> if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally.
Clearly anyone slightly sophisticated can bypass restrictions like this. A quick search reveals https://github.com/shadowsocks. This only harms regular users who might benefit from privacy. The dystopia levels continue to rise...
Ah your comment finally makes me understand the premise of MMT[1], which seems to presuppose that the US will always have this special status. Makes the current administration's geopolitical recklessness even more terrifying.
Taxes, if not quite the price of civilisation, do give citizens a reason to care about efficient and effective government. Severing that connection, and leaving large chunks of the electorate as mere recipients of state largesse, risks deepening America’s political dysfunction.
We can't have nice things without paying for them. People who believe they are self-sufficient seem to ignore all the public infrastructure that keeps society and the economy moving (e.g. roads, emergency response/firefighters, schools, parks, libraries, etc).
Imagine how much more entrepreneurial people could be if taking big big financial risks didn't have dire consequences like not having access to health care.
No one loves paying taxes, especially when you don't agree with ways it's spent, but that means we need to fix politics and spend money better rather than denying that society needs financial contributions from almost everybody to function.
> if run at full strength for a year, Colossus [xAI's new datacenter] would use as much electricity as 200,000 American homes. When fully operational [...] this facility and two other xAI data centers nearby will require nearly two gigawatts of power. Annually, those facilities could consume roughly twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle.
> Even conservative analyses forecast that the tech industry will drop the equivalent of roughly 40 Seattles onto America’s grid within a decade; aggressive scenarios predict more than 60 in half that time.
> [...] by 2030, U.S. data centers will consume more electricity than all of the [USA]’s heavy industries [...] put together.
Basically it boils down to the US meeting this electricity need using natural gas and fossil fuels (with nuclear as an eventual goal) and China moving at a similar pace using renewables. Of course the AI companies on the west coast don't have to experience the pollution such energy demand brings to the communities nearby the power and data center facilities.
The implication from the LinkedIn post (to my eyes at least) is that they believe they have a case for canceling X Corp's claim to the Twitter trademarks. And then the landing page at twitter.new certainly implies that they plan to start their own social network/app called Twitter.
The article gets into this where real Americans do job interviews and if they get a job they can keep 30% of the salary and have to pass off the remaining 70%:
> In the IT worker scheme, once someone involved gets an interview, North Koreans use remote-desktop tools to help coach people through the Q&A with a recruiter.
> Aidan Raney, founder of Farnsworth Intelligence, posed as an American willing to help North Koreans to investigate the issue for a client who almost hired a fake engineer. During the course of two video calls with three or four people who all said their names were “Ben,” Raney learned the details. “The Bens” would handle all the upfront work for him—creating a fake LinkedIn profile to verify his new identity for U.S. recruiters, formulating a bio, and sending it out to dozens of job postings with a new Gmail address they set up.
> The Bens even modified Raney’s headshot to a black-and-white photo so it wouldn’t resemble his usual picture, Raney told Fortune. If Raney got a job, he would show up for meetings, like a morning stand-up or scrum, and go about his day while a North Korean engineer handled the workload. Raney would be allowed to keep 30% of the salary but had to transfer 70% to the Bens using crypto, Paypal, or Payoneer.
> “What they were trying to do was use my identity to bypass background checks, and so they wanted this fake persona they created to be extremely close to the real-life version,” said Raney.
> The Bens got Raney an interview, and while it was ongoing, they used a remote-desktop application to set up a notepad on Raney’s screen so they could write out responses to the questions from the interviewer, Raney explained. And it worked: Raney got a verbal offer for a job with a private government contractor that paid $80,000 a year.
> He then had to immediately turn around and tell the company he couldn’t accept the offer and apologize for claiming their time.
These are in the top left hamburger menu from the Home dashboard (edit: actually on all pages).