Part hubris, part greed. They believe their own hype and either think that other people will believe it too or that they can force it on the unbelievers, thus leading to great profit.

Where is the profit? Enforced cloud accounts and storage mean users’ information is permanently held ransom, and users shall pay monthly to retain access to it.

They can also pick through users’ files and sell that information to data brokers and advertisers, if not also various government intelligence agencies.

Actually that last one is more about the continued ability to go on bleeding users dry, but it amounts to the same thing.

So what you’re saying is that I’m falling victim to a No True Scotsman fallacy.

I guess I’ll have to go away and think about that.

Are you suggesting that people who torture children aren’t subhuman scum?

Look up the paradox of intolerance. This is an instance of it.

Those who dehumanise are the true subhumans.

That just means that the lowly, customer-facing peons that work for government offices don’t have access to any such master database.

Most people work for companies that hold information inaccessible to them. Other government databases would definitely be on that list.

You mean to tell me that such a database doesn’t already exist?

Sometimes the only real options are “bad” and “less bad”. An uncomfortable echo of something else we’re all familiar with, perhaps.

This does not mean that we should not criticise the less bad option, only that we should not switch to the the bad option.

I hope being part of the British Commonwealth doesn’t exclude them.

Not being sarcastic.

The link, however tenuous, to Britain and our asinine degree of exceptionalism shouldn’t be a stumbling block, but I can see Europe - especially France - considering that to be a problem.

And then the LLM says something like “You’re absolutely right, there was an error in that code that is clear and obvious now it has been pointed out and despite the fact you gave the instruction to make no errors. Is there anything else I can help with?”

… and they’ll be too blind to take that as the warning it is and continue to ask even more of the LLM.

Literally in the blurb:

Carrying cash is too risky these days.

If you’re not getting mugged by the government, you’ll get mugged on the street instead.

Satirists make the best politicians, but most of them aren’t brave enough to try.

So I actually had to drill down into the report itself to find this out:

The organisation releasing the report has offered suggestions and policy ideas to local (if not national) governments that ought to bring down pollution and then relied on those cites to report back the success (or otherwise) of the implementation.

That alone has my sus alarm jingling. People never lie about pollution. Just ask, I don’t know, Volkswagen, maybe.

It also doesn’t report on whether that pollution - if it actually has reduced in a particular area - has simply moved outside the monitoring area. Because I bet there’s a bit of that going on too.

Yes it can. First you pump the sea full of the most obnoxious, toxic, lethal poison, then you wait for the global food web to collapse, taking humans with it.

Climate will begin to behave within a few hundred years.

Minor correction: Finland is Nordic, but not Scandinavian. It was arguably Scandinavian during the several hundred years it was occupied by Sweden, but that’s a somewhat touchy subject.

I never said it was empathy. I said it’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to it from him.

My bad. I used a double negative, which clearly confused you.

“That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist there” means “racist behaviour almost certainly still goes on there”.

I can try to break this down to words of just one sound if you like, but to do that might be too mean, and it’s hard to write like this as well.

Nominally non-racist. Back during apartheid, South Africa was definitely racist. Now apartheid is over, everyone there, regardless of race, is supposed to be equal.

That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist there, just that it’s no longer encoded into law, and indeed the opposite might be encoded, regarding hate crimes and the like.

South Africa isn’t a threat to America, no, but living in a post-apartheid, nominally non-racist country is super uncomfortable for rich, white racists. They perceive the situation as them being in danger, and this has triggered the closest thing to empathy that you’ll ever get out of DJT.

Not sure he’s been accused of killing any.