Rhaedas

Useful maybe. For what purposes though… getting labor costs down, pumping out stuff fast assuming it’s correct because it’s AI, being ahead of their competitors. Useful as in productive? Maybe for some cases when they know what AI can and can’t do or its limitations. I get the impression from this year’s news stories that a lot of them jumped on it because it was the new thing, following everyone else. A lot got burned, some backtracked where they could, some are quiet but aren’t pursuing it as much as they advertised.

OP is right, companies will go the direction they feel consumers will buy more from, and if that’s a “No AI” slogan, that’s what they’ll put. There’s no regulations on it, so just like before with ingredients or other labeling before rules were set, they’ll lie to get you to buy it. Hell, from a software pov there’s a big thing now on apps being sold as “FOSS” that are not, because there’s no rules to govern it. Caveat emptor.

Needs a continuation of the help desk, where you end up educating the person on the topic. And at some point get transferred higher up to someone who might actually be able to help, and it disconnects while on hold.

Sure, let’s keep going towards the goal of better solutions. Even this meme doesn’t say or imply that it has to be all green, and it simply can’t. Some things need a high energy density or other features that unfortunately only petroleum has. It really is an amazing substance. That causes problems. Everything has a cost.

That makes sense, from why some things were captured more than others and from the pov of starting an archive service - using what’s already been done and going from there. So things that weren’t part of such a network and didn’t rank high in existing search engines really didn’t have a chance.

They started in 2001 archiving pages back to 1995. I guess it was luck of the draw what got saved then.

That’s a valid argument, however it’s a pretty gray one because it depends on what you refer to as the company, all costs, or motive. Note that in your points you use abuse, exploitation, and legally, implying that the company is breaking laws. So there the problem isn’t regulation, but enforcement of them.

But I don’t want to get into a debate on the finer details and legalese, you got my point. And my phrasing of what the company “should” do was probably too vague. A company’s goal (not the individuals inside it) is to produce something and try to profit from it. That’s it. How it can and does do that is determined by laws and the people running it, and that’s where the control and ethics and legal lines begin.

I recently was searching for evidence of web existence of a site, and of course Wayback was my first thought. So I put in the address, and couldn’t find anything relevant (a redirection error was the best hit I got). Then I realized, duh… What I was looking for was in the late 90s, maybe 2000, and the notion of preserving the web hadn’t become a thing yet. So this is what happens without such efforts, things are really lost to memory and maybe snippets of references here and there if lucky.

That link seems to support my point of the government having a leash on things, and when that was loosened or removed, we got what we have. Granting certain privileges for doing public good sounds a lot like regulatory management to me. But that’s only possible if corporations don’t have their own leash on the government from inside, which was my point all along.

That’s what holds US gas prices down, subsidies. Helping large scale things be possible is what a government should do. There’s many things that wouldn’t have happened without the government paying for it.

The kicker is that if they switched to green and took away paying for petroleum, things would collapse, as green alone isn’t going to support our society. That’s the dead end we’ve walked ourselves into. It’s not one or the other, it’s what can we supplement or phase out with a better solution. And that kind of work needs government support, from subsidies to regulations to a supervisor that directs the change vs. relying only on free market.

Well, one particular religion. They talk about being persecuted while practicing it on other beliefs.

But at least there’s something in writing to argue about, whereas I don’t know of any rules protecting corporate influence on lawmakers. Maybe there are some limitations on lobbying and money waving, but there’s also loopholes. Just the issues of insider trading and other ways to profit from the positions of power shouldn’t be possible in an ideal government by the people and for the people.

Likewise on the other side, it shouldn’t be possible to just pay a fine and keep breaking existing regulations. There may be a parallel there with the average person and the wealthy - where one goes to jail for something and the other just waves it off because of who they are. Small businesses can’t get away with breaking laws like the big ones can. Deep pockets and influence matter, and they shouldn’t.

This shouldn’t be directed at companies. They’re the ones that are saying this, but that’s what they should do. Find the best route for the betterment of the company and its products.

That is why we need regulation from the government. To narrow the path that companies can take to maximize profits and growth. The real problem, and why so many of these maintained traction until they didn’t, is when businesses and government intermingle with each other.

We need a separation of corporate and state, just like church and state, for similar reasons. And the church and state one has always been kind of weak, some times more than others. Government should be impartial and fair to all matters, period.

Given the OP, maybe it’s not flawed vision, but close to human vision. Elon’s philosophy of trying to max out simulating people is not a great tech solution when there were better choices.

Also had another thought on that pesky air in the way. Something related to your point is called Max q and occurs very high up still in the atmosphere, even above most of the air, because of the speed also involved. The advantage of a rocket is that they can manage the ratio by backing off the throttle until getting past that point. But important to this conversation is how high that occurs. Even if the mass driving avoids the lower air, it still has to come out of the tube at a comparable speed to attain orbit, so it will run into its own Max q type effects as it exits, and then even further up. The stress on a vehicle would certainly be far greater than “just” a rocket launch.

That opens up another problem that I’ve seen talked about. The air that is left at the end. So for a mass driver to work, it needs to be close to a vacuum, otherwise you’ve got all the air in the way. Another reason the Moon is so easy. So when the payload that we can send through this ultimate roller coaster gets to the end at the top (wherever the top is), how do you manage an airlock there? It can’t be open long, otherwise the thin air will start filling the tube and be a barrier to run into, but it can’t open at the last millisecond because what if it doesn’t open fast enough (for whatever reason)? Plus, if it got through the airlock, it’s still going to run into the thin air outside, which will be like hitting a sudden brick wall at that speed.

I’ve loved the idea of mass drivers since I was a kid in the 70s dreaming of space colonies. But there are some serious problems to overcome on a 1 G planet with an atmosphere.

As far as the mechanisms of the mass driver itself and the power, I think that’s doable even for large loads. It just doesn’t work for other reasons. The opposite of a mass driver is an electromagnetic drive and we do that in limited fashion on some trains and other places. They would also be an awesome low acceleration drive for something like asteroid movement, using the slugs of mass on the body itself to change its vectors. Although that bears the Mass Effect warning about shooting without a target, it will ruin someone’s day one day.

Mass launchers on Earth would work for things that can sustain large amounts of acceleration. That rules out a lot of things we launch into space. A mass launcher that would be as gentle as a rocket launch would stretch hundreds if not thousands of kilometers and need either a gradual slope or a very wide curve to avoid the side forces. Mass drivers are too good at what they do at their full capacity, and need a lot of room to do it slower.

On the Moon, a mass driver is a no brainer and could launch people in a short run. It’s Earth’s gravity that’s the problem. It sucks.

And… the network cancels it. As usual.

I’ve switched the default search engine in Firefox to DDG finally, and I honestly haven’t noticed a difference in results. This may not be the best praise though, since Google has sucked for a number of years now.

I first read that as “Halo” (after just reading a post about Halo) and it didn’t make any sense.

“Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.”

Sometimes? I wouldn’t worry about your unease in walking out of your bank with your money, I’d worry about having your money in that bank where they apparently give money out to anyone.