Yeah I have a habit of doing this and then testing the link to find the smallest possible version. Mostly because I find it annoying when I want to text a link to someone and it takes up an entire page of the chat.

I don’t understand the bottled water thing either but I think the rise of things like delivery services and subscriptions can be linked to increasing workloads and decreasing community assistance.

If every member of your household is also working a full time job your time becomes significantly more valuable.

This isn’t a new thing but I hate anytime it asks me a question. I’ll be driving through an accident scene trying to work out where the cop directing traffic wants me to go and if I’ll need to go a different way because the turn I was gonna make is blocked off and at that precise moment google maps decides it’s a great idea to cover the bottom half of the screen with a “is tHeRe sTiLl An aCcIdEnT hErE?”

If it’s illegal to use your phone while driving it should be illegal for navigation apps to suddenly require interaction in the middle of navigating.

Yeah I’ve definitely been noticing this one a lot more recently. It won’t even give me an option anymore, just switch to another route even when the turn is less than a minute away. Sometimes if I’m driving through a town it will switch multiple times in a few minutes which is infuriating

So does B make this basically a non-starter? Seems like you’re never going to get someone to cooperate with this (not that I blame them).

I feel like people are missing one of the more heinous aspects of this, which is that it injured thousands of people and only managed to kill ~10 of their targets. The outcome of this attack is going to be general terror and potentially hundreds of life altering injuries but very little military advantage.

Is there evidence that this is true? Ive read that the US is actually not more litigious than some European nations and the idea that it is has been boosted by corporations that want to shift public opinion against plaintiffs (an example being the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit)

I’m not qualified to say if this is accurate but thanks for putting in the effort to write it!

Growing up my mom didn’t understand this and always insisted that the sink plungers were the only kind that worked (she also called them toilet plungers) and that toilet plungers (the fancy kind) were some kind of trick. Took until I was in college that I learned you shouldn’t have to break a sweat unclogging your toilet.

In my experience most Starbucks workers will just let you say small/medium/large without questioning it.

That’s another good example. The Trump/Putin kissing mural is a great example of something that ends up being homophobic rather than partisan.

So you think it should be illegal?

If you used it to slander your neighbor, it would not be legal.

You’re entirely ignoring my point, I’m not trying to pass the video off as real therefore it’s not slander.

You keep referring to this as revenge porn which to me is a case where someone spreads nudes around as a way to punish their current or former partner. You could use AI to generate material to use as revenge porn, but I bet most AI nudes are not that.

Think about a political comic showing a pro-corporate politician performing a sex act with Jeff bezos. Clearly that would be protected speech. If you generate the same image with generative AI though then suddenly it’s illegal even if you clearly label it as being a parody. That’s the concern. Moreover, the slander/libel angle doesn’t make sense if you include a warning that the image is generated, as you are not making a false statement.

To sum up why I think this bill is kinda weird and likely to be ineffective, it’s perfectly legal for me to generate and distribute a fake ai video of my neighbor shooting a puppy as long as I don’t present it as a real video. If I generate the same video but my neighbor’s dick is hanging out, straight to jail. It’s not consistent.

That’s arguably a better rule than the more traditional flat-fee penalties, as it curbs the impulse to treat violations as cost-of-business. A firm that makes $1B/year isn’t going to blink at a handful of $1000 judgements.

No argument there but it reinforces my point that this law is written for Taylor swift and not a random high schooler.

You’d be liable for producing an animated short staring “Definitely Not Mickey Mouse” under the same reasoning.

Except that there are fair use exceptions specifically to prevent copyright law from running afoul of the first amendment. You can see the parody exception used in many episodes of south park for example and even specifically used to depict Mickey Mouse. Either this bill allows for those types of uses in which case it’s toothless anyway or it’s much more restrictive to speech than existing copyright law.

Not convinced on this one

It seems like the bill is being pitched as protecting women who have fake nudes passed around their school but the text of the bill seems more aimed at the Taylor swift case.

1 The bill only applies where there is an “intent to distribute”

2 The bill talks about damages being calculated based on the profit of the defendant

The bill also states that you can’t label the image as AI generated or rely on the context of publication to avoid running afoul of this law. That seems at odds with the 1st amendment.

Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.

Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.

Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.

Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.

Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.

Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.

I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.

I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.

Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.

He has been a terrible candidate though. If the polling is accurate and trump has a slight lead in popular vote, Biden has less than a 5% chance of winning the election (according to Nate Silver’s models). Unfortunately, this is probably optimistic as polling has overestimated the democratic vote in the last 2 presidential elections including the one that included these same two candidates.