stormeuh

The Académie Française is absolutely not a "committee of linguists". They're a bunch of rich conservatives who are way too high on nationalism, and they are infamous for going against the consensus of linguists (who they supposedly consult).

I agree with your overall message, public water in public water can absolutely taste like drinking from a pool.

However, small correction and a fun fact: the chemical you taste is actually chlorine, not fluoride. I actually have no clue what fluoridated water tastes like (if it has a taste at all), because in the EU most countries don't fluoridate their water.

A small intake of fluoride is good for you by the way, it helps reduce tooth cavities. The amount you need is small enough though that you should get enough from toothpaste.

It makes sense for everybody, except for those with a financial interest in selling and/or haggling over software licenses. That's not only the companies producing the actual software, but also legal firms and similar "specialists" who siphon off money from this system of complex IP law.

IMO the only way to transition to more software being open sourced, is to deconstruct these vested intrests with regulation. We need to fundamentally restructure the way software development is funded, and transition away from a model where ownership is the only thing that's profitable.

Doing that is delicate though, because as backlash from those vested interests, a lot of workers will likely lose their jobs. You need to make sure those people easily find new jobs working on open source, and communicate that effectively, so workers' job insecurity is as low as possible during the transition.

In the case of cars with infernal combustion engines, it's even worse. Even for very efficient road car engines, more than 50% of the energy in the fuel is expelled as waste heat, through either the exhaust or cooling system. Of that smaller than 50% fraction, indeed most of the energy is spent overcoming aerodynamic drag of the car body, and friction from the tires.

Sidenote: F1 made headlines a while back they had achieved >50% thermal efficiency, with an incredibly complicated hybrid system that recovered excess exhaust energy from the turbo.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-human-on-a-bicycle-is-among-the-most-efficient-forms-of-travel-in-the/

It gets better: a human on a bike is the most efficient mode of locomotion there is in terms of mass moved per unit of energy invested.

That, but also the current concentration of wealth is an immense problem. These things are incredibly interconnected of course.

My point is that even if power didn't corrupt, everybody still has a price, and with wealth this concentrated, there will be someone who is able to pay it. Furthermore, even if there are measures against corruption, or someone is uncorruptible, etc. there will be a way around that if you throw enough resources at it to find it. Whether it's influencing public opinion through the media, spending decades changing the law incrementally, or just litigating everyone into oblivion, these people have the resources to be 10 steps ahead of activists and completely above-board.

He also liked to run around and primordially scream on stage for over a minute

Miller is a purebred fascist, who delights in abusing rhetoric to advance his goals. He'll happily engage in projection like this, with a big grin on his face, because he knows the rhetorical fight is rigged in his favor. His opponents have to care about the truth, and he doesn't.

It's definitely this, but also shock and awe. Release everything all at once, but also not really everything, so there's a shitstorm of reporting with outlandish stories and ongoing criminality. The end goal of that is to traumatise the public into thinking nothing can be done, because everyone is both overwhelmed by the firehose of information.

The best way I have found to make sense of why some people are so enthousiastic to shill for AI, is to see AI as yet another product that preys upon people's insecurities. In this case it's maybe the worst insecurity of all: feeling like you're less intelligent than other people.

Taking that insecurity as the through-line, this kind of shilling makes perfect sense IMO. It's essentially a form of self soothing, saying "everyone is or will be using this, it's not just me!".

So Germany but the trains run on time.