Your selective quoting is extremely misleading. The first section about publishing a name/photograph only applies in the context of "for purposes of advertising products, events, political activities, merchandise, goods, or services or for purposes of fundraising, solicitation of donations, purchases of products, merchandise, goods, or services or to influence elections or referenda." i.e. it's illegal to pretend someone is endorsing something they are not.
Sorry, the example I had in mind was a politician and I don't know why I forgot to add that to the comment, else I'd edit it in.
The point is that "to influence elections or referenda" is incredibly vague! Almost any reporting on a person involved in the election, or even related to it (reporting on someone who's group looking bad helps a party) can be construed as "influencing an election"
But the second paragraph doesn't have any of those specifics. It's just any algorithm (an actual ban on forbidden math), software, tool, technology, service, or device.
...when the primary purpose of that algorithm, software, tool, technology, service, or device is to produce an individual’s photograph, voice, or likeness
i) without the individual’s prior consent [...]
ii) with intent to cause harm [...]
you need to read it together with the two sub-clauses, which make it much more selective (and a lot more reasonable!)
Why this fixation among conservatives on the out-of-state plates? Desire to pin unrest on "outside agitators" a la Ghorman? [1] In fact the woman lived in Minneapolis, if that matters to you for some reason. [2]
At the university level, this is patently false. Professors have wide latitude to pick the texts for their classes except in lower division classes that might be taught by a TA.
This is more nuanced than “controlled by the administration or not”.
Universities that have accreditation (typically regional accreditation for nonprofit and private research universities) have to meet certain standards for certain curriculum design. Within those requirements there is wide latitude.
That doesn't seem more nuanced between controlled by administrators or not.. An accreditation may have a minimum number of hours for Greek Classics and could expect the topic of Classical Greek Cultural norms to be compared/contrasted with modernity or it may not be mandatory to cover. That's a bit short of an accreditation telling an administration to ensure the topic is never covered or to police every unlisted topic a professor may cover.
> At no point in human history have humans not worked
This is a non sequitur. The discussion is about the point of life. At no point in history have humans not pooped, but I would imagine that few consider pooping the point of life.
> Carefully consider the lifestyle of someone living several decades ago. Would you honestly want to live such a lifestyle yourself?
Sure, I lived it, and it was very pleasant at the time and in many ways better than now in retrospect. e.g. always-on access to infinite content engines like YouTube, TikTok, X, Facebook, etc. is probably a net negative, both for individuals and society. I wouldn't want to go back a century or more and give up air conditioning, dishwashers, washing machines, air travel, electric lights. But a few decades, sure, in a heartbeat.
I agree, 30 years ago a working man doing 40 hours a week in a factory could still support a family on one income and expect to own a house. We hit a peak 30-40 years ago.
I hear this often, but I think this discounts the fact that this was mostly true for the US/Western Europe at a time where they enjoyed unilateral super-powerism as a result of winning WWII. I'm not sure that kind of prosperity is normal (though I hope it could be).
I'm worried the harsh reality for most humans is that life is often not that easy. And if it is, it won't be for long
But there is still enough wealth for all of those houses to exist. That tells me the world is wealthy enough, but it is in the hands of different people
> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.
This is not true as a generality. e.g. soap operas had long-running stories long before DVRs. Many prime-time dramas and comedies had major event episodes that changed things dramatically (character deaths, weddings, break-ups, etc.), e.g. the whole "Who shot J.R." event on *Dallas*. Almost all shows that I watched as a kid in the 80s had gradual shifts in character relationships over time (e.g. the on-again/off-again relationship between Sam and Diane on Cheers). Child actors on long-running shows would grow up and the situations on the show changed to account for that as they move from grade school, to high school, to college or jobs.
Parent comment was (I think), specifically talking about sitcoms from what I understood.
Sitcoms are - and I know this is a little condescending to point out - comedies contrived to exist in a particular situation: situation comedy → sitcom.
In the old day, the "situation" needed to be relatively relatable and static to allow drop-in viewers channel surfing, or the casual viewer the parent described.
Soap operas and other long-running drama series are built differently: they are meant to have long story arcs that keep people engaged in content over many weeks, months or years. There are throwbacks to old storylines, there are twists and turns to keep you watching, and if you miss an episode you get lost, so you don't ever miss an episode - or the soap adverts within them, their reason for being for which they are named - in case you are now behind with everything.
You'll find sports networks try to build the story arc around games too - create a sense of "missing out" if you don't watch the big game live.
I think the general point is that in the stream subscription era, everything has become like this "don't miss out" form, by doubling down on the need to see everything from the beginning and become a completist.
You can't easily have a comedy show like Cheers or Married... With Children, in 2026, because there's nothing to keep you in the "next episode" loop in the structure, so you end up with comedies with long-running arcs like Schitt's Creek.
The last set of sitcoms that were immune to this were probably of the Brooklyn 99, Cougartown and Modern Family era - there were in-jokes for the devotees, but you could pick up an episode easily mid-series and just dive in and not be totally lost.
Interesting exception: Tim Allen has managed to get recommissioned with an old style format a couple of times, but he's had to make sure he's skewing to an older audience (read: it's a story of Republican guys who love hunting), for any of it to make sense to TV execs.
Soap operas use entirely different tactic - every information is repeated again and again and again. They are meant to be half watched by people who work while watching them. So you need to be able to miss half the episode and still caught up comfortably.
That is why slow graduate changes.
Neither of these could afford serious multi episodes long arc with nuance played out the way current series can have.
The Polish "paradocumentary" format is like this, but taken to an extreme. Such shows are mostly dialog interleaved with a narrator describing exactly what just happened. There's also a detailed recap of everything that happened in the episode so far after every ad break, of which there are many.
It's basically daytime TV, to be watched at work, often as background, and without looking at the actual screen very often.
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.
Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.
I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).
I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."
I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
Yes, absolutely. How else would you define it? The whole point of happiness is that is a subjective, internal state. If you just want to know if people live in a cold, dark climate you don't need to ask them.
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