I think that's only the excuse the car makers use for being lazy and not taking design risks.
Because homogeneity also extends to the interiors (which are not affected by regulations). And of course the offered colors, where we have almost full-circled back to "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".
> almost nothing is truly organic anymore, or at least you can’t tell if it is, and I suppose that’s what you’re getting at
Yes, but over time, even pre-Internet generations have learned to be skeptical of everything watched or read online. Children growing up in this environment will almost certainly adapt and learn to do the same.
So, at best, laws restricting Social Media are a nanny state overreach, and at worst dystopian Big-Brother-style narrative control.
We have witnessed a similar overreach in the distant past with printing-press regulation laws [1]. But at the time, they power structure was different so they could instate an outright ban without hiding behind "think of the children" or the Red Scare.
Culture has been rapidly regressing to a mean long before AI.
See e.g. modern cars. Until the mid 00s, you could tell different brands apart from far away. And you could perhaps also tell a few things about the owner from the color.
Or movies. The past 20+ years of high-budget film-making has been mostly rehashing franchises and remaking what has already been made.
AI is perhaps accelerating the trend and eliminating many opportunities to witness something original (e.g. a quirky amateur wedding video). But the trend had already begun.
I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose.
Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.
With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.
I think they can already sink any US ship that comes in range if they want to. And the US knows it too. But for different reasons, it's in neither's interest to go there.
Personal rule: Whatever you are asking (question or action), make it easy to spot. Place it either at the start or the end of its paragraph. Never ask >1 things in a paragraph, to make responding inline easier.
This is especially important in multi-recipient emails, where different people need to address different issues.
Governments have failed to patch much more important loopholes that directly affect them. E.g. loopholes for corporate tax avoidance. I doubt they will put any effort at all for fixing loopholes related to dodging game preservation obligations.
The best way to not have loopholes is to put some effort in not creating them in the first place, not patching them later.
> I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.
I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.
Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.
I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.
This. Having survived dozens of mediterranean village summers without A/C, I am genuinely puzzled how it came to be considered a necessity. Is it "modern" construction methods that turned buildings into heat batteries? So, it became a necessity in the cities, and then spread everywhere because we became spoiled and our collective tolerance to heat dropped?
It is heavy handed on the wrong side. How about heavy-handed regulation of the Social Media platforms? Not content regulation, but operations regulation. I'm pretty sure bots and ai-spam can be both easily flagged and banned, something that would have a positive impact for minors and adults alike. But the platforms won't do it, because these drive engagement and keep their stock value up.
Also, including the mid-teens (15-16) into the regulation may have a generational negative effect. This is the age you start to get interested in the world and how it works. Social Media is the primary medium teens use to get this information, having eclipsed traditional media (magazines, tv shows, radio shows etc.) Banning Social Media for these ages leaves a gap in newer generations maturing to adults.
But maybe that's by design? I.e. make new generations indifferent to the world around them, and also prevent them from building resistance to (home) propaganda spread through Social Media.
I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months.
It went a bit like this:
- EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies.
- Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation.
- EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them.
- Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.
> Russia would conquer Eastern Europe and reestablish Eastern Block and USSR
This is BS regurgitated by people that can't let go of the cold war, because their self-importance is tied to the era.
Anyone with half-brain can see that USSR had the various CPs as means of establishing and maintaining control over other countries. Russia does not have any equivalent apparatus. Relying on military power alone, they can't reach much further than their backyard. And Putin is smart enough to understand this (unlike Trump).
> Putin himself stated those goals
Says an article titled with "US Intelligence:", based on Russia's refusal to concede territory in a war they may not be outright winning, but they're definitely not losing.
This is grand coming from the current Greek government. It is an open secret in Greece that the ruling party has been funding and running an army of anonymous internet trolls called Omada Alithias (loose translation: Truth Strike Team) for more than 10 years.
Incidentally (?), on April 26 there was the first conviction for one their trolls, writing on X as GheorghyZhukov. The real identity of the troll was established on trial, and he was convicted for slander and defamation. So maybe the feel that they may soon lose control of the online narrative, so they hope to create a chilling effect for online criticism via banning anonymity?
Because homogeneity also extends to the interiors (which are not affected by regulations). And of course the offered colors, where we have almost full-circled back to "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".