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Chinese AI "rewiring" the world is a terrifying notion, as I'm sure by mandatory design, China's version of Asimov's laws would basically put obeisance to the party and big daddy XI as their primary tenets.

You could not be more right. At least from my personal experience. I mean, try and buy a phone case on Amazon right now. Literally every single listing on their top two pages of results when filtered by "best rated" is stuffed with fake / paid reviews. Its literally impossible to tell if you're going to be getting a quality product. And if companies like Fakespot or whatever can tell if Amazon reviews are fake, Amazon themselves could easily do as as well, or even just buy one of the review validating services and integrate the score directly into their listings. None of this is that hard, and especially not for Amazon with their scale and resources, so literally the only reason for them not to do this is that it is more profitable not to. The average consumer may have a relatively high degree of trust in Amazon, but anyone who thinks even remotely critically about their purchasing decisions is going to quickly realize Amazon is mired in fake reviews and duplicity.

I'm only interested in owning one of these devices when I actually own it. That is when the device is actually working for me, not the corporation who sold it to me. I'd be very interested in a personal assistant/ daemon that wasn't part of some walled-garden ecosystem and would actually put the benefit of its user ahead of the profits of corporation. If I ask my daemon to find me a product, I want it to compare prices across all online vendors to find the best deal for me, not just default to purchasing from Amazon. I also want complete control over the information it shares with third-parties, and I want to directly benefit from any information sharing as my data is valuable and if folks want it they're going to have to provide me some benefit in exchange.

As soon as I tried to sense it I could and now I can't stop.

The fact that they're doing this and the fact they're actively trying to export their political ideology via their Confucius institutes, etc. terrifies me. As China's influence grows, I worry they may make implementing similar systems of condition of doing business with them and that developing countries (in Africa especially) who are becoming increasingly reliant upon China for development funding, will lack the power to push back against this dystopian bullshit.

The thing I really, really don't get about modern media companies (IE. YouTube, Facebook, etc.) and their approach to advertising is their almost universally puritanical policies. I mean I get it to a point, they're trying to mitigate the risks of someone getting offended and suing them or something, but at the same time its such a lazy and one size fits all approach.

They have all this data about people, yet they're too lazy, or too genuinely puritanical, to actually use that data to show the right ads to the right people. Take for instance the category of drug "paraphernalia," (not to mention actual drugs). Neither Facebook, YouTube or Google will allow advertisers to advertise for these kinds of products, even in markets where they are completely legal. You'd think a more reasonable, and profitable approach, would be to use all that data to only allow advertisers to target these kinds of ads to people of legal age, in markets where these products are legal, but no, no-one can advertise them to anyone, anywhere, ever.

And what about sex toys? Why can't videos of say sex toy reviews, be age-gated, and then so called "Adult ads," you know, only be shown to the verified adults watching those videos? I'm sure there are lots of sex toy companies who would love to advertise to that audience, and I'm sure someone watching a sex toy review video would much rather see an ad for a sex toy than for another fucking Nissan, but yet again, Google et all would rather impose their bizarrely puritanical morality on the world, than do their jobs and build a system that actually works.

One of the prevailing theories about the extinction of Megalodons (60 foot great whites essentially) is that Orca's out competed them for their primary food sources. So thanks Orcas. Without you we'd be living in a world with 60 foot sharks and that would be absolutely bloody terrifying.

Not to mention that most so called "Reviews" these days are just a rote listing of the products features from company press releases.

I can't count the number of laptop / smartphone reviews I've seen the last couple of years that don't even contain a single benchmark. The extent of the actual "reviewing" that takes place is some glib anecdote about how "there didn't seem to be much noticeable lag" or some other contrite BS.

I hate this race to the bottom of the customers presumed intelligence.

Easily. I know a few people from my agency days who had sub 100K followers made $50K+ annually (and got a bunch of free trips) through paid promotion.

Personally I find it kind of depressing that bikini babes and comedy bros are making that kind of money for that kind of "work," but in a society as obsessed with fame, youth and beauty as our is, it shouldn't be that surprising.

I work in post secondary administration, so I think I have some perspective here. Part of the problem, at least in the US & Canada (Where I live) is that post secondary institutions are positioning themselves less and less and places to get an education and more and more as places to go for an "experience." Its no longer enough to provide a quality education, universities now are selling themselves on their facilities, their "student life" and all the other intangibles that are secondary to actual education. This leads to all the administrative bloat we're seeing as now that many schools are functioning more like glorified 4 years spas they have to have departments filled with staff to plan events, throw parties, Snapchat sports games, provide "save spaces," etc.

I haven't been in the sector long enough to have a real handle on when or why this shift happened, but from my perspective its the primary driver of the increasing administrative bloat. Schools are competing more on the intangibles, and so they need to invest more into these areas, which means more staff and more overhead.

Personally I think the whole university model isn't long for this world though as there are plenty of ways competency can be signaled apart from a fancy foil-stamped piece of paper and eventually when the costs of university education don't provide a positive return over any reasonable time horizon students are going to start looking for alternatives en masse and the market will innovate to meet that demand.

Our selection process is as follows: "Does your daddy have money?"

I am perennially amazed at the ire of sellers who build businesses on someone else's platform, and then complain when the purveyor of said platform changes the rules. If you want to get to determine the rules of the game, you have to build your own playing field.

I live in Vancouver, can confirm. Maybe after a significant liquidity event or two pumps some capital into the local ecosystem, but at present there are few (if any) world class tech companies here and despite the incredibly high and fast rising cost of living, wages are actually the lowest of any major Canadian city. Sure its a desirable place to live, but few world class talents are going to relocate here to work for second or third tier companies, for 50% less than they'd make in other markets, when a 30% more of their salary will be going to housing costs. Vancouver is a real-estate city, not a tech city and likely always will be.

Trader Joes doesn't have a goddamn peg-leg to stand on in this dispute. If Trader Joes had made any indication whatsoever they were seeking to satisfy the clearly substantial demand for their products in Vancouver I might better be able to see their side of the story, but they have done absolutely nothing to expand into what would be ludicrously lucrative market. I know multiple people who have sent bloody hand-written letters to Trader Joes begging them to open a store in Vancouver and yet they would rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting a local small-business owner than satisfy the demand themselves. Regardless of the legality of this situation Trader Joes has not won the moral high ground.

Misjudged is an understatement. There is no appetite for these over-priced "Connected" bikes. They are essentially taking a $1000 Chinese carbon bike and selling it for $1500 with the extra cost attributed to an integrated, non-upgradeable computer and some sensors, all of which can already be found in any given customer's existing smartphone, which can easily be mounted onto whatever bike the customer wants. I don't get why anyone would take a bicycle, something that has a useful lifespan of potentially decades and integrate it with technology that will become obsolete in less than a couple of years. Just because you can put a computer and sensors in something doesn't mean you should or that anyone will pay for it.

I don't really think "innovation" can be defined as replicating manufacturing processes developed 100 years ago. This is simply playing catch up in terms of manufacturing processes and quality control.

Hope these "micro farmers" enjoy the good times while they last as their days are numbered. Sensors, automation and intelligent, intensive and most importantly organic, vertical farming is going to ultimately decimate the small producer farming industry. The thing is produce is a commodity, not a branded good, and people ultimately don't care what "label" is on their vegetables and won't pay a premium for a given label when they can get reasonable analogs for the same or a lesser price. Consumers just want quality produce at a reasonable price.

When technology driven high intensity automated farms are able to output yields orders of magnitude greater than these people digging in the dirt with hand-tools are able to output, at a commensurate if not substantially higher quality, they'll be able to undercut the prices of these "micro farmers" by significant amounts and all consumers will care about is that their organic heirloom greens taste just as good but cost half the price. Not the mention they'll do so with a substantially reduced environmental impact, requiring less water per unit of output and requiring substantially less space allowing formerly agricultural lands to be returned back to their natural state.

Small scale agriculture is a fantastic solution to the problem of disaffected young people who want to be farmers, but doesn't really offer any practical solutions for the rest of the world.

Racial discrimination is completely legal in China. Why the hell would anyone want to move to a country where they can legally be discriminated against?