sturger

Ah. That explains it. Conservative pols are extorting porn sites for donations.

Ironically ew music has never been more accessible, but few people take advantage because of the noise we have to wade through.

Also remember that Torvalds invented Git and gave it away for free. The Corps are stealing the free software and leveraging it to force everyone to give them money instead.

Your point about music is a great analogy. Basically:

1. People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
2. Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
3. Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
4. Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
5. Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.

From Java beans™ to Magic Beans.

You don’t have to influence a populace. Just purchase a subgroup willing to do violence on the populace.

5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that “AI” is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year’s more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they’ve ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.

My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn’t have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I’d write, “Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room.” Of course then we’d have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we’d receive a reply saying, “Fine, turn on the light in the dining room.” The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.

We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.