It takes work by the citizenry to keep the political class in check, regardless of the configuration. Kings don’t rule in isolation, nor do elected governments. In a lot of countries we’ve abdicated that responsibility, likewise the political class has abdicated its responsibility to its citizens.

Read any government document from almost any department and the language for citizen has become customer. Language matters, I’m not a customer, but no one cares.

Heaps of normies use either Chat, Grok or now Muse to replace their Google Search of everything.

>Find me restaurants in Queenstown

>Is it more expensive to renovate or rebuild in XYZ location

>Is so & so being narcissistic with this message copy paste

People basically outsource their thinking and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

To be fair, there was hardly any thinking in the previous method where a Google Search landed on SEO, Reddit or ads.

The rise of AI coincides with the destruction of the old Internet.

I hate the concrete/modern aesthetic, but live and let live I say and you should build your dream one day.

I read something interesting recently that some huge percentage of society, all genders, all classes etc etc hate modern architectural compared to classic architectural style. The only people that like are architects and/or architecture students. Amusing tid bit. Could also be complete junk when I drive all over Australia and see white/grey render & black trim absolutely everywhere. Yuck.

My note wasn't really on style, but more so how much human energy goes into custom cabinets in a lunch break room, when in reality an almost custom off the shelf solution that just has a bit of evenly spaced empty space on both sides is cheaper and 90% less hassle.

I'm currently working on metal hallways portals that are 10' tall, except the material is only 8', and the seams are ugly, so several people are designing solutions on how to split the span up And what kind of reveal to do so the edge/seam is nice. Why? Why does this hallway need a metal cap at the end of it?

I had trouble reading it because they kept drawing my eyes to them, so I stopped.

It was inconceivable to crypto bro’s that kidnapping people for their keys was a possibility…

If banks make it a requirement you use certain pre approved devices, you better believe badusb/physical theft will take place more commonly and it will definitely not be someone as polite as James.

Any sane country has a sticker/menu price that is the price you pay when you settle up.

The first scenario is done on account & settled later, an established customer/supplier relationship would easily handle a power outage.

Sticking with farmers as I'm in a rural area, still to this day large exchanges of labour and produce take place with neither physical cash nor e-cash forms, maybe at most a ledger note or IOU marker - in the great wash and flow of the seasons emergency mechanical work at harvest time can be repaid with a sheep some months later.

That's the trust of established relations.

Yeah, I think a lot of people regular people when dealing other regular people they trust, the principle of it comes out in the wash somewhere applies a lot.

That's a fair point to make that for 90% of us we get cash from a machine that requires electricity.

It's not a fair characterisation that cash is useless without electricity because once you have it(presumably before the electricity stops) then you can still transact with it.

The rules for laundering - know your customer - are ridiculous, governments don't need to turn banks in quasi-state actors to squash laundering if they really wanted to stop it.

Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.

That stuff can be not very good at doing what is intended. If I want to make a legit regulated transfer they now ask where the money came from and a lot was inherited forty years ago for which the records generally don't exist anymore. Meanwhile the actual criminals still manage to circumvent the system. It mostly creates hassle and expense for the law abiding.

I actually invested in a kyc business after being a bit horrified by the scam compounds in Cambodia but was disappointed when I heard a presentation of their successes which were mostly fines for legit people filling the forms wrong. Meanwhile the scam compounds got closed by raiding them and imprisoning or executing the criminals. I think the latter works much better than the former.

I sold a property earlier in August, my solicitor had to “verify my identity” this time even though she acted as my solicitor when purchasing said product.

Now tell me how intelligent the system is in that scenario.

I don’t know about a III but Flash was good in the early/mid 2000’s while I was attending university.

Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.

I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.