ChunkMcHorkle

Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter – the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc – and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you’re not familiar with Huey Long: he’s been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn’t changed a bit.

It’s exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there’s a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there’s also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.

“But,” you may ask, and rightly so, “why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?” and the answer to that is, “Yes.”

One of the sure signs you’re in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.

I already assume that everything that goes into a cloud somewhere WILL be used for other purposes, at the very least as AI training material, and this will be no different. And the plan is for at least some (possibly all?) video to automatically be extracted to some kind of cloud storage, no matter how temporarily. From the article:

The AirPods will have a “small” LED light to indicate when “visual data is being fed into the cloud.”

That’s a hell of a non-answer to all the privacy concerns Apple already knows the public has. Since this entire article is itself just a manufacturer-friendly puff piece for pre-release promotion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Apple is willfully holding back the specifics on all of that.

And again with the fucking notification light, like that’s the solution to all privacy concerns. On AirPods a light can’t possibly be more than a pinhole itself, just because of the size of the device, so that’ll be even worse than Meta’s joke of a notification light.

The first unmistakeable clue was that it was a man doing this to a woman. The BBC article that saimen@feddit.org posted in this thread removes all doubt as to the purpose (emphasis mine):

Alice was walking into a London shopping centre when she was approached by a man wearing smart glasses. She says she had no idea she was being filmed.

“In the moment I just thought ‘OK this guy is just trying to talk to me, to chat me up’,” she said.

“I was hoping that he would leave me alone eventually but he did actually follow me.”

The video was posted on social media and viewed about 40,000 times, though Alice only found out about it after a friend sent it to her.

“My initial reaction was complete shock,” she said. “He had no phone, he did not have a camera directly in my face.”

The videos are often posted on social media under the guise of giving dating advice to other men online.

That last line . . . think about what’s going on in that area of the internet, use your imagination, fill in the missing blanks.

That said, I appreciate that your character is such to have not instantly jumped to this conclusion. But in the world we now occupy, there’s generally not a whole lot of innocence in a dude filming a woman without her knowledge or consent.

Since the orange chancre is obviously Putin’s puppet, with massive evidence already in the open to the point that we even know his KGB codename and this departing ambassador has cited that specifically as her reason for leaving, it seems clear why the US has not just quit NATO no matter how many times Trump has said he was wanted to quit NATO or was even planning to quit NATO.

The bottom line is that if the US leaves NATO, the US loses its ability to keep Ukraine out. This is extremely important to Putin, and has been all along, to the point of Putin demanding “legal guarantees” that Ukraine would never join NATO.

So instead of leaving NATO outright, Putin’s stooge in the White House is doing everything he can to destabilize and weaken NATO – and keep Ukraine forced out – without ever actually giving up his own ability to manipulate it on Putin’s ongoing behalf.

Just a reminder that between his Ivy League connections, his Reagan/Bush services, and Chief Justice Rehnquist’s untimely demise, Mr. Non-Political-Actor here went from mere well-placed attorney to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in less than five years, mostly by way of his work on Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Not a political actor, lol.