> Especially not when you're getting older

Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.

Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.

No, its pushing her into a cash flow problem. Its not poverty; she has substantial wealth, but its all in the house.

There are mechanisms, of course, to access that wealth without moving, including ones specifically geared toward income-limited house-rich retirees.

Now, those end up creating a debt that must be resolved before transferring the house, including via estate, so living on the value of the home reduces its utility as a vehicle for generational wealth, but...unless you want to reproduce California’s system which makes it much harder for people to become homeowners while rewarding those who already have, eapecially the wealthiest, making the rich richer and what would be the comfirtable middle class anywhere else in the country poor, that’s the way it works (and your exact scenario was the major sales pitch that was used to sell the California system; its maybe understadable how people without 50 years of California’s example fell for it then, but...)

There's a reason the labs in the US frontier oligopoly are using “safety” to lobby for antitrust exemptions for mutual coordination as well as anticompetitive regulation.

Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.

But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.

Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...

The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.

This is... logically equivalent to the claim it is offered to contradict.

> A technology being flawed does not absolve its users of responsibility.

It may not absolve the users of responsibility that they actually have, but that doesn't change that the entity making and selling the technology is to blame for its flaws, not the user.

The problem is that, for most potential users to whom personal (not software dev) agents are being marketed, security & privacy for AI agents is a higher load domain to manage than the things they would want to delegate to agents to relieve load, so taking up the required security & privacy management to avoid problems using the agents creates disutility that exceeds the utility of the agent.

Which is why anyone selling them is going to distract from the issue rather than try to inform their customers.

EDIT:

Another problem is that in many cases, BECAUSE of the assumptions about how people use computers, web services, etc., the required tools DO NOT EXIST. Most account based web services DO NOT have ways to create, say, access tokens with a subset of full account permissions that you could give to an agent rather than full control of the account, because that kind of delegation to limited authority actors was never part of the usage model the vendor designed for.

No, the legal system is not; there are non-legal documents which claim both of those things, but being subject to “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” is very much how the US elgal system treats them. There is even, in federal Constitutional case law, an established, gradated system of tests (rational basis test, intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny) depending on which right is at issue and for whom it is being limited as to whether there is sufficient justification.

No, it didn't. It tried to change from state capitalism (the system the Soviet Union had, not the ideology it presented) to private capitalism but ended up veering off into kleptocratic corporatism.

A college student who is also very clearly (fron the links beyond the blog) a very active and enthusiastic AI user that thinks common (if correctly identified as less than ideal) UI trends from before vibecoding was common are indicators of “AI slop” and not just design being the done by people who aren’t very good at it (which, to be fair, includes but is not limited to AI slop) is unsurprising and nothing like doomerism.

You can disagree with the factual interpretations ans subjective interpretation in the piece without trying to tie it into a completely unrelated social phenomenon.

The period where hijackings were “common” (an exaggeration even then) ended around the time the first airline security screening requirements were adopted, about 30 years before 9/11 and (and just a little bit before I was born, and I am in my 50s.)

Airline bombings were NEVER common in the US (there are three I can find reference to, the most recent in 1962 and the others in 1933 and 1955.) They have been more of an issue internationally, but obviously US screening rules have done fuck-all about that, and they have continued.

I suspect it leads to more people not travelling at all (or much shorter distances) and net saves lives in both the relatively immediate travel sense and even moreso in the broader analysis including net carbon emissions and their effect in climate change.

(It is still a mix of corrupt corporatism and authoritarian conditioning that should be ended for that reason.)

Can’t really think of any other way to rationalize that combination.

I don’t think the people that were appalled at loose “fiscal”—more specifically targeted—policy from Congress as a substitute for loose “monetary” policy from the Fed (under the MMT model that the real constraint on “fiscal” policy are its monetary effects rather than fiscal balance) would be any happier with tight “fiscal” policy substituting for tight “monetary” policy from the Fed.

I don’t think they would be happy for the “who pays the bill” when tightening is needed to be one members of Congress have to defend to their constituents anymore than they want “where does stimulus go” to be.

They may like selective appeals to constraints to avoid discussing the specific merits of spending proposals they don’t like, and dislike losing the myth of fiscal constraints, but they still don't want to subject the distributional impact of m monetary tightening to real policy debate.

Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.

Also, Jev/laya do it in one forward pass, for multiple questions about the same state, rather than multiple passes for one question about that state. Well, for the usual multilingual configuration, two forward passes through different small models for laya, but that's because one is the router which chooses which model should do the real work, but still.