have already made their purchase decision.

The high share prices do subsidize Meta's share-based compensation, which seems to make up a substantial portion of the total wage bill. High and rising share prices also allow Meta to purchase other companies with Meta shares, instead of having to pay cash, which is beneficial in many ways.

>"This creates a prisoners’ dilemma: every firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, because the individual incentive to cut labor costs always outweighs the diffuse, shared consequence of eliminating consumer spending."

It seems like the author is attributing a 'standard' recessionary spiral to AI. I am not sure that AI is causing the layoffs, but it does seem like the AI investments are the only thing that have kept us from a deep recession (until now).

CE itself is the least of the issues, and is indeed relatively low-cost for mass-market consumer goods, (this is not true for niche products,) when it is taken into account in the original product design.

From my perspective (as a non-resident EU citizen), it seems the EU is addicted to cheap products from PRoC which do not comply with a variety of EU regulations, because actually enforcing compliance would drive up consumer prices, which is politically unacceptable. This also seems like the reason of the lackadaisical enforcement of regulations.

Essentially, allowing in PRoC products, then complaining is an easy way to keep prices low while continuing to introduce regulations which are expensive to comply with.

Put another way: why does the EU manufacture a declining share of its consumer products, at a time when automation makes mass-production less labor dependent than ever for many industries.

The EU's approach to imports from PRoC is the regulatory equivalent of trying to 'test your way to quality' (which Deming showed to be nearly impossible). Attempts to use regulatory fines and prosecutions to ensure compliance from PRoC products is a whack-a-mole exercise which will fail.

Every major PRoC company is required to have CCP ties; in addition to 'paying for facilitation' by local officials, a certain percentage of their employees must be CCP members.

Canada has little used for airborne early warning outside of NORAD; the country has little independent air defense, and has not performed any foreign air superiority missions since the Cold Warz

The comparable aircraft is the more modern E-7 Wedgetail, which has many features that are superior for Canada's use case (notably including range and NORAD integration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail

Canada has unfortunately been in conflict with Boeing since before either of Trump's terms, originally triggered by Boeing's trade complaints regarding Bombardier's government subsidies.

>”So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved?”

No, I’m not saying that, and if I were, I’d clearly state it.

I agree that everyone deserves to be paid according to their contribution, and have their employer follow all relevant laws. I am not aware of anyone being murdered, enslaved, or even tortured by the Foundation. This group seems to be trying to ‘cash in’ on Wikipedia’s AI windfall, and I think that will cause long-term damage to the organization.

These employees trying to organize seem to be ignoring that they don't actually provide the majority of the value that Wikipedia benefits from, volunteers do.

>"Wikipedia’s workers are fighting to unionize because the institution hosting the world’s encyclopedia has started acting like a regular employer at exactly the moment when the world most needs it to act like something better.

>"The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection."

If Wikipedia has excess reserves, that money should be directed to a worthy cause, not just the people at its office. The labor that sustains it is made up of many more people than those who are employees; trying to milk monopoly rents out of Wikipedia will be its (long and slow) death sentence.

What is ironic about this? I am not trying to be difficult, I just don't understand.

There is definitely a huge gap, where hardware people spend a great deal of time creating and testing things, that they then want to manufacture for long enough to pay it back. It seems like on the (web) software side, people want to try something out (maybe over a weekend), launch it quickly, then shut it down when they figure out it's not going anywhere (the Google approach).

The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.

Congress has been delegating huge amounts of power to the administrative state (via the Executive Branch) for longer than Donald J Trump has been alive.

When the administrators/bureaucrats (whatever your preferred terms are) have very limited and defined powers, I agree they are different. When the administrative powers become wide-sweeping and ill-defined, the powers are difficult to differentiate from those of the politicians.

My points are not whataboutism; I’m saying this was predictable, forecast, and inevitable. Whataboutism focuses on tangential (or unrelated) things.

The Salmon Arm Salute is still remembered in the West: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/a-b-c-museum-says-its...