Well… the first colleges were established to train clergy, because reading and writing were rare skills at the time, and there was a demand for trained clergy who worked as clerks, accountants and record keepers for nobles who could not themselves read or write, which I think just circles back to the workforce productivity thing.

This is also true for Confucian schools in China. The students were not clergy in the religious sense, but they learned reading, writing and tradition in order to become useful administrators for local rulers.

Hmm, depending on whose opinion you listen to, education systems have always been built around workforce productivity:

RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms

“… the current system was structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution
[…]
it was driven by an economic imperative of the time
[…]
we have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism, and in the image of it.”

Striking is a revolutionary act and it should be normalized

An action (any action) cannot be normal and revolutionary. These are antitheses.

I am… actually not clear on whether you are referring to my comment, or the comment I was responding to.

If you were referring to me, I want to say that I’m not looking down on the potential good, I am criticizing the framing of unionizing as revolutionary. I think talking about it this way is a mistake, the kind that is made by people who want politics to be exciting, who find discussions of good policy to be boring. This kind of framing supports the narrative of the owner class who try to imply that striking workers are unreasonable violent malcontents.

Good policy should be boring. Unionization should be as mundane as arranging direct deposit for your paycheck when you start a job. It should be just another form that you fill out for HR. It should be normal. Employers should expect that their employees will participate in collective bargaining, and should be treated as unreasonable nutjobs if they speak (or take action) against it.

This probably seems like it makes sense when you’re a teenager, but most people with children want a stable society and a reliable income.

Considering that they hired Wine devs and basically said “keep doing what you’re already doing” to build Proton… yes.

If I give you my page and tell you to enter your credit card details in, why would you do it?

Because I’m paying for something?

Why do people need to tell everything to the agreeing website?

I don’t know, it’s probably circumstantial.

Probably a lot of the data being shared is from chats, but not necessarily all of it. We know that OpenAI scrapes the Internet at large for training data, which would include data sets of publicly leaked PII (such as the OPM breach). It’s entirely possible that the data OpenAI is sharing about users was not given to them voluntarily by those users, but has simply been aggregated, analyzed and correlated by their AI tools.

If that’s how they learn not to share intimate and personal data with the billionaires, then that’s how they learn.

Let’s not engage in blaming the victims.

There’s no reason to treat the behavior of these corporations as if it were normal and inevitable, like they were a force of nature or something. Put all the blame where it belongs, on the people running these companies.

I don’t like this take, because labor unionization should be seen as a completely normal activity for workers and not a form of revolution.

Hmm…

1. Discourages voting
2. Username is “GuyFawkesV”

Are you 13?

I mean, OK… Until every bank, government service, health care provider, etc implements this.

And? you realize that all the toy licensing was about making money and nothing else right?

Just because there are children’s toys for an IP does not mean that the IP is intended for children. That Venn diagram is not a circle.

Nope, not upscaled, there’s a fairly close-up shot when Luke goes back to the farmstead. It’s pretty quick, though I’ve always thought quite graphic - the skeletons aren’t just burnt black, there’s very clearly charred but bloody red flesh still on them. If anything this is a low-resolution still compared to watching it on Blu-ray.

I don’t think the original Star Wars is a children’s movie, but I do think the the series became a lot more kid-friendly over time, probably both consciously and unconsciously on George’s part.

It could be really useful for various social or psychological research

The only application I can see for such research would be to extend and refine the distopian use cases. What else would such research be used for? It will only feed back into the cycle of privacy invasion and the surveillance state.

… or monitoring patient status.

Impersonal patient status monitoring (beyond vital statistics like heartbeat monitoring which we can already accomplish much more easily) will not have any practical benefit. The most likely outcome is that it will be used to justify reduced nurse staffing.

I can’t think of any beneficial uses for such a product.

But as soon as money/gifts/favors are introduced, it’s automatically an uneven playing field.

Even if you discount or prevent direct bribes/corruption, there is still an imbalance when a particular group (e.g. the petroleum industry) can afford to employ people as full-time lobbyists, who spend their time and attention on nothing else. It’s much harder to write effective regulation against that, or enforce it.

The only useful response is to organize advocacy groups that can also afford to support full-time lobbyists (the ACLU, EFF, etc).

Yes.

Alternatively, donate to and/or volunteer for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontiers Foundation (or equivalent groups in your country) which are already organized and employ lobbyists.

[…] or consult experts in the field before they enact legislation.

This is technically the justification for lobbying.

Tell me the kids still t-bag each other.