No most Americans do end up supporting their parents. On the other hand, I think most Americans would agree that their parents don’t deserve financial support merely for being their parents. You support your family because you like them and not because it’s a requirement.

Also, I think a lot of younger people begrudge their parents for not handling their own financials better, especially as the younger generations see how much harder some things are than they used to be.

For example, my in-laws collectively make over 6 figures and inherited a house decades ago that’s worth almost a million dollars due to housing inflation. They absolutely could have a reasonable retirement plan, but they don’t. They spend money as fast as they get it and won’t be passing their house down like their parents did because they have multiple large loans against the house. They use this money to go on vacations every other month and own more vehicles than they really need. They also mentioned to me recently that they would like it if we could try to buy a house with extra rooms for when they get old and need to be taken care of.

I’m not going to let my wife’s parents be homeless when they inevitably can’t work, but I do find it somewhat infuriating that their lack of planning is going to cost me potentially a huge amount of money.

Last, just to add more confusion to this, there are a number of US states which have familial responsibility laws. These laws mean that you can be found legally liable for certain debts accumulated by your parents. This is the exception rather than the norm but it does demonstrate that Americans aren’t actually as independent as they would have you believe.

Is there evidence that this is true? Ive read that the US is actually not more litigious than some European nations and the idea that it is has been boosted by corporations that want to shift public opinion against plaintiffs (an example being the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit)

I’m not qualified to say if this is accurate but thanks for putting in the effort to write it!

Growing up my mom didn’t understand this and always insisted that the sink plungers were the only kind that worked (she also called them toilet plungers) and that toilet plungers (the fancy kind) were some kind of trick. Took until I was in college that I learned you shouldn’t have to break a sweat unclogging your toilet.

I think we also need levels of PII or something, maybe a completely different framework.

There’s this pattern I see at work where you want to have a user identifiable by some key, so you generate that key when an account is created and then you can pass that around instead of someone’s actual name or anything. The problem though, is that as soon as you link that value to user details anywhere in your system that value itself becomes PII because it could be used to correlate more relevant PII in other parts of your system. This viral property it has creates a situation where a stupid percentage of your data must be considered PII because the only way it isn’t is if it can be shown that there is no way to link the data to anybody’s personal information across every data store in the company.

So why is this a problem? Because if all data is sensitive none of it is. It creates situations where the production systems are so locked down that the only way for engineers to do basic operations is to bend the rules, and inevitably they will.

Anyway, I don’t know what the solution is but I expect data leaks will continue to be common passed the point when the situation is obviously unsustainable

In my experience most Starbucks workers will just let you say small/medium/large without questioning it.

Maybe, but nobody cares when you call them facists so I’m not sure what the best move is.

I do actually think the weirdness argument does probably play to the suburban traditional values types who want to believe they’re the normal ones and everyone else is going crazy.

I think at least some of it is because republicans already call democrats corrupt and criminal. When the dems come back and make the same accusations it just looks like bickering. Ideally the substance of such claims would matter but current political discourse in the US prioritizes sound bites and quips

That’s another good example. The Trump/Putin kissing mural is a great example of something that ends up being homophobic rather than partisan.

So you think it should be illegal?

If you used it to slander your neighbor, it would not be legal.

You’re entirely ignoring my point, I’m not trying to pass the video off as real therefore it’s not slander.

You keep referring to this as revenge porn which to me is a case where someone spreads nudes around as a way to punish their current or former partner. You could use AI to generate material to use as revenge porn, but I bet most AI nudes are not that.

Think about a political comic showing a pro-corporate politician performing a sex act with Jeff bezos. Clearly that would be protected speech. If you generate the same image with generative AI though then suddenly it’s illegal even if you clearly label it as being a parody. That’s the concern. Moreover, the slander/libel angle doesn’t make sense if you include a warning that the image is generated, as you are not making a false statement.

To sum up why I think this bill is kinda weird and likely to be ineffective, it’s perfectly legal for me to generate and distribute a fake ai video of my neighbor shooting a puppy as long as I don’t present it as a real video. If I generate the same video but my neighbor’s dick is hanging out, straight to jail. It’s not consistent.

Do you know what enthusiasm means? The article you linked has a number of examples of what data might lead someone to believe in the increased enthusiasm. Did you read it?

That’s arguably a better rule than the more traditional flat-fee penalties, as it curbs the impulse to treat violations as cost-of-business. A firm that makes $1B/year isn’t going to blink at a handful of $1000 judgements.

No argument there but it reinforces my point that this law is written for Taylor swift and not a random high schooler.

You’d be liable for producing an animated short staring “Definitely Not Mickey Mouse” under the same reasoning.

Except that there are fair use exceptions specifically to prevent copyright law from running afoul of the first amendment. You can see the parody exception used in many episodes of south park for example and even specifically used to depict Mickey Mouse. Either this bill allows for those types of uses in which case it’s toothless anyway or it’s much more restrictive to speech than existing copyright law.

Not convinced on this one

It seems like the bill is being pitched as protecting women who have fake nudes passed around their school but the text of the bill seems more aimed at the Taylor swift case.

1 The bill only applies where there is an “intent to distribute”

2 The bill talks about damages being calculated based on the profit of the defendant

The bill also states that you can’t label the image as AI generated or rely on the context of publication to avoid running afoul of this law. That seems at odds with the 1st amendment.

Feels like you could go after it from a campaign finance angle, not that those laws are particularly restrictive as it stands.

I guess this mostly means figuring out how to do it with the minimum amount of chaos, but the clock is ticking and I’m not sure what he can really do beyond deciding on an endorsement and writing a speech.

I mean nobody really wants Kamala but it sounds like that may be the best path. It’s one thing to have the president step down for health reasons, but it’s another to unilaterally replace the candidate after the primary as a response to bad polling.

If the second case happens you’ll see a bunch of pushback from democrats who don’t like the pick, donors who backed Biden, and virtually every Republican trying to portray the democrats in a negative light. That’s just the PR angle ignoring that there will also be legal questions around using Bidens donation money and getting a different candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.

This is just a soft rent control which isn’t going to increase the supply of housing.

We don’t need this, we need to tax the fuck out of secondary residences and short term rentals.

Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.

Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.

Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.