I suspect the AI is going to be more interested in your history with Delta (frequent flyer status) and the fanciness of your credit card than your zip code. Age, employment status, and race/gender/number of social connections will also likely factor in.
Great time to be in the “Influencer” business, but I wouldn’t want to be a member of a marginalized group (dark skin, poor English, scary religion/gender, etc).
the catch is that the vpn connects to the poorest areas of the country you live in
A common mistake.
You’re going to get a worse deal if the airline thinks you’re not going to be a repeat customer or part of a larger network of frequent fliers. The customers who get the best deals are the ones that airlines believe they will be able to collect money from routinely. If they have you pegged as someone who will only ever buy a ticket once or twice in their lives, they’re going to try and sell you the worst possible seat at the highest possible price.
What you can expect as a poor buyer is debt-financing, bait-and-switch, and the worst kind of economy service at the highest marginal price point. Budget airline travel is miserable and AI isn’t going to make the experience any better.
Normal people either can’t afford these devices or don’t have time for all the hassle
Had a friend who was getting by on $2k/mo and got herself a $1400 top of the line iPhone, because her carrier gave her a reduction in her monthly payment plan (for an obscene amount of debt and locked-in service on the back end). Her brother jail-broke it for her and did the normal “cleaning off all the bloatware” due-diligence.
This is just something we all put up with in the modern day. “Normal people” have a harder time navigating the bullshit, but its a lake we all have to paddle through.
Reminds me of getting a notice in Middle School, decades ago, about how a pager was considered “drug paraphernalia”
There was also a big Bloomberg-Era push by the NYPD to arrest any woman carrying condoms on her person, on the grounds that a woman carrying a condom must be a sex worker.
chinese companies are notorious for stealing IP
American companies sell the ip to China in exchange for access to capital and labor, then claim they’ve been robbed when the Chinese firms innovate and expand on the patents they’ve acquired.
The end result is a car company that produces better vehicles than anything an American or Japanese or German company can manage.
Curiously, these superior vehicles are “stolen” while the Teslas keep exploding under home grown technology.
A lot of these subsidies (both in the US and China) are implicit. Chinese state rail networks operate at cost, allowing cheap transportation of materials and labor. American borrowing is heavily subsidized through the Fed Credit Window, which keeps rates in the low single digits while corporate bonds and consumer loans can be 2x-30x as high. Both countries cut corners on environmental enforcement and subsidize waste management. Both countries subsidize education and incentive R&D through their university systems.
The real benefit BYD enjoys - even above its Chinese peers - is vertical integration. They own everything from mining interests to technology patents to dealerships. This is a deliberate consequence of Chinese trade policy, which requires foreign investors to partner with Chinese nationals in order to own and operate capital. Consequently, Berkshire Hathaway - a large early investor in BYD - cannot dictate Chinese vehicle manufacturing policy from a private office in Omaha. Chinese locals benefit from the innovation, the domestic capital, the experienced labor force (which can migrate to local competitors), and the increased economic activity it produces.
China is insourcing it’s wealth aggregation, which has a cyclical compound benefit over time.
This is important.
It’s the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. “Right to Repair” is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.
Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.
That’s the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.
This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that’s just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.
why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?
Because
and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.
You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems
It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.
Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing “dir” into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.
Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.
Be less lazy
“Damn this sucks, I’m doing the thing”
“Hey you lazy stupid fuck, go back in time and do it sooner”
Why is the Internet like this?
Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.
This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts
Israel’s Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn’t work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as “terrorists” after the fact.
It can say it can, when asked by an investor. And really, what else matters?
If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.
Nothing to do but downsize and move on.
Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.
Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they’re treating as headcount.
Nothing however breaks because of AI
The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.
What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.
I think you’ve got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).
The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.
The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren’t outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.
News isn’t being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.
I mean, this is the same guy who said we’d be living on Mars in 2025.
However you want to phrase it, they’re very different problems with different solutions.
“Someone picked the lock on my door and got into my house” is meaningfully distinct from “Someone stole my keys”.
You can keep your nasty chips
You’re off by a factory of 13x