Anyone using any technology can miss something and end up in the same spot. I think the real takeaway is that there is way too much consolidation of our technology.

If you’re talking world wide you could give everyone on earth that is currently in poverty about $1200. That’s enough to help a great deal in poor countries, but it would be very temporary. If you’re talking just the USA, you’d be giving everyone in poverty $30k. That would certainly keep people out of poverty for a while. But under capitalism where people have to work many would be back in poverty in a year. Cash infusion would only work if it was permanent like a UBI.

Even if you spent that money to build free housing all over the country, it wouldn’t be enough to end poverty, though that would probably be the best use of the money. Just flood the market with housing availability and living gets way cheaper.

I’m fairly techy have a technical job that involves programming, data, and implementation. And I’m still on Microsoft and stock Android. It’s really not that complicated for some of us. I’m not on my phone or home computer that much, I have a mile long “to do” list. I’d love to switch over, but it’s a super low priority. Even if it would only be a few hours, that’s a few hours I could be doing anything else.

There are 5 classified levels of automation. At the lower levels of automation, the very article you are responding to quotes this evidence for you. Here is another article that gets deeper into it, I haven’t read it all so feel free to draw your own conclusions, but this data has been available and well reported on for many years. https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/autonomous-vehicle-safety-statistics.html

They only have to work better and more consistently than humans to be a net positive. Which I believe most of these systems already do by a wide margin. Psychologically it’s harder to accept a mistake from technology than it is from a human because the lack of control, but if the goal is to save lives, these safety systems accomplish that.

I’ll never buy a Samsung again absolutely irritating phones. I’ve had 2 nearly flawless pixel phones. Even if this doesn’t last 5 years, I’m not going back to endless bloatware programs that enshitify the Samsung. If I leave pixel it would be for something like fairphone.

I got mine around release, which means it’s 3 years 2 months, no issues so far.

It’s these bad faith arguments that caused the thread to turn against you. Gender isn’t a cat, and it certainly isn’t anything at all. You claim you wanted earnest conversation, but you undermined that with snide comments you knew would result in negative reaction.

I’d rather pay for security updates than invite more AI and Microsoft sponsored spyware onto my computer…

Adobe Scan works as good as a scanner if you use their cropping system to square up the page afterwards.

You’re worried about kids seeing a nipple while they watch a streamer turn their enemy into a bloody mess. If we can accept kids seeing constant violence in their media, I really don’t think nudity is a big deal. We have our priorities all messed up.

My parents were both vaccine skeptics. Covid, and all of public consciousness and education about vaccines, convinced them both that vaccines are important. They got the shot and every booster available. Contrary to the common stereotype of vaccine skeptics, they are both highly educated successful people and when presented with solid evidence that their beliefs were moronic, they changed their thinking. It’s not helpful to be so cynical, because people do change. I see people change their minds about things all of the time. Sometimes for the better and sometimes worse. As long as we remain cynical and unmotivated, the morons win.

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