jrs100000

Sales taxes, including VAT, are inherently regressive. Normally things like unprocessed food are exempted to minimize impact, but it does still affect the poor more than the rich. Why keep them? They are easy to collect, hard to avoid and can bring in lots of revenue without people noticing or complaining.

Waltzes are the worst.

Im going to guess its a proportional cost issue. Drivers take up a much larger percentage of the cost of shipping a ton of cargo by truck that the cost a human engineer on a train.

That was reposts as well. Its not like anyone was wasting their life making fresh Facebook grade memes for that that cesspit.

The problem is I dont think many of the accounts really care if their total account activity appears organic. They are mostly there to create volume, sometimes to puff up activity metrics, to amplify specific points and narratives, or simply to shut down conversation if it strays into the wrong topic. They know Reddit doesnt actually want to stop them, and the individual accounts rarely say anything interesting enough to justify human users taking the time to evaluate their post history.

This!

It makes sense that a vote based platform, where users encounter direct positive and negative reinforcement with every interaction, would tend to developing repetitive conversation patterns over time, even if it were populated entirely with humans.

I would bet the actual number of active bot accounts is probably lower than many people think. Maybe 20-30%. Those accounts are more active than humans though, maybe accounting for half of all the posts. Many of these bots arnt even proper LLMs, they are just scripts recycling generic comments, catch phrases and old memes and upvoting each other endlessly.

Cause the FBI are the keystone cops of the intelligence world. Theres a reason they spun off a whole new agency rather than just give the FBI unlimited resources for the war on terror.

Also the government is not all one monolithic entity. Just because the NSA has a backdoor doesnt mean theyll hand that information out to anyone who asks. Maybe if the CIA fills out a ton of paperwork, but if its the FBI theyll laugh in their faces and tell them the data doesnt exist.

Ok, so if the only change is that RF radiation is not emitted…I guess blackbody radiation breaks, Earth becomes uninhabitable and everyone dies. Not sure exactly how long it would take, maybe weeks or months? Maybe years?

Radio waves are a pretty big part of the EM spectrum. Do you mean like sudden intense jamming from outer space, or like physics just stops suddenly?

If its the former, its going to depend on what parts of the spectrum are being jammed, but most modern militaries are actually pretty prepared for radio jamming and have alternate systems for most critical applications. The scenario is fairly similar to the EMP saturated environment expected in a nuclear war. The military has spent a lot of time and money preparing to moderate the worst of those effects. Civilian systems would not handle things very well at all. Expect lots of catastrophic cascading failures and instances of permanent damage.

If its the later, all bets are off any time physics breaks.

Edit: thinking about it a little more, I think the biggest risk would be that a nuclear submarine might in interpret sudden intense jamming as evidence that a nuclear war had in fact occurred and decide to fire its missiles when it was unable to contact anyone on any frequency.

Oh good, theyll be right over as soon as the pot is boiling and the butter is melted.

I know everyone thinks they are middle class, but If your parents are giving you a trust fund you are probably pretty solidly in the upper class, not middle.

The only real benefit I can see would be to have the ability to suddenly crash the market on demand. This might be an interesting way to temporarily disrupt states trying to evade sanctions with crypto, but probably not a great investment on the $ to impact scale.

Shits always been like this. Well, maybe not exactly like this, but this level of fucked or worse. There was just a brief blip after WWII when things were relatively stable, and now that its ending things feel a little out of control.

Are they? Im sure they must be on an industrial scale. But if you are feeding them kitchen scraps…youve got to have a giant tank, it sounds like some sort of mill to grind them up? That means youll need to dry them out, which is either time and space consuming or it means more equipment. Is there some sort of sterilizing involved so you catch some sort of weird cricket fungus or something?

Meanwhile, if you get the right breeds, chickens will mostly manage themselves and can at least partly make up for a less efficient metabolism by foraging independently. Also your house doesnt end up infested with crickets and you dont have to change any recipes.

You could just raise chickens at the point.

This applies to the US and western Europe. There are places in the world where hitmen can be hired by normal people, but they are closer to homeless drug addicts than the sort of professional you are probably envisioning.