baltakatei

The root of MAGA’s nostalgia for the 1950s is the effective US corporate tax rate being 40-50% rather than the 2010s’s 10-15%. Those higher taxes paid for healthcare, anti-trust enforcement which increased wages across the board, general public services. Instead, money that corporations would have spent on taxes goes into bribes for regulatory capture, helping depress wages and facilitate monopolistic mergers and acquisitions. Quick overview of historic tax rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States

Sounds like Aceh… Yep, it’s Aceh. They’ve been strongly Islamic for centuries. Their Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) was a pain-in-the-ass even for Suharto, Indonesia’s military dictator throughout the 1960s/1990s.

Does it act as a dumb monitor? Can all smart TV features be permanently disabled?

Theoretically, it’s possible for the user to authenticate their age without either the site or service knowing the user’s identity. Quick and dirty example:

There’s a thing called a ring signature that allows one to prove that one of a large number of people digitally signed something. Let’s say a million people all have private keys whose corresponding public keys are registered to a database after they flashed their state ID at a post office or something to prove they are ≥18 years of age. So, John Smith uses his private key plus all 1 million public keys to sign a statement that he sends to a server saying he’s ≥18. The server then takes all 1 million public keys plus the signed message John provided and verifies that his signature is among the 1 million but cannot calculate which exact public key belongs to John. The verification process requires all 1 million public keys as input; you cannot, for example, try an omit each public key one-by-one to see which causes the verification process to fail.

Currently, there is ongoing research on how to make compact ring signatures since they can be very large the more public keys are involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

That said, even if you had scalable compact ring signature technology, I’d be more worried about advertiser deänonymization efforts once a user has logged in that check browser canvas size, IP address, user agent, font availability, etc. See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Also, ring signatures for age verification don’t actually verify age, just that someone proved their age at some point in the past to the owner of the public key database; just like an adult can log into YouTube on behalf of their children and let the children go to town, John could give anyone access to his private key regardless of age.

“Hey, Uncle, can I use your age tokens to do my research homework? The rich kids all get to use the entire Internet because their uncles let them ride their age credentials. Thanks!”

That exception probably would be twisted into permission to add an “AI summary” section to each article.

No one loved her enough to fight to free her, so she wasn’t worth much to society anyways. — the local DA, probably

Instead of adding more buses and bus stops or light rail or any form of public transit to alleviate the problem

But then I’d have to replace time inside my personal climate-controlled carriage with sharing space alongside the unwashed masses.

Cargo cult happiness.

66 countries

Yes.

Texas flips blue is on my Bingo card.

Reminds me of a quote from Small Gods (1992) about an eagle that drops vulnerable tortoises to break their shell open:

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

Yeah, I can see Aceh, Indonesia’s fully Sharia law province blocking Grok or anything culturally disruptive, especially if it’s just a matter of filtering out traffic from a handful of IP addresses.

This is like a SimCity news ticker item.

Pay no attention to the ex-Intel CEO behind the curtain.

Hamas is crazy as Crazy Horse was “crazy”. You know what both have/had in common? They are/were fighting displacement of their friends and family due to colonizing powers. The only difference is the latter’s people suffered almost complete annihilation while the former is a work on progress. If the British didn’t insist on making Palestine their reservation for Jews, then Palestinian freedom fighters wouldn’t have had to fight Zionists violently encroaching upon their native land.

I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.

How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don’t know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.