In libraries there are librarians who know enough about their books to guide you to the ones you need. There's systems to make finding types of books easier, and if the book you need isn't available they can have another library send their copy over, and all of this is paid for with taxes, so you don't need to buy books and find out they were a waste of your money. Imagine a library where they use a different method of showing you books. Instead of a librarian there are posters and videos and events all to promote different books. How much harder would it be, in such a library, to find the books you need? What if the books you need are educational, which aren't being promoted at any time? There's ads for cookbooks, for entertainment, for sports, but nothing for your hobbies. Ads for books about types of cars, but not how to repair them. This library wouldn't run on tax dollars, nor would the books be sorted for ease of finding them.

The second library sucks, fundamentally it's a worse experience for everyone. But that's how things work outside of libraries, we get shown pictures of things that are almost what we need but not quite, and then that's supposed to convince us to buy it. I just want a global librarian who can listen to the problems I have with a project, so they can point to where I can get or buy a solution. An expert that is paid with tax dollars. Half the budget of every product is its marketing, meaning half the cost you pay for anything comes from marketing. If there was no marketing outside of what's funded with taxes, it wouldn't lower the cost of everything by half, it's lower it by more than half. If you make chairs and use that money to buy beds and tables and desks, those people are also not needing to market their beds and tables and desks, so you need half the money you used to. Even if you don't lower your prices and they don't lower theirs, you can still buy twice as much as before, and so can they, because you didn't have to pay to show people pictures of your chairs and had money left over.

Instead of ads being billboards distracting drivers, or adding to paper waste, or wasting peoples time by interrupting something they were trying to watch, instead there could be centralized events where people can use different things in person. A location that holds all kinds of equipment and lets people use it for a while, with people on hand to teach how it's used. Like a library, there would be fees if the items aren't returned on time. But it would let people figure out if something is worth getting, as well as collect it all under one roof so you can browse the different sections. Maybe you want to make sure that a USB-C cable you want to buy actually transfers data, or if the port on your laptop is just dead.

Secondary boycotts in law typically refers to union related actions, but you could draw parallels to how payment processors are putting pressure on the internet to effectively ban erotic art.

"For example, suppose you have a labor dispute with a dairy. The dairy sells its products to a grocery store, which sells them to the public. You may picket the grocery store to discourage its customers from buying the struck dairy products." - National Labor Relations Board

In credit card companies version, they put pressure on banks who work with them via credit card company rules, and those banks then refuse to do business with companies until they change their policies to suit the card companies. It's like boycotting, but instead of you choosing to avoid paying for a product in protest, the card company makes you unable to pay for anything, same outcome in that the company isn't paid until they change what they do or sell. Only difference is that it's not you choosing what to do with your money, it's Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal deciding what you do with your money.

And the problem is that most alternatives still have to go through Mastercard and others payment processing, and even if you work around this further and buy Steam's prepaid cards, some banks are on the credit card companies side and will make this harder. Worst case scenario, people have to resort to physical currency to get around these secondary boycotts. What percentage of the population who uses credit cards would be willing to go that far?

The only real solution here is for the law to limit the powers of the people who facilitate payments, so they can't use your money to interfere with what's available for you to buy.

No evidence for this, more of a shower thought.

New internet censorship laws make it so that people are less likely to use the biggest online services as well as porn sites, which is potentially a good thing for local business.

In the past, people would go to bars to socialize, spend money, date and so on. Nowadays it's too damn expensive, prices have gone up to the point the better option is to just hang out at home with friends. In South Korea this pressure to abide by societal norms and expectations has combined with the cost of living crisis to lower birth rates below half of what is needed to sustain their society, and even if they use immigration and AI to pick up the slack it will still result in the death of their societal norms and expectations, family traditions and so on will just fade away. Obviously part of the problem is the wealthier people got their power and wealth over many generations and would prefer to keep everything this way forever, but this isn't sustainable and it will ruin the country within the next fifty years if nothing is done. And every developed nation is dealing with a form of the same problem, where the wealthy want to maintain the power structure despite how it forces everyone else to make life changing decisions.

Spending money online means not spending money on local things beyond shipping, it doesn't act as an investment in your community outside of taxes you pay, and entertainment of any kind can be a distraction from aspects of life that need to be dealt with. What's the point of doom scrolling if it only affects your opinions, and not your decisions?

So, maybe the governments of the world are trying to get control of all these problems by targeting what they think is the root of the problem. They feel that social media and anonymity will lead to a boom of bot accounts twisting public opinion against various governments, and by forcing people to use ID to access these sites, bots will be pushed out. It will also prevent people with extremist views and opinions from talking publicly about matters, especially in societies with dictatorships and fascism running the show. Of course, the reality is that civilians will always break whatever rules are forced on them, and will often cause the opposite of what was intended to happen more, but governments are like that, clumsy but powerful and prone to making dumb choices to start with and hoping they can patch things later down the line. They can handle problems that crop up over centuries, but not problems that crop up in decades.

Anyways, maybe shoving people off of the internet will result in a higher birth rate, but I don't think people will be switching back to overpriced bars any time soon, and it's more likely that people will sue to get the money back that they spent on digital products they can no longer use without sharing their ID with third party companies they are right to not trust with private information.

There's probably many other reasons for pushing these laws through across the globe, but this is just about the only universal problem I can think of that it would have a meaningful impact on.

I expect over the next few years, sites will require identification that can be forged, then new laws will be created that require identification that can't be forged, then new kinds of identification will be created that won't harm you if it was leaked but is official and does require payment (which means many people will not be able to afford to use the internet even if they used a public libraries computers to do so), and we'll all look back on the wild-west years of the internet fondly, even if everyone else born after that time knows how these freedoms could have been and were abused to manipulate people.

One thing that's for sure is that any time a government tells people to behave a certain way, they push back. Giving people a false choice results in less pushback, and that's what we're seeing now. People are still pissed off by it, but they're finding ways to adapt or work around it than trying to tear it down.

I wrote a journal last year about how credit card companies and so on could use their monopoly power to dictate what people can and cannot purchase by pressuring companies to not offer products. Legally they aren't stopping you from buying things, they're just taking away the options you never knew you could have had.

In the last month there's been a massive, global push from companies and governments and so on to fundamentally do the same thing: control what you can do online, and gather more information about everyone than they already had access to, even if the method is irresponsible and dangerous to the general public.

A centralized internet has been criticized for this reason for decades. Long ago, the way that the internet worked meant that even if a node went down (due to a nuke, which was a concern at the time), the network could pick up the slack and continue working even if huge chunks were gone. This also meant it was impossible to police the internet, and the attempts by governments to do so was joked about. China ended up creating the great firewall to better control what information their people had access to, but that's the only real method governments had to control the internet, cutting everyone off from everyone outside the nation. On or off.

Over time, some websites became universal, like google search, and then wikipedia. As more of these cropped up, advertisers gained a foothold. Before, ads were not seen as very profitable despite the number of people using the internet, but as more people flocked to specific sites, this allowed advertisers to target large parts of the population with less cost to them. And as more people on youtube became dependent on them for their income and livelihood, this gave advertisers more power to put pressure on them and the platform, gradually making things worse as the revenue stream took priority over creators and viewers. The solution would have been to make youtube publicly funded, like PBS, but that opportunity has passed, and the shareholders hunger for more as they always will.

And with centralization comes a greater capacity for control. The internet's no longer an on/off switch kind of thing, governments can easily put pressure on a corporation and so put pressure on huge chunks of the internet, even if the internet is still resilient to damage to the network.

Which is where we come back to the present, where governments and organizations have all in the same month pushed forward plans that will make it harder to access wikipedia for some for a time, will attempt to force adults to share their private information with corporations, and so on. They've been trying to pull this off for decades, and now is their chance to do it.

Over the next five years, expect to see news reports of corporations posing as identity verification groups selling or leaking private data online. But most importantly, look back on cabaret laws and licenses in the US. Even when people followed the rules, paid the fees, got their licenses, they would still be raided by police, taken to court, and punished to such a degree that they could no longer afford to perform for the public. Ultimately, the reason for these laws wasn't to keep the noise down, it was to kill off a culture that was becoming popular, to control the people without them realizing they were losing choices. You can't go to a club that never existed.

Read up on the past, and focus on how the government utilized its power, that will give you an idea of what they will be doing, and the real reasons why. It won't tell you who the specific targets are, that's too modern, but their methods don't really change that much from decade to decade, and you can easily learn those.

As for fighting back, it's too late. The problems the governments used to have are now solved, everyone uses the same top ten sites daily, everyone's emails are tied to the same corporations, and this last push looks like it's been planned for a long time. Otherwise, it's weird that steam and wikipedia and all of social media, youtube and reddit, all are being targeted by different actors in the same month for similar reasons leading to the same result.

Maybe if they push the issue hard enough the internet will splinter and decentralize all over again.

If a retail store had everything locked behind glass windows and you had to ask a worker to unlock it so you could get things like peanut butter, I feel like people would buy less things. But when we shop online, the steps to buying stuff is technically worse, because you still have to ask a worker to get an item to you, only now you have to pay before they get the item out, and you have to wait a week or so to be handed the item. The reason people prefer the second option to the first option, in my mind, is that we don't want to directly interact with another person we don't really know.

Extroverts might want to have a whole conversation, which the employee doesn't want to participate in, and even if they did they'd get in trouble for suboptimal work or something. Introverts would rather not interact at all, and will actively try not to look like they're looking at anything just to avoid having a worker walk up to them and asking what they want.

Shops generally don't have all their wares behind glass, but they do expect their workers to interact with customers in the hopes it will lead to a purchase. I think the idea is that if a customer isn't at the cash register then they are a drain on profits somehow just by being there, so everything is geared towards getting them in and through the entire store and then out again as quickly as possible. But they also want enough customers wandering around that the store doesn't feel abandoned, because that leads to the sense that you don't belong there since everything else is designed to lead you to the exit fast.

I think that's why I'm more okay with a vending machine than a shop with glass security and workers following you, both lock their wares away, but you can stare at the contents of a vending machine uninterrupted all day if you really wanted to.

A heads up, I'm pro AI as far as true open source, global collaboration goes. I feel that whenever corporations do anything it's always a pursuit of profit even if the product being made worse brings in more money. They start off strong to get people dependent on it, but then over time changes make it a little bit worse until finally people just want the original with only the good updates. If they try the same thing with AI, then they would be giving up the main strength of an unbounded learning machine, the lack of limits on growth in capability. Cutting corners automatically means imposing some kind of limit by definition, you can't cut a corner without an edge to cut.

If we want to stop this kind of AI being developed we need to get ahead of them. As regular people without billions of dollars, it's pretty much impossible for us to get corporations to do something unprofitable. And whenever corporations buy out things like education, they always introduce reading material that supports their industry, so it's pretty difficult to motivate people who have a corporate endorsed education into protecting themselves from those corporations.

But AI can do a lot of things that are tricky or hard to do. Like combing through internet archival data piecing together a timeline of every corporate executive's movement through their industries. It's so hard to track down information about these jobs, to the point it's more effective to tell people to boycott a brand rather than to boycott whatever brand has hired a specific executive.

In the present there's some tariffs that are predictably going to backfire in a few months time if they aren't removed, and the global reaction to them has resulted in an app in France that tells you if a product you scan was in part made in the US. I think it goes off bar codes right now, but imagine if there was a camera app that could detect products on shelves, recognize them, and then highlight them to show which ones are good to get.

The reason the real app feels like a time saver is because even if a product was assembled in that country, it might have been made in the US at some point, maybe the base materials even. In an effort to not lose sales, corporations will obfuscate information while feigning transparency, as much as the law will allow. Apps can get around this because they aren't owned by the corporations selling those products.

This is the key to fighting AI. You can't just kill off one thing, corporations will pour more money in until it's no longer a problem. You need an AI ecosystem. If corporations can control what tools can run an AI, or they control distribution, or they control access, then life will be made worse for people who at most have a phone in terms of advanced tech. If there is no monopoly on AI, and access is provided freely for all, then corporations would struggle to make AI profitable.

If AI is going to be trained on public data, the result should not be sold for profit, it should also be public. Not because it's more fair, it's because it forces corporations to make a choice, they can use public data and share their research by law which would prevent their use of sensitive data, or they can use internal data and have a worse system than their competition. This would kill off the push from corporations to make publicly trained AI for profit, they would be incentivized to keep it secret, and so would use them internally at best. And because of this, the rate of advancements for AI that benefits corporations would slow dramatically, and AI that is favorable to citizens would speed past them.

Arguing about all AI being bad will not bring back the past. AI exists, and while everyone wastes time debating if thought matters more than action, corporations are getting a foothold in how AI will be used for the rest of time. So, picture a future a thousand years from now, imagine one where people use AI in the same way we use paper books.

How do we get there from a time when population decline is caused by government policy? Once AI becomes more of a thing, policy will reduce the human population. If people aren't needed for labor, infrastructure, then all that's left is to reduce the number of people. Make people choose to have less kids by not keeping wages up with inflation, control the rate of inflation, control how many doctors there are, give corporations enough control that needless suffering culls the population just enough to get rid of people that won't be missed by the fortunate. Except now there's corporate funded AI research, so policy will shift some more, reduce the population a bit faster.

Humanity's extinction won't be caused by AI directly in this scenario. It'd be caused by a solar flare, once the global population was reduced to the point it cannot sustain itself without AI assistance. A bunch of rich people trying to re-learn how to farm from whatever books remain in their private galleries before they starve.

This outcome doesn't work if regular people also have access to AI, and pit it against their own governments. Presently AI isn't a huge threat, but once it is, the threat works both ways. Corporations have a lot more to lose and have to operate carefully to avoid risk, and once they've taken our data and our work and our future we have nothing left to lose and everything to gain by breaking their foundations. Maybe AI could play a part in that, because nothing else has really worked. We created unions to ensure workers have rights, so they made unions out to be a bad thing by any means necessary. Worker safety began because people were being crushed into paste by machines and the businesses did nothing until forced to. AI will not remain safe for much longer, and it's so much easier to automate the work executives do than it is to automate labor.

https://ych.commishes.com/auction/s.....ontestant-ych/

YCH comic drawn by zdemian, functionally this is an effort to pay off Soylent's car repair debt from when their engine exploded.

First, lets do extreme examples to showcase the problem. Lets say that 70% of the income of the poorest people pays for taxes, the richest pay nothing. The poorest people are more numerous, but without enough income to rise up through their society there are few threats to those at the top. In nature the kiwi bird lived in an environment with no predators, it lost all the size related traits its lineage came from, because in a world built on scarcity of resources, weakness isn't a problem life cares about, it only cares about survival, a species could lose everything so long as it continues to reproduce.

So, without competition the ones at the top of society are weakened, and the majority of society suffers because to improve their lives is to threaten the structure of their society. It is harder to control people who have access to things like healthcare, education, freedom to travel, freedom to speak their mind, freedom to do work. By extracting resources from the poorest people, society stagnates or at least grows very slowly.

If we crank the tax up to 100%, the poorest people die out in prisons if they survive somehow, or they die after giving everything up. But once they are gone there's a new poorest segment of society, and this repeats until there's only one person left. This might be a faster process, but all regressive tax systems, including tariffs, will whittle away at the wealth of everyone over time.

People buy things, that's what makes the economy work. If people can't afford to buy things, the economy slows down. If people have no money, the economy stops. Sure, you might own a fancy car you could sell if times are tough, but what is it worth if you can't find anyone that wants to buy a used car? Suddenly all these things people own or produce has no value because nobody has the money to buy it. They might want it, but all they have is stuff. So as more of the economy freezes, the people making the money at the top find that the only people buying things is other people in their social class, and those people aren't producing anything, they own things. They might pay people wages, but those wages are swallowed up by taxes, almost none of that buys things from the companies the people at the top own.


Then there's progressive taxes. Again, lets do the extreme and have the poorest people pay no income taxes, but the people at the top pay 70% of their income in taxes. Since it's popular now for the richest people to be paid in shares and a $1 annual income, and they buy companies using the projected increase of value of those stocks over time without ever selling those stocks, this income tax would need to account for this loophole, perhaps 70% of stocks that replace their wages goes to the government.

Since there's a cutoff between who counts as rich and poor, the rich who are near that line might choose to not receive a million dollars (or equivalent) a year, and instead put that money into the business, or their workers wages if they can't spend it on anything to grow the business. More wages attracts better employees, but it also means people spending more money on things, which speeds up the economy. If people buy more things then companies make more profit leading to more wage increases. Eventually people might satisfy their need for things and society might plateau at this economic peak, but over time more people will go from poverty into middle class wealth for a long while, it could take a long time for everyone in the world to become a consumer.

And remember, the people paying these taxes are still millionaires, they won't be starving in a progressive tax system, and this doesn't hamper business growth, so even though their wages are stagnating compared to the rest of society, they likely wouldn't change their lifestyle much even if their income went up 10x.

A regressive tax system is pretty flat, because their economy doesn't grow much. With most of their wages going to taxes, and people spending only 30% of their earnings on themselves, the poorest citizens live from day to day and so can't afford to improve the world. In such a society, only 6.6% of the population is able to afford the time to improve society as a whole. In a progressive tax system, given enough time for it to work, 100% of the population is able to afford the time to improve society. Even in the worst case scenario a person earning a million dollars a year is earning 300k a year, and most rich people would put off increasing their wages until they are guaranteed more than a million dollars after taxes.

Another thing to note is elections. Elections are a system where the majority decide the direction their country is taking, and the richest people in the nation are a minority. They can own news stations and they can pay to support politicians, but there isn't anything they can do to make their vote count as more important than any other vote. It's in their best interest to make people who oppose them not want to vote. Maybe transportation is lousy, maybe it's too far away, maybe they run ads that confuse people on when and who to vote for, but the goal is generally the same, turn their money into votes somehow. In a regressive society there are no votes, or fixed votes, there's nobility and oligarchs and that's about it. In a progressive society there's more incentive to vote because there's more encouragement to participate in politics and business in general, because the richer the society is the more money the government makes.

And a thing to remember is that government income comes from taxes, if the rich aren't paying them then the poor is paying it instead. If taxes aren't paying for healthcare then you're paying companies for it or going without healthcare at all. Some people might think that if they don't use something then they shouldn't have to pay for its availability, but I have an example that disproves that point.

Insurance companies have been pulling out of wildfire prone areas, because they are happening more regularly, and insurance is like a lottery, you are betting your home burns down and hoping you are wrong. The problem is that if it's likely to happen in an area, then they have to pay out, even if your personal odds are low, for them it's guaranteed every year. The business model fails, so they pull out, there is no insurance, or what exists isn't going to cover the current cost of a home.

Your quality of life depends on the lives of the whole country. The better off everyone else is, the better your own life is, even if you're paying for things your neighbors use but you don't. This is why roads are paid with taxes, even if the corporations are the ones making the most from it, everyone is able to use them because limiting access would slow the economy in a progressive society. Regressive societies have roads the leader uses to reach their airport, and that's about it, because that's how regressive societies maximize their profits.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/60311062/

I made the cover art, it's been a couple years since I worked on it and I'm pretty happy that they finished it. Been keeping an eye on the project for some time, though I don't know anything about the story yet, beyond what I'd been told for the cover.

Back in October 2019 I made some predictions of the future, and I knew at the time I was gonna be way off on everything. So, lets laugh at past me a bit. The original journal is https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9302064/

For the sake of brevity lets only talk about the ones that haven't come to pass, we can mock the others once their time has come.

"By 2022 we have AI that can learn anything and use that knowledge, mostly tested on games but some practical application in real life begins here. This isn't human level intelligent yet, that classification shifts to require the same physical space as a human brain, then shifts to require less than the amount of energy the human brain needs."

Okay yeah this did happen but its hallucinations really make it difficult to trust. I think a number of companies are trying to solve the energy cost problems, but I think it'll be a few... decades before it's cheaper to power than a human brain. I'm accounting for how the human brain can also be trained, because training AI is more expensive than running a trained AI, and it costs a fortune every time. For the same thing from humans you just need time and food.

"By 2022 research progresses in leaps and bounds as AI starts taking on challenges humanity has never fully solved."

Also true, different therapies have been developed, but the main one that was only possible with AI was advances in protein folding research, but Alphafold's earliest version existed in 2018, so the fact a better model came out in 2020 was guaranteed to happen. A lackluster prediction since it was certain to happen soon after the journal entry.

"By 2025 we see solar panels change how power companies function globally, switching to power storage as opposed to power generation as the market for electricity starts to collapse, with nations trying to get their neighbors to buy the electricity they don't use."

Well, nations are shifting towards more renewable energy and not just solar, Kazakhstan is aiming to use renewables and export energy to its neighbors, and due to the Ukraine war a lot of nations have realized that an over-reliance on fuel from other nations is a problem during war time, so they are looking for replacements. Australia has its "future made in Australia" plan where if it gets through their government then they'll also become a producer of solar components, but these are still potentials for the future and aren't the current state of the world, meaning my prediction was very optimistic. If all goes well, things might continue down this path, but some recent events have shown that the corporations benefiting from how things have always been aren't going down without a fight... but in a "we're taking the whole country down with us" kinda way. It'll happen, it's just going to really really suck.

"By 2025 we have a device that lets us write, click, and interact with software with our mind rather than our fingers."

Again I think this already existed at the time of writing that journal, neuralink was in testing at that time so the only way this could have been wrong is if they scrapped the project. There was also sensors that can read thoughts more broadly without surgery, so again this was not an impossibility. My thought had been that by now we'd have something like a mouse replacement you could wear on your head and maybe by now it'd be more popular for games and writing, yet here we are with no real options on the market.

Some of these ideas had further steps around 2030, so I removed those parts from here since there's still time to be proven wrong. I think I got pretty close on these though, but a lot of them were things that came out the following year, a bit like predicting a game's gonna come out because you saw a trailer for it. I think if I do another prediction list it's gonna need to be a bit more ambitious.

So the trolley problem has had a bunch of different forms, trying to change the parameters and see what matters to people, things like age or whatever. How about instead we just change how the scenario began.

There's five people on one track and the other is empty and the trolley will go down the empty path. A person comes along and flips the lever so the trolley will now run over the five people, and they themselves get onto the other track for one reason or another. So now the scenario is the same as before, five innocent people on one track, one innocent person on the other, a trolley is coming down the line, and you can flip the lever, dooming the single innocent person and saving five lives.

You might feel that the single person isn't innocent, they were dooming other people by flipping the lever first, but at this moment in time they are still innocent, nobody has died yet, and if they die now then it would be your fault for choosing not to save them. But choosing to switch the tracks and killing a single person, saving the lives of many, that's still your fault.

But this introduces a new problem. If you stopped them from flipping the lever in the first place, and so they never got onto the tracks, would that be better than flipping the lever once they'd gotten settled in? Would it be better to prevent people from taking advantage of others for personal gain in the first place, especially when lives are on the line? Should things like health insurance be banned because it inevitably leads to either the deaths of many, or the deaths of the few who would doom them?

I don't think this trolley problem is the same as the original. In the original, the trolley running over the five people wouldn't instantly make the innocent individual on the other track turn into a murderer. But, if a decision is made that will definitely end lives that would otherwise have been saved, even if its decades after the decision, it's just as indirect a murder as flipping the lever the first time was. Unlike the trolley problem though, it's hard to get information about how many lives might have been saved if insurance companies didn't control medical procedures. All we can do is compare parts of the world that rely on health insurance for medical care, and parts of the world that pays for it through taxes.

Or, we can count the number of people who get funding online to pay for their operations, because without that funding their insurance wouldn't help them, and they would die. With this, we know of at least a few people who are on the other track. Definitely not all of them, but a countable number that are definitely there.

So, in real life the reason for the single innocent person flipping the lever and getting on the other track is because there was a lot of money on it, and a lot of people were paying them to hand them the money that was there. So, is the problem really the individual, or is it the people paying them? If it wasn't them, someone else might have done it, and why would someone build a track with all that money on it. Maybe the problem wasn't people taking advantage at the cost of others lives, maybe the problem is that the lever was the only way to reach the money, or that there was money on the track at all. Maybe the solution was brakes for the trolley, and to not make it profitable by dooming people.

Japan uses a lottery system to prevent price gouging, which leaves a bad taste in peoples mouths when it's used to purchase something like tickets to a music venue, but with the way graphics card prices have been escalating I wonder if a side effect of this is that people who purchase tickets are less likely to re-sell them, and that this could reduce the amount of graphics card resellers.

Like, lets say that we stick with first-come-first-served. The people who can afford to wait outside for a week in advance of a new GPU coming out are also probably going to re-sell them, because the average person will install and use the thing until it breaks, giving it no other value than the initial cost, whereas a reseller could buy out the stock and make double what they spent.

Changing to a lottery system could reduce the final cost of the product if calculated correctly, and it would mean that instead of scalpers getting ahold of it first, everyone has an equal chance of getting it, and the majority of people don't intend to buy it for resale, meaning the majority of sales will be directly to the final customer. With resales becoming less viable a business strategy, less resales would occur, driving down the price of resales.

The question then would be, how much would a lottery need to cost in order to disincentivize resales. It'd need to be far too expensive to buy a huge quantity of tickets, at least in terms of making a profit. The cost to participate in the lottery would need to account for the amount of cards in stock, the amount scalpers are expected to aim for once they win, etc.

The next question would be, how would the lottery work. Do you buy once and then wait a few rounds until you win, or do you need to re-apply each time? While the second one would be better news for scalpers, it's still random chance, so they'd need to buy a high percentage of tickets in order to make it profitable, and so the ticket price can be used to negate that. Alternately, making the ticket price smaller but you have to purchase new ones each time would quickly bleed the energy out of any scalper organization, reducing the odds of losing since they wouldn't even participate without a guarantee to win.

The problem is that all lotteries can cause people with gambling addictions to take risks they can't afford, and so instead of dealing with scalpers people would be dealing with gamblers/hoarders.

Primarily, the reason for shortages will always be risk aversion. Companies can't afford to create millions of a product that may need to be recalled and replaced if there's any issues, or a product that doesn't sell as much as expected, not all on day one at least. It's not like a videogame that can be copied infinitely, you cannot scalp digital service games. Since risk is important to making efficient use of resources, this will be a problem until resource scarcity is solved once asteroid/space mining and manufacturing begins. Until then, we need tools that hurt scalpers more than they hurt consumers.

I read todays SMBC comic, no direct link to the page yet, and it made an interesting point about a saying where strong men create good times which create weak men which create bad times which create strong men. The point being that that cycle, even if it exists, is interrupted by exogenous factors so often that clearly bad times just happen and that cycle has no bearing on it, ending with hard times creating strong men, but before any good can happen a nuclear war wipes almost everyone out.

I think corruption is what the original quote is getting at. There was an experiment where plants were grown in a biodome closed off from the world, and the trees kept falling over. They checked them and found the rings in the trees were perfectly circular, which made them softer and unable to deal with sheer forces. The cause was that the trees were grown in an environment without wind. Now, you could argue that the dome itself was like the "good times", where a bubble of protection removed the threat of storms and pests, or you could argue that the trees falling over are the bad times, and evolution would eventually result in a new species that grows stronger even without wind. My point is that the bubble would still exist, and so these "good times" are more like a seemingly favorable situation that turns out to have drawbacks because it's not how things used to be, and those drawbacks are just the grand reveal of these problems nobody noticed was building up until it happened.

So even if something good happens, if it's sustained for a long time there must be some adaptation to account for the absence of old problems, or else new problems will arise. And what makes something good isn't really clear. The problem is that people take weakness and goodness to be literal immutable things that have opposites. Remember, the biodome still existed, and trees would have adapted, solving the problem didn't require re-adding wind, even though that's what they ended up doing. Favorable things can continue to exist even as we go through some crappy experience. Realistically in the future humanity will stop favoring sugary things, and so our foods will eventually limit it, even if we keep putting more of it in now. A lot of people would get sick in the meantime, but we'd eventually adapt one way or another. Maybe we'd even adapt to use it better even in excess, who knows.

So yeah, not everything needs to be reversed just because it presently doesn't work well, sometimes things are overengineered because the world has been awful for a long time and we're finally getting rid of things that plagued humanity for eons, and by stamping out the terrible stuff now we can ensure that everyone suffers equally until society adapts to a new normal.

This is a big part of why people suspect corporations of secretly keeping things shitty, because if disease and hunger and everything else were fixed then they'd be out of a job. Technically they aren't wrong, there was a time when lightbulbs had worse and worse lifespans and it turned out there was a group of companies involved, and the government had to break them up to stop it. Nowadays with everything being global and production being split between many countries it's a lot harder to know for sure if companies are just sharing a manufacturer or are working as a group to ensure your washing machine doesn't last as long as the one your grandparents still own. This lack of trust has created an opening for businesses that make products that are repairable, despite the fact the other companies are continuing to pressure the governments to not allow any repairs without going through them. This is how things work, corruption can grow and make things easier for the big businesses, but like the trees without wind something eventually breaks and adaptations are made. Either repairs are allowed again and the corporations adapt, or repairs are protected and the biggest companies creak and snap and fall and are replaced by ones who understand they could abuse their customers trust but choose not to.

Flying cars and self driving cars. Self driving cars do not die and take their knowledge with them, the data they gain can be used to further improve cars into the future, and eventually exceed the capabilities of any human in a few decades, centuries, millennia, leading to heightened safety and an end to accidents caused by compromised human drivers/blind spots. Flying cars increase the risk caused by crashing, because I doubt humans in freefall would be able to react without the driver or the passengers panicking and making the situation worse, and I feel that aerial crashes in freefall have the potential to be more damaging than a car that has its brakes cut, because roads can have barricades, you can't barricade everything the sun touches.

Lets assume a world where everyone is a farmer. Everyone might have time to spare building their own homes, but roads wouldn't be built, and time spent on anything else could be spent on working more land to create enough food for more kids who might live long enough to farm more land. This kind of life is risky, a bad season could end multiple families all at once. Still, food is produced, value is added, and a necessity is satisfied.

Most other jobs don't satisfy a need as well as farming, so for other things we need to assume that needs are fulfilled and all that remains are wants.

Education isn't necessary but it is important in a society that builds on the efforts of the past. People have worked on and solved problems over time, and throwing that away would be a waste of resources, both what it cost to do the research, and a waste of future resources spent to re-solve the same old problems. The arts, storytelling and theater are important ways to convey ideas and morals, people who read more stories of other places, people, lives and experiences may be more empathetic and understanding than a person who has only ever lived in one place with only a few options when it comes to kinds of food, kinds of friends, and kinds of weather and terrain.

Then there's jobs that maintain, healthcare and roadworks, construction and demolition, that solve problems indirectly. Health might seem like a direct problem, but in reality healthcare is more about the society than the individual. If everyone had a fatal illness then healthcare would ensure society is as productive as possible given the circumstances. An outbreak isn't a problem for you, it's a societal problem with solutions that involve you, same way that food distribution isn't a thing farmers need to be concerned about yet must be resolved as efficiently as possible to ensure productivity.

And then there's parasitic jobs that feel like maintenance jobs, but aren't. Maintenance jobs resolve problems that are persistant, and disappear when new solutions are found. Parasitic jobs are eternal and rely on problems they contribute towards. Thatch roofing used to be a common maintenance job, but now is mostly gone as new methods were developed. Landlords and rentals are parasitic, because while reducing the cost of housing and increasing the amount of available housing would fix the problem, landlords can and do use their money to buy up available housing, it's a recursive effect.

Maintenance jobs can turn into parasitic jobs, the way that car production did. Initially cars replaced horses, but over time they made the option to travel via walking everywhere unviable through political pressure and money gained from sales of cars. Cities used to be structured where businesses and housing were combined in the same building, but now residential is fully separated for a majority of people, resulting in a need to own or use a vehicle to complete the last step of other maintenance jobs, like buying food.

The important part of what makes a job parasitic is that removing its existence would temporarily cause problems (since society was structured to involve them) but be quickly resolved once the structures supporting it are also removed. The reason residential and business is separated is due to regulations that can be changed, and once businesses and residential are mixed it'll be easier to walk wherever you need to go. As for landlords, removing them is harder because of housing prices held up by landlords, and so we'd have to wait for pricing to reset as the market falls apart. When it's no longer profitable to buy homes, they cease to be an investment vehicle, and simply become a place to live that decreases in value over time. Only reason housing gains value is the strength of the economy and scarcity of housing perpetuated by people buying houses in order to sell them again or rent them out. If corporations couldn't legally buy housing, how expensive would they be?

As for the question "what if there was only one job in the world", landlords would the one of the worst. If all needs were met and all people were landlords, then the need for landlords would cease to be since all people would have somewhere to live. Their existence requires some people be unable to live anywhere else for a smaller temporary cost, but still able to afford a long term higher cost if they end up with no other options. The other reason it's one of the worst is that the job isn't construction, it isn't repair, it's a person who sits between residents living there and the means to improve the quality of the building in the event of damage. Remove them, and the resident would be able to get repairs done directly for less cost. Only real barrier is the large upfront cost of buying a home outright, which leads to money lending which is another parasitic job.

There are probably other kinds of jobs than supply, maintenance, and parasitic, but they're good enough for constructing fictional societies with fictional jobs. A lot of stories are generic in a weird way when it comes to work, they don't differentiate what kind of office job a character has, for example, they kinda brush over the details fast and usually ignore anything beyond whether or not the boss and co-workers are nice. In anti-authoritarian stories the character might lose their cool and call out the business model, but again this doesn't take full advantage of the complexities these systems can have. A parasitic company might offer to deal with the red tape that a maintenance company can't afford to deal with, so long as they do something that benefits the parasitic company in the long run. A supply job has to choose to distribute to either a parasitic company that pays more, initially or a maintenance company that will not use pressure to lower costs over time.

The actual worst parasitic job is advertising. They often don't care if a product is legitimate or a scam, it's not their name that's affected once the scam is revealed, far as the audience knows the advertiser was tricked into it with boatloads of money. If ads didn't exist then word of mouth would quickly replace it. Advertisers generally don't produce anything of value outside of ads. Sometimes they do, and they use the money to fund those projects, but if there were only one job in the world and all other needs taken care of, what exactly would they be advertising? It's an existence that requires another business in order to exist, meaning its value is wholly dependent on someone else being more successful but simultaneously not good enough to get by without artificially spreading word about their own product, such as a scam. Maybe in the future advertisers will be seen as peddlers of scams and we can use morality and ethics to slowly get rid of it, but likely not.

If you live in the US, try to avoid going outside until this is over. TB is an airborne disease and only through constant communication and tracking of the disease have we been able to keep it down, a bigger push could have eradicated it but instead you're getting a decrease in communication and tracking of all diseases, including TB. Kansas has had and outbreak of it and so long as we don't know where it's spreading to, there's no way to know the odds of catching it until you've caught it.

I don't know what reason there is for shutting down communication, seems like a bad move given how miscommunication and disinformation caused covid to be particularly devastating to countries that didn't follow their own rules and regulations for not making outbreaks political. If bad information causes problems, what do you think no information will cause?

So, you know the drill, in the event nothing changes this week, buy toilet paper and be ready for other countries freezing travel from the US.

Been trying to figure this out for months, and I think I finally got it.

PEGI, the rating system, has no problem with the nature of gambling, which is the use of an addictive game of chance to extract a ton of money from players who are vulnerable. That's totally fine and in fact gets a three and up rating from them.

What they take issue with is people learning about the rules of pre-existing gambling games. The money loss, addictiveness, and so on would have been fine, but deigning to make a game that references the rules of another game (so people who already know the rules don't need to re-learn those rules and in the process making the barrier to playing this new game lower) is in their opinion despicable if children somehow learned those rules. Not children learning to gamble, as stated before they have no problem with them using parents credit cards on games of chance, PEGI doesn't want children learning the rules specifically. They may claim it's to stop them gambling or something, but as we already know they give real gambling games the a-ok for three year olds, right? So stopping them from gambling is, functionally, not the problem here, the problem is learning rules from games that were used in gambling for a long time.

The part that kept confusing me was I thought, surely if gambling was the issue they'd do something about other modern games with gambling mechanics, but not only did that never happen, but they changed their rules later on in a way that led to Balatro being a PEGI 18 game, so changing the rules has always been an option, they just refuse to.

In short, PEGI loves gambling and thinks people of all ages should be able to throw money away on games of chance, but they hate the rules from old games of chance and so they restrict anything using those rules to adults. Any reasons for why don't apply universally to the gambling games they do allow, and so no reason truly exists, because they changed their own rules and have proven changing the rules isn't the issue here, the issue is that gambling is a big money maker, and they must love it or they would have age restricted it already.

The game idea: You're planning on taking a gameshow trip to the past. The time period will be a random one from the last 150 years, but it will always take place around some sort of turmoil that may only have happened locally, or it could be a global event. For the game, you are given one hour to find a news source that was around at that time, and you have to do everything they said to do, or you have to make decisions based on what they said was happening. Instead of gameshow points, the winner is whoever gained the most profit or survived the outcome.

Think Geoguesser, but for trust and predictions. Currently there are people who can look at a photo and tell you what city in the world that photo is from, or what mountain range that is, or on what beach a picture captured. We could have the same level of knowledge of trustworthy sources if we turned this into a game.

The moire effect is when a grid or repeating pattern overlaps another pattern, like lines in an image on a monitor with pixels, but the alignment isn't exactly the same. The result is a pattern that changes when the image is moved, scaled, or rotated.

Time can be thought of the same way. In a racing game you might have a car bounding box check if it's colliding with the wall or another car, but if you were to make a car go fast enough then between two frames the car may not technically collide with another, and the result is driving straight through the other car.

Quantum tunneling is where an electron passes through an energy barrier, because electrons are a cloud of potential locations the particle could exist, and sometimes that location is on the other side of an energy barrier they don't have the energy to cross.

Nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light, in a way this rigidity can be seen in the same way as a grid or pattern, and if electrons can travel up to this speed then we should expect to see a conflict between the effective frame-rate of the universe and a particle that approaches that limit. Maybe the result of that conflict is quantum tunneling, but I don't know the math or the details of any of this.

There's a thing called the double slit experiment where a single photon is shot at a barrier with two slits, and on the other side sensors detect where they hit on a far wall. Put all together, an interference pattern emerges similar to the moire effect.

Years back I remember teachers telling us we couldn't use calculators for some classes because we weren't going to always have access to one in future. The real reason was that we were learning the basics and they wanted us to memorize how to do it manually, because in later years we were given math to do but were also expected to use a calculator because it was difficult. I don't trust people to either spell words right or get math right if they don't use tools, because the internet's full of examples in their comments. Spell-check is built into everything and they still get it wrong.

Anyways, wikipedia eventually came out, and the immediate reaction was a distrust from the school system. Good reasons were had, as before, but when you're entering highschool and have seen two things shot down you start to question if the school system is up to date and trying to advance society or not.

Then AI comes out and the same familiar pushback is seen, and I think my viewpoint is solidified.

The school system wants people to be taught in a completely unbiased and factual manner, because teaching the students to question what they are being taught isn't part of their education until much later in life. If students lean on educational crutches too early then they aren't going to learn the basics, is what seems to be the issue.

The problem is that there's schools who are paid by religious organizations and corporations who both push for the inclusion of books that are inherently biased and teach viewpoints instead of things that meaningfully improves an individuals quality of life. If you teach someone math then they have the capability of becoming a merchant, if you teach them to read then they can learn from more than just teachers, but if you teach them to love oil companies then they only learn to accept other people making money while their own prospects are reduced in number, and if taught religion then they learn to be hostile to outsiders who might have made good allies or gained new technological insights other cultures provide.

With this, I think it's reasonable (in that we can use reason to understand) that the educational system dislikes things that will alter the foundation of society. But if it continues to push back against reality, then the result will be a loss of faith in the education system. This is an issue, because schools lean heavily on faith the age of the facilities creates to justify the cost of attending school there. If people lose faith then they might argue in general that education is good, but they might not be willing to pay for it if a better and cheaper alternative exists.

For a while schools also used the idea that an education would lead to jobs, but job hunting is mostly useless thanks to automation and nepotism making it impossible if you don't pay a service to apply for jobs for you. Companies ask for years of experience in fields that only existed recently, specifically because looking like they have openings means they can hire someone instantly the moment a position opens instead of creating the opening and then waiting for others to notice it (and if you the worker are wasting your time, who cares, the business didn't have to pay you for all the work you did applying everywhere, it's at your expense and not theirs).

AI's progress isn't what some expected. We're seeing things that at one time was predicted would exist a full century from now, but for everyone who only heard of modern AI in the last nine years this pace seems slow as hell, the quality is bad, etc. There's also the fear of cheap labor being favored by corporations when it comes to art of a certain quality. I've always hated advertisers, some are good, artistic, but then there's ads that blow out your eardrum when they come on, there's ads that take advantage of people who might not realize it's a scam, there's advertisers who put pressure on creators to not swear or show too much skin or any number of things. Of all forms of art, advertising has the greatest potential to do the most harm while the most people accept such harm is normal and expected. Which is why I'm not entirely against the education system's biases, because they (to my knowledge) ban advertising in schools.

Anyways, it seems the school system is banning smartphones again, some at least are, and I'm curious if this will increase people's faith in the education system, or worsen attendance as people question whether the current system is modern enough. Personally, I think this is more about how the parents are voters while children are not, and so there's going to be an increase of parents who believe schools are relevant and important for future worker production, and an increase of parents and children who believe schools are a waste of time that could be better spent learning from the internet and starting a small business at home. Who's more likely to be hired at a company that needs five years of work experience after all?

There's certain things that benefit everyone because it's a necessity for everyone. Food, electricity, computers, internet, radio, transportation, education, there's many things which are slightly useful for a few people but are much more beneficial when everyone has access to it at no cost beyond taxation. Businesses benefit from roads, so taxes pay for them. Everyone eats food, so taxes should cover that. If all computers were shut down today, the global economy would collapse, and it's hard to argue that a computer with internet and electricity wouldn't be of benefit to the poorest people in the world, even if that computer is just a smartphone.

Public toilets are expensive to maintain but become more expensive if an area is plagued with a variety of crimes, so parts of the world who have functional laws and law enforcement can afford public restrooms, while places in decline will close their public washrooms to reduce the costs. Remember, washrooms serve a necessity, and places in decline who lack these facilities will begin experiencing outbreaks of diseases associated with developing nations who also have poor sanitation.

A lot of people feel that a government getting too involved is a bad thing. In my opinion, the best thing a government can do is remove distractions and pay for things nobody should think about too hard. Advanced civilizations shouldn't have to waste time calculating expenses to decide whether to pay for rent or food that week, those are collective moments that could have been spent better elsewhere, it isn't even optimizing for productivity, it's just optimizing losses.

Corporations can and have built public toilets and used advertising to cover part of the maintenance costs, but like any business model it's always more profitable and less risky to put in the minimal effort to maintain it.

I believe taxes are necessary to keep things working smoothly, but the real issue here is governments deciding where the money goes, and putting it into things that benefit businesses more than all the people in the country. Profit isn't the domain of the government, an efficient economy is definitely something they can implement policies to create, but there's many more things that are needed to keep cities clean and safe that incur more costs than they can gain back. Police fines shouldn't cover the costs of running the police, fines should go straight into projects that are designed to prevent those infractions in future. If speeding on a straight large road is an issue, why not re-design the road so it curves, is narrower, and implements something like a roundabout which naturally causes cars to slow down? We can calculate how to design these roads so it's almost impossible to break the speed limit, but instead we're fining people.

Hostile architecture is another side of this. In countries that refuse to invest in public toilets, they've created sloped bases at the bottom of building walls so it splashes back on you if you try to urinate there.

I'm obsessing over the public toilet thing, but it encapsulates the problem perfectly. There's a need, there's a solution, but the solution costs more in areas with crime, and by removing the solution you only get the problems. I could have made this about how regions in Africa have an unstable power grid due lack of government funding, and people cut down the power lines during outages to sell the copper wire. They've also tried solving this in that the wealthy will pay for a personal power supply method, but then they need to hire security to ensure they don't get raided, and by the time this is all settled they've functionally done the government's job for them, but only for themselves. I decided to use public toilets because they're something people can either recognize, or it's something they've never seen and they just go into shops to use theirs.

If there's ever a cyberpunk setting in fiction, it should not have a public toilet, because that's almost definitely a contradiction in its themes, because a public toilet implies cleanliness, prosperity, or at worst it's vandalized and in decline and soon to be shut down, but that last one is a transitory scenario and shouldn't be part of an older city.

In the old internet days, "don't feed the trolls" was the only real way to deal with internet trolls on many sites. Nowadays that nugget of wisdom isn't as useful, because there's more people on the internet, and a troll is like spam, their efforts only need to work on one person and it's worth it to keep going once it happens.

There's certain people who are susceptible to this kind of thing, so the larger the sample of the population, the likelier they're going to get involved somehow, nowadays it's almost a certainty. So, the trolls will always be fed, and as a result they're everywhere all the time. "Don't feed the trolls" is now more about personal peace of mind than it is the correct method of getting rid of trolls.

Banning, however, is much easier now. I'm guessing blocking people only became an option later on, because "block the trolls" might have been the saying instead.

Or at least flu-like symptoms. There's strep throat going around, and luckily I don't seem to have caught it. I'll be back to doing art by Monday hopefully, so there's gonna be a lot of catching up to do.

I also took the last month off the comic to work on another project that's still ongoing, but will resume working on the comic again this month, once I have caught up with the work I missed.

I feel like there's too high a priority in getting a quote, whether or not what's said answers the question or not. It's basically left up to the audience to interpret the answer, because they'd rather continue asking questions that get no answers than possibly lose out on future interviews.

I'd like it if journalists could just summarize the answers given as "they refused to answer the question", and maybe provide the answers they gave in a separate document so people can critique the journalist if they feel the question did get a relevant answer. It would cut down how much time is wasted, and do more to depict corporations and politicians as avoiding responsibility for their decisions. If an interview were to result in no real answers given, or primarily focused on selling something unrelated to the interview, then the whole thing can be summarized as well, "They refused to participate in the interview".

And while this might initially feel like news companies would waste their time, because most important questions go unanswered nowadays, I feel that this only reveals how bad reporting has gotten, that filtering out the garbage would remove almost everything.

One bonus is that if journalists clearly and simplistically show which companies do this the most, it'd be easier to make apps that can blacklist them when buying things online. Suddenly there's a monetary incentive to accepting interviews and providing actual answers in them instead of dodging questions and turning it into an ad.

The smartest move reporters could do would be to develop an app for this themselves, it would rely heavily on their reputation for providing unbiased reports, and would require the ability to reach out to every company at all times (maybe by paying for past interviews other people made), but the result would be too useful to go without. At the same time, the reporters would need to ask questions people would like an answer to, not just whatever the reporter thinks would get a bad response. This part's trickier, and would be the biggest weakness in this system, but again this can contribute to their reputation if they only include the questions that deserve an answer.

In the past, countries would have narratives to guide public opinion on things like war, famine, natural disasters, and in general major historic events that may or may not have been easy to anticipate. There's thousands of years of history where governments manipulated the facts, edited history books, changed borders on maps, and so on. A fun example of this is the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, in which a ruler fell off his horse and told them not to add it to the records. Less fun of a fact is that a prior ruler executed one recorder and five other people for what was written in the records, which is why they tried to never again let a ruler see the true records.

If we were to take all of the records of the entire planet, compare them to each other, figure out which ones are more accurate and which were modifications meant to keep the authorities appeased, then we could have not only a more accurate world history, but also a record of every way governments have ever edited the facts, the ways they control the narrative of any world events, and in the end have a system through which global news reports can be added, decoded, and translated back into the probable truth, the likely reasons for the lies, the kinds of lies used, and what it means when a government needs to lie in that specific way.

Once all of that is done, and we have the truth as far as the government understands it, we can then develop another system that takes both sets of information, lies and truths, and compares it against real world events months and years down the line. This can be used to predict future events, whether it be that all governments agree to ignore the truth in favor of a beneficial arrangement (more about strategy than facts), or a disaster that could have been prevented (facts no amount of strategy can avoid).

Like, if a government tears down a bunch of forests for farmland, and thirty years prior those forests were planted so mudslides caused by over-farming would stop, then we can safely assume there will be mudslides in the future, right?

Doesn't take a genius to put these kinds of things together, but you do need to know all of the worlds history in order to connect the dots, which is hard to have every single human do, but it's a lot easier to make an AI that can do this for everyone.

So that's what I think we're going to see eventually, the develop of an AI system that removes all the social and political fluff, and just describes the facts based on past records, likely trajectories in global markets, weather patterns, and so on.

If this works how I think it will work, you could consult this system on whether you should buy a specific house, and it can tell you the likelihood that it'll be torn down within the next century due to any number of reasons. Maybe the house is on the best route for a highway and may be a poor choice in 20 years. Maybe it's the ideal location for wealthy people to live and is just waiting for the land value to rise into unaffordability for the people living there. Maybe the city has been kicking cans down the road and one of them is its lead water pipes.

Alternatively, is there a person you could personally go to and ask for answers to these kinds of questions? You could maybe talk to a historian about old laws, but they may not know enough about regional housing to help you there. You could talk to a librarian, but they may only point you to the books that could help, they haven't read every book in existence and memorized the relevant information. You could do all the work yourself, but it'd be unpaid, and if you neglect to publish your findings then every other person in the world would need to re-tread the same path, assuming you all got the correct, unbiased information through even more work.

There's two ways this gets created. Either some central authority controls it, and can edit what it outputs so they still control the narrative, or it's decentralized and everyone has a copy of it locally, which makes it harder to control the narrative if people don't constantly update it, making it easier to compare the quality of its guesses against new models. An easy test would be having it predict tomorrows news, and seeing which model performs better.