Only in America where there’s an exclusive service contract that forces franchisees to use a very expensive third party to fix the machines. The machines throw error codes that can only be cleared by a service visit for something that should be as simple as a clean and reset. It incentivizes machines that fail often and disincentivizes the franchisee from actually keeping the machine running.
Where I’m at we’re desperate for civil and structural engineers.
I work for a city that installed flock cameras. Their salesman insisted it was just license plate identification and nothing else when making the pitch to City Council.
The new city manager and I recently read through our “contract” with them. It’s a hyperlink to their TOS on their website. We have nothing in writing and they can change the terms any time they want.
I expect Council to have them removed soon.
Gotta get that engagement.
I remeber having some bullshit feeds by default on an old Samsung phone’s home screen, and to disable them you had to first get into the app’s settings, which required you to agree to the EULA to allow them to strip-mine all your data forever even if you disabled the software.
If you’ve got some comfort with tinkering:
Wrap it in copper and run a hard line to a second router.
What they got would be like us getting Jon Stewart. Instead we got The Donald.
At this point I’d prefer the Chinese government to track me over US companies. The Chinese government won’t let the US government access its databases, whereas Google will.
Yeah. At this point as an American I’m way less worried about in the Chinese government tracking me than I am with the US government. The Chinese government is evil, but I don’t live in China.
Definitely don’t remind people to leave their phones at home or use a Faraday bag to shield their tech.
They’re not just cameras. They also log nearby mobile devices. They’ve gone from a few hundred nationwide to over 100,000 in like 2 years.
They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won’t get it.
The thing with the bubble bursting is it will still take time for it to come down, as they’ll need to start manufacturering consumer RAM again. The stuff they’re churning out now can’t be thrown into a PC or laptop.
And they’ll NEVER allow prices to drop back to reasonable levels. They’ve already learned people will pay a premium during a shortage, so they can still artificially control the supply to keep prices high.
If competitors ever emerge making RAM at reasonable prices, we need to boycott the current fuckwads even when they undercut the new players.
I work in municipal government, and I just renamed the shortcuts on my work computer to avoid having to explain it to another mayor or councilmember. I think they’re adding Photoshop to the bufget anyway next year. GIMP is good for free, but I have to admit Photoshop really is the king of photo editors.
I do really like Inkscape though.
The FOSS software I find to be the most impressive, however, is QGIS. I have ArcGIS and QGIS both installed on my machine and use them both heavily. For data processing, I usually go with QGIS, but then I make most of my deliverables in ArcGIS because it has a way better layout editor and lots of other software and angencies require me to use ESRI REST services.
But I can go with the cheapest ESRI licenses because I don’t have to pay an extra 4 grand a year for the “Erase” tool when I can punch a hole in a shapefile in QGIS for free. And I openly said as much in my last meeting with ESRI when they were trying to get me to upgrade.
I had a video of a newsworthy event a while back that went viral, and I made over 5 grand on it over the course of about 2-3 years when YouTube changed its monetization policy to require like 10k subscribers or something before the creator could monetize.
The video didn’t stop getting views. It had a spike in views just a few weeks ago when something similar happened in the same area. But I haven’t made any money from it in like 8 years.
The US bombed a girl’s school in the opening salvos against Iran because their AI fucked up.
Missiles that miss their target still hit something.
The employees and shareholders of the AI companies should be held responsible. Make RICO cases out of it.
The key difference with a Ponzi scheme is that the Ponzi/Madoff investors weren’t in on the schemes. They though they were investors in a legitimate enterprise. They had a central figure as the fraudster, wheras Enron and the AI bullshit are institutional-level fraud requiring multiple companies to be complicit.
The new one is the most elegant, because they don’t have to break the law to make money on the grift. It also makes it the biggest by far because everyone wants in on the action.
This bursting of this bubble with be catastrophic. Maybe tens of trillions (there’s estimated to be about 125 trillion dollars in assets total worldwide).
This has Ponzi elements, but it’s closer to a multi-company Enron in its structure. They’re manufacturing fake revenues through circular investments. Nvidia invests in AI companies and increases their value while AI companies use that investment to buy Nvidia cards increasing its value so, so they invest more in AI, so they buy more cards…
Enron did this by making fake companies to generate fake revenue. Right now the tech sector is all working together on this scheme, so none of the companies are fake, but the revenue is.
Stocks skyrocketing are a symptom of inflation.