Not_mikey

This is just like Canada banning foreign investment in real estate. It admits there's a problem, data harvesting , homes as investments, but just solves a small part of the problem pertaining to "foreign bad guys" while ignoring the larger domestic issue.

All it does is make the government look like they did something without actually confronting the powerful interests that are causing the problem.

They actually have a somewhat open door policy for the weebs through JET. If your an American with a college degree than your welcome in Japan. There just aren't that many of them and those people also don't tend to have children.

There are a ton of people in the Philippines and S.E.A that would do anything to get to Japan even if the work is hard because the standard of living is so much better, much like Mexicans and central Americans wanting to come to the u.s. They would also be more willing to start families. Like the u.s. though they don't like brown people and only let a limited amount of them in legally.

Maybe eventually, it has to do with market share and if the service is a "core platform". Signal doesn't have enough market share to warrant it yet, even iMessage wasn't forced to since it's not that popular in EU. The law was mainly targeted at WhatsApp as that's THE messenger in the EU.

I think you misunderstand what apples value proposition is, at least nowadays. The app store and not being able to use other app stores is not a reason people get iPhones. Maybe back when app stores were first created and the threat of malware was greater people might have considered it but nowadays no one cares. Even the idea of a unified ecosystem isn't as much a selling point any more because Google and Samsung offer similar seamless integrations with their accessories. You can see this in their marketing, they aren't focused on how all the apple products work together easily any more. In their marketing you can see what they think their value proposition is, and what was their big Superbowl ad this year, longer battery life ...

Apple at this point knows it doesn't have much of a value proposition for switching from android. So the only way they're gonna sell new phones is to get the kids who don't have a phone and convince the people who do have an iPhone to get a new one.

They convince the kids through their tried and true aesthetics and lifestyle marketing, this is about half there marketing these days. This along with iMessage in the U.S. and the general fear of being in the out group and obsession with brands that younger people have moved them towards iPhones.

They convince the current users with incremental upgrades, eg. Better battery life, better camera; and maintaining the walled garden and keeping exit costs high so they don't turn to androids for those incremental updates.

All this is to say that apple having a single app store isn't a sign of consumer sentiment, but a sign of apples desire to milk as much profits out of their current users as they can. Other app stores can only benefit the consumers, either they do get them for lower fees or don't because they put some value on the "ecosystem". From a company's perspective yes your right that they want to be able to do anything to their product they want, but the goal of regulation is to step in when the companies desires are at odds with the people or the consumers desire, this is one of those cases.

If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.

This is why "high quality" consumerist and capitalist "art" and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one's paying to get it made.

Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire

It's sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn't matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn't got overthrown in revolutions.

Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?

Let's say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of "a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil", does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?

For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I'd say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.

The glaciers and ice flow down to the ocean, here you can see the velocity of the ice there are a couple red streaks that could be called streams but they aren't the long narrow fast moving streams we'd call a river.

We really need to vote her out this round, San Francisco deserves better than this

By slightly modifying the output based on a set function

Not if you make the watermark part of the output itself

Oh definitely, I don't see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don't see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using more tried and tested technology and methods in a significantly less populated area on an established corridor, while hsr is building from scratch through the heartland of California.

It'll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.

Oh definitely, I don't see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don't see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using tried and tested technology and methods, while hsr is building from scratch.

It'll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.