Probably, but the Wii games are actually good, as well, not microtransaction slop factories.

While the Wii didn't have modern microtransactions, its surprise popularity led to a lot of poorly produced cash grab games. I'd count those as slop, even if they aren't AI-produced slop.

The term for those is "shovelware", and the Wii really did have a lot of it.

Sounds like you're saying this tax didn't actually pass and won't, and this whole thing is overblown.

Why would bandwidth have anything to do with net-zero when it's one of the cleanest industries?

There was a blast of anti-datacenter either propgoanda or just incredibly bad science, a bit before the AI craze, where they took the total amount of internet traffic, the total amount of data center energy usage, then said, well, netflix is x% of bandwidth so it must be x% of energy usage too. https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/carbon-f...

In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.

(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)

Is there some structural reason that they can't reduce rent by developing a lot more housing? Is it purely artificial government rules preventing the construction of new housing — or are there actual constraints in terms of capital, labor, or materials?

Far too many people don't realise this. The internet only isn't P2P because of market economies of scale - like how all the bitcoins are (were) in Binance. The underlying tech is still P2P.

There is going to be a problem with everyone trying to register an address block. The internet addressing scheme isn't designed for many tiny networks and you'd have to use sub-blocks of a big block, but then someone owns the big block and gets held liable for the use of the whole block and therefore for the whole P2P system.

It actually works perfectly fine with many tiny networks, as we have been seeing with IPv4 blocks being carved up into increasingly smaller pieces. You might not be able to get a /12, but with enough cash you can for sure scrape together 2^12 discontinuous /24s, and it'll Just Work.

The XFRM thing is probably Dirty Frag, patched several months ago.

You'd think that would force them to make the third party app experience as good as the first party app experience. Instead, they did the opposite...

Seems like this is a signal that they in fact take the privacy concerns seriously?

If you have a weather app, is asking you every week whether you want it to access your location improving privacy?

Providing you with a routine notice that applications are repeatedly tracking your location is improving your privacy. If the legal requirement is 1st party applications don’t get special treatment, then yes asking you for the weather app too as opposed to just not asking for any apps is improving your security.

If they took the privacy concerns seriously it wouldn't take anti-trust pressure for this to happen.

Install one of the better village mods

I was thinking a nomic. Or Stack Overflow.

American companies get big by cheating basically. European companies find it harder to cheat or don't want to, so they lose.