> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP
In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?
(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)
> all locations any given individual has been seen
This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole.
(Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)
If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?
If we're going by objectively terrible things to be, even though the definition of nazi is very loose to now mean anyone to the right of far left because of it's overuse.
The Nazi bar argument does not do itself any favours and is in ways self-defeating. The majority do not care what someone else's political views are and arguments that shame people for doing so will just lead to increases in populism.
> If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?
If that guy is a regular known for being a vocal supporter and often engages in discussions in said bar with attendees over how right he is and how reasonable his opinions are, and you still decide to stay and engage in those discussions still without thinking there is anything wrong with that... yeah, you are.
On the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable.
(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
The comment said 'organizing this', not doing the development work. That could mean crowdfunding to fund development of the desired outcome.
A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.
I was drawn to this idea but then I realised that the number of phone calls/texts I made/received was so low I would essentially be carrying the phone in case of emergencies. Or, more accurately, because I didn't feel comfortable being without a phone for any length of time. (Remember when people used to complain about all mobile phones, because they felt they shouldn't be contactable all the time? Kind of remarkable that the same device is now the 'disconnected' option!)
Now I carry an Android phone with an epaper display and a physical keyboard, which feels like a really good middle ground to me. It's good at the things that are important to me (reading, writing, communication), can do whatever other essentials I need it to in a scrape, and is absolute dogshit at scrolling through nonsense. The device itself feels rather less polished than the Pixel I was using before, but since I'm using it much less that doesn't seem like a problem. My old pre-smartphone phones always felt kind of janky too!
In a home emergency I pick up one of many DECT wireless phones around the house
In an emergency in public, I yell "Help!" and 20 phones come out.
In a major emergency when cell phone lines are down I can tune to the frequency of my local police and yell at them all to come to me. They never deploy any useful encryption on those things.
So far so good. Even when I totaled a vehicle. Always reliably other people around with emergency phones so I do not need one.
I think projects like this help you develop a felt understanding of the painting as a unique physical artifact that is not fully reproduced by prints or scans.
> Laws should reflect the values of the democratic consensus, speed limits included. If almost everybody is traveling at a speed other than the posted speed limit, whether that's faster or slower, that is a strong signal that the speed limit needs to be adjusted.
I don't see anything about interstates in your comment. But even roads reserved for motor vehicles have noise and pollution effects on people who don't use them. Plus, passengers exist.
The problem with that is that people aren't asking for AI generated images in the style of Raven from Topeka with an Etsy shop. They're asking for Ghibli. So the people whose livelihoods are most directly impacted are (assuming they're not centuries dead) the famous, talented, and trend-making artists, not the lower tier making bad Precious Moments knockoffs. Society's problem is understanding that not wanting to pay for bad Precious Moments knockoffs is rational, while not wanting to pay, say, a Studio Ghibli for quality, professional creativity is insane.
Except they didn’t do any work for the exposure. If a marketing agency had come up and executed the Ghiblify everything model as a PR stunt we would call it the most genius creative campaign of the decade
They did though. The studio engaged in tremendous amounts of work and created good will, in addition to their specific creative works. Their visual style is tied up in that good will. Use of the visual style for profit without consent is, at least ethically, misappropriation of another's value. And "You should be pleased I used your creative work because now more people will know about you and you will make a lot of money from this!" is one of the oldest defenses to misappropriation of creativity.
I'm not even mad. We do a terrible job in our society of valuing artists and creative people generally and in explaining the value of intangible things, especially something like good will. People have been misappropriating fonts and clipart and screenshots in presentations and posters and whatnot, duplicating clever branding ideas and the creative efforts of others, and so on for _decades_ if not longer, all without ill intent. It's something we need to fix and never will. But when that becomes a channel for another to directly profit, it begins to venture out of harmlessness.
You're entirely missing the point. The average western person has never heard of or seen any Ghibli movies. GPT use is heavily skewed by nerdy types. The average football watching big-bang-theory-is-a-smart-show type person doesn't know what any of this is.
If Ghibli feels like they are getting screwed, they could've taken this opportunity to promote themselves, is the parent's point. If I were in their marketing dept I would have been screaming "guys, non-weeaboo people are seeing our name in the news, let's fucking capitalize!" When has Ghibli ever trended? Set up some screenings or stream Spirited Away on their site for a couple weeks or somethin. If they want to win hearts and minds, that's what you have to do. As of now, it's already out of the MSM news cycle and forgotten.
As if the Ghibli trend wasnt just a short trend people will have forgotten about in 4 weeks... Also I couldnt care less about big studios, they print money anyway.
In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?
(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)
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