Right, the purpose is to actually arrange for legitimate competition. Ideally, we would split by whatever facets actually make sense; consider something like fighting disciplines where the split is by weight, or auto racing where it's by the class of vehicle, power-to-weight ratio, etc.
The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.
Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....
I doubt that 5 billion people could watch the Olympics at all.
Where I am from, there is so little interest in the Olympics that I doubt even half my countries' population would be interested. I have never watched the Olympics ever, and amongst my family and friends, there is little to no mention of it. It is a minor cultural phenomena. This seems to me like there were large extrapolations made.
How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.
I sincerely doubt more than half the population of the entire planet showed more than a passing interest in them, and I'm still curious how it'd be possible to measure that.
It really is crazy that environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," and suddenly everyone started screaming "No, boo! We like the way things are!" I have a friend who has never used an induction range before that is dead set that he never wants one. I just don't get it.
To be fair induction ranges aren't without issues, not due to the concept itself but failures in implementation.
Touch screen controls are rife and not only become impossible to use when, say, grease is splattered on them or your hands are wet/wearing gloves (common when cooking on a stove top), they can even be falsely activated by such things. Cold spots can also be a concern depending on your cookware.
Unfortunately a lot of promising technology has matured in a time of consumer product enshitification, and there is no established track record for people to be nostalgic for.
Again, I’m talking about someone who has never used one who has their mind made up.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring gas. It has many superior use cases. My point is that “no, I like things this way and won’t ever consider trying the other thing, much less changing, even though the other thing ends up being effectively free in the long run” is silly, and almost certainly based in some kind of identity.
Where as I think most curious people would think "Oh, neat, a new cooking surface. I'd like to try that thing."
At least as recently as a few years ago, a lot of induction ranges on the market would tend to break and need expensive repairs. I've forgotten which part it is, I think it's the inverter or something. I've seen it happen once at somebody's house then I remember reading about that very same problem on reddit from a repair guy IIRC. I think some of the electrical equipment is somewhat under spec'd and can't handle the current. Repairs tend to be in the several hundred dollar range and can happen somewhat frequently, like annually. (This may not be a common problem anymore)
I have one from IKEA that they market as their own (it's made in partnership with someone, can't recall who). I've had it for 3 years now, never had a problem. Was this a specific model/brand or something?
To me this sounds a little like "I saw that fiats break down often, so I better not get a car" which is obviously silly
This is exactly it. If you don't connect it, it's a dumb stove like any other.
I was extremely dubious about connecting it, but I decided to do it anyway and see whether it's worth it. So far I've noticed two things:
* It sets the clock with NTP and follows daylight savings time. This actually might be worth it, I'm one of those people who otherwise just lives with clocks set an hour wrong for half the year. The odd thing though is that this isn't default behavior, I had to install an add-on in the mobile app.
* It gives me a mobile notification when the oven gets to temp. Not really compelling.
So depending on how you feel about clocks, feel free to skip the wifi setup.
When you realize that trillions have been spent on anti-renewables propaganda over the last half-century, it gets easier to understand. Many people have been indoctrinated into fighting tooth and nail for the right of oil companies to destroy the environment.
> environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy,"
It's not free. It costs trilliions of dollars to build and maintain. I think it's worth it. But one place where the climate-change movement lost the plot was in underplaying costs and overplaying the doom.
If I install solar panels, a battery, and a next gen breaker box in CA, even with premium equipment and no subsidies, I'm looking at a max payback period of like 20 years, right? At that point yea, it's effectively free energy.
Is it an investment? Sure, but it's an investment that trivially pays for itself.
I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else
> isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars?
Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage.
I am massively pro renewables. But you have to ignore a lot to pretend it's without risk.
The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you.
This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.
There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale:
1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr.
2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability.
3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr.
If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit its expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits.
The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying your purchase.
If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future.
No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference.
> You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you
This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsense.
I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part.
The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right.
Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand.
This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely.
> even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand
See Uruguay. Bet heavily on renewables [1]. Baked in a high cost [2].
If LNG becomes crazy cheap and you're stuck with expensive solar and battery, the countries with cheaper power will eat your industry. On a household level, you wasted money. The alternate you who didn't put money into the solar and battery set-up could have earned more from other investments and had cheaper power.
Put another way: if you remove the decommissioning costs, the same argument could be used for nuclear. Once you've built it, it's sort of "free." Except of course it's not. Building it took a lot of work.
Per your sources it looks like they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage:
Household electricity prices are 157% of average in SA, and 200% of industry prices. That's not a case of renewables backfiring, it's a case of strange policy resulting in weird pricing.
> they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage
Germany had to do the same thing when their power costs threatened de-industrialisation. The base cost of electricity in Uruguay is higher than its neighbors’ in an environmentally-wonderful but economically-problematic way.
I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return.
Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future.
I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital.
I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.
To be fair, CA is one of the only places that's true, largely due to PG&E fuckups paired with a legislature keen to grant them unlimited money to kick back to shareholders.
Every place I've lived other than CA has had >3x cheaper electricity. If the max break-even period in CA is 20yrs, that's 60yrs in those other places, which is both longer than I practically care about (not that I'm not a fan of non-renewables for other reasons, but we're in a thread talking about costs) and also far beyond the useful life of any of the renewable tech involved, meaning I wouldn't achieve a full 60yrs of benefits in the first place, even if I let the system run for an indefinite period of time.
I know there are other places with high energy costs, but for the majority of the US (both by land area and population count) solar doesn't make economic sense without additional incentives.
And even that analysis assumes that you're forced to use electricity. Many home appliances are vastly more efficient dollar-wise when powered by various petroleum products.
Some people (myself included) are quite attached to cooking with gas. Induction seems to be the best alternative and doesn't require non-renewable fuel.
Resistive electric stoves aren't super popular for cooking on. Gas stove use gas which can't be powered by traditional renewables. Induction cooking is competitive with gas cooking and can be powered by renewables.
See, when I initially wrote that comment, it legitimately did not occur to me that there was even such a thing as a "gas stove" until I walked away from the computer. In my world they're a strange novelty.
Wait, what?!? Nothing about trying to strategically put yourself in an ideal situation during a recession is going to make anyone else worse off. Much of this isn't zero-sum, and assuming the investments are not rent seeking.
If I were to invest in potatoes because I thought people might need potatoes, then there should be an incentive to make more potatoes, and if people need potatoes, then more potatoes are likely to exist... which helps people get food.
If I instead concern myself with clutching my pearls and tightly as I can, and I don't invest in potatoes, then there is less of an incentive to make more potatoes, fewer people are able to buy the limited supply of potatoes, and everyone is poorer for it.
I studied philosophy focusing on the analytic school and proto-computer science. LLMs are going to force many people start getting a better understanding about what "Knowledge" and "Truth" are, especially the distinction between deductive and inductive knowledge.
Math is a perfect field for machine learning to thrive because theoretically, all the information ever needed is tied up in the axioms. In the empirical world, however, knowledge only moves at the speed of experimentation, which is an entirely different framework and much, much slower, even if there are some areas to catch up in previous experimental outcomes.
Having a focus in philosophy of language is something I genuinely never thought would be useful. It’s really been helpful with LLMs, but probably not in the way most people think. I’d say that folks curious should all be reading Quine, Wittgenstein’s investigations, and probably Austin.
I think we may have similar perspectives. Regarding empirical knowledge, consider when the knowledge is in relation to chaotic systems. Characterize chaotic systems at least as systems where inaccurate observations about the system in the past and present while useful for predicting the future, nevertheless see the errors grow very quickly for the task of predicting a future state. Then indeed, prediction is difficult.
One domain of knowledge I think you have yet to mention. We can talk about fundamentally computationally hard problems. What comes to mind regarding such problems that are nevertheless of practical benefit are physics simulations, material simulations, fluid simulations, but there exist problems that are more provably computationally difficult. It seems to me that with these systems, the chaotic nature is one where even if you have one infinitely precise observation of a deterministic system, accessing a future state of the system is difficult as well, even though once accessed, memorization seems comparatively trivial.
Where can I read about how LLMs have changed epistemology? Is there a field of philosophy that tries to define and understand 'intelligence'? That sounds very interesting.
There is already philosophy of mind, but it was pretty young when I was in grad school, which was really at the dawn of deep learning algorithms.
I’d say the two most important topics here are philosophy of language (understanding meaning) and philosophy of science (understanding knowledge).
I’ve already mentioned the language philosophers in an edit above, but in philosophy of science I’d add Popper as extremely important here. The concept of negative knowledge as the foundation of empirical understanding seems entirely lost on people. The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb is a very good casual read on the subject.
> Math is a perfect field for machine learning to thrive because theoretically, all the information ever needed is tied up in the axioms.
Not really; the normal way that math progresses, just like everything else, is that you get some interesting results, and then you develop the theoretical framework. We didn't receive the axioms; we developed them from the results that we use them to prove.
Axioms are, again, by definition, arbitrary. It is effectively irrelevant that we try to develop axioms so that the framework mirror the real world. Everything falls out of the axioms, period.
If you want to change the axioms to better reflect some aspect about life, that's all well and good, but everything will still fall out of the new axioms.
A different set of "everything" will fall out of the new axioms. You can enumerate it, but no one will care.
That doesn't make for a perfect field, or even a good field, for machine learning to thrive in; what we care about is finding useful results. Starting with arbitrary axioms is a good way to prevent that from happening.
Compare this discussion from an algebra textbook I've been reading recently:
-----
The possibility of combining two elements of A(S) to get yet another element of A(S) endows A(S) with an algebraic structure. We recall how this was done: If f, g ∈ A(S), then we combine them to form the mapping fg []. We called fg the product of f and g, and verified that fg ∈ A(S), and that this product obeyed certain rules.
From the myriad of possibilities we somehow selected four particular rules that govern the behavior of A(S) relative to this product.
[...]
To justify or motivate why these four specific attributes of A(S) were singled out, in contradistinction to some other set of properties, is not easy to do. In fact, in the history of the subject it took quite some time to recognize that these four properties played the key role. We have the advantage of historical hindsight, and with this hindsight we choose them not only to study A(S), but also as the chief guidelines for abstracting to a much wider context.
-----
It takes work, a lot of work, to determine what axioms you should use. Where do you think the information necessary to make that determination comes from?
I'm talking about a deductive framework based on by definition arbitrary axioms.
You're talking about an inductive framework in which we create deductive frameworks that model the world we live in as best as we can tell. This is very, very hard work. The flipping back and forth between the inductive framework and the deductive framework -- between modeling reality and discovering and testing new aspects -- is the heart of what knowledge is, but again, this is the dance between the two frameworks.
I'm just talking about that deductive framework, that exists, locked in it's by definition arbitrary axioms. It's in that framework that machine learning should thrive, because all of the propositions possible will fall out of the axioms.
> I'm just talking about that deductive framework, that exists, locked in it's by definition arbitrary axioms. It's in that framework that machine learning should thrive, because all of the propositions possible will fall out of the axioms.
You like to repeat yourself. Are there other words you can use to describe what you're supposedly thinking? What does it mean for machine learning to thrive in a space?
In the same way that you can derive all valid proofs from a set of axioms, you can derive all valid 320x240 bitmaps from a (much simpler!) set of axioms. Does this mean that artwork is "a perfect field for machine learning to thrive [in]"? What would be an example of a field that isn't "perfect for machine learning to thrive in"?
I agree and not all mathematicians care about or are motivated by how well a set of axioms model the real world. To a mathematician the richness of the consequences of a set of axioms is its own reward.
In this sense mathematicians are board-game designers. It matters less how well the game describes nature's reality than how fun it is to play the game that results.
Now if you were a physicist, the game has already been design by some other mechanism and you have to probe to understand the rules and discover its consequences.
Also, we can do thought experiments, simulations in our heads, that often are as good as doing them for real - it has limitations and isn't perfect though. But it does work often. Einstein used to purposely dose off in a weird position so that something hit his leg or something like that to slightly nudge him half awake so he could remember his half-dreaming state - which is where he discovered some things
> distinction between deductive and inductive knowledge
There's also intuitive knowledge btw.
Anyway, the recent developments of AI make a lot of very interesting things practically possible. For example, our society is going to want a way to reliably tell whether something is AI generated, and a failure to do so pretty much settles the empirical part of the Turing test issue. Or alternatively if we actually find something that AI can't reliably mimic in humans, that's going to be a huge finding. By having millions of people wonder whether posts on social media are AI generated, it is the largest scale Turing test we have inadvertently conducted.
The fact that AI seems to be able to (digitally) do anything we ask for is also very interesting. If humans are not bogged down by the small details or cost of implementation concerns, and we can just say what we want and get what we wished for (digitally), what level of creativity can we reach?
Also once we get the robots to do things in the physical space...
I don't want to do the thing where we fight on the internet. I don't know your background, but I'll push back here just because this type of comment that non-philosophers seem to present to me, which misses a lot of the points I'm trying to make.
(1) "intuitive knowledge" - whether or not you want to take "intuitive knowledge" as a type of knowledge (I don't think I would) is basically immaterial. The deductive-inductive framework dynamic is for reasoning frameworks, not knowledge. The reasoning frameworks are pointed in opposite directions. The deductive framework is inherited from rationalist tradition, it's premises are by definition arbitrary and cannot be justified, and information is perfect (excepting when you get rare truth values, like something being undecidable). Inductive/empirical framework is quite the opposite. Its premises are observations and absolutely not arbitrary, the information is wholly imperfect (by necessity, thanks Popper), and there is always a kind of adjustable resolution to any research conducted. Newton vs Einsteinian physics, for example, shows how zooming in on the resolution of experimentation shows how a perfectly workable model can fail when instruments get precise enough. I'll also note here that abduction is another niche reasoning framework, but is effectively immaterial to my point here.
(2) The Turing Test is not, and has never been, a philosophically rigorous test. It's effectively a pointless exercise. The literature about "philosophical zombies" has covered this, but the most important work here is Searle's "Chinese Room."
>The fact that AI seems to be able to (digitally) do anything we ask for is also very interesting.
I don't even know how to respond to this. It's trivially, demonstrably false. Beyond that, my entire point is that philosophy of language actually presents so hard problems with regards to what meaning actually is that might end up creating a kind of uncertainty principle to this line of thinking in the long run. Specifically Quine's indeterminacy of translation.
I thought I agreed with most of your original comment that I replied to, and here you are ready to fight. I'm not even sure what you're fighting, and I certainly didn't have in mind the things you responded to.
Well, I guess I learned not to talk to philosophers (especially those who went through school) the hard way. Sometimes I forget my lesson and it's always sad when this happens. Have a good day.
Searle's Chinese Room is a fallacious mess ... see the works of Larry Hauser, e.g., https://philpapers.org/rec/HAUNGT and https://philpapers.org/rec/HAUSCB-2
The importance of Searle's Chinese Room is how such extraordinarily bad argumentation has persuaded so many people open to it.
And the literature about philosophical zombies is contentious, to say the least, and much of it is also among the worst arguments in philosophy--Dennett confided in me that he thought it set back progress in Philosophy of Mind for decades, along with that monstrosity of misdirection, "the hard problem". Chalmers (nice guy, fun drunk at parties, very smart, but hopelessly deluded) once admitted to me on the Psyche-D list that his argument in The Conscious Mind that zombies are conceivable is logically equivalent to denying that physicalism is conceivable, so it's no argument against physicalism ... he said he used the argument to till the soil to make people more susceptible to his later arguments against physicalism (which I consider unethical)--all of which are bogus, like the Knowledge Argument--even Frank Jackson who originated it admits this.
Similarly, Robert Kirk, who coined the phrase "philosophical zombie" in 1974, wrote his book Zombies and Consciousness "as penance", he told me when he signed my copy.
> I don't want to do the thing where we fight on the internet.
Nor me ... I've had these "fights" too many times already and I know how they go, and I understand why people believe what they believe and why they can't be swayed, so I won't comment further ... I just want to put a dent in this "I'm a philosopher" argumentum ad verecundiam.
I would hope that philosophy would be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority. I say I don’t want to fight exactly because I don’t want to come off like a jerk because I’m arguing. If the Chinese Room is a mess, I welcome the argument, and will happily read the paper.
I’m less open to push back against philosophical zombies, as the argument seems trivially plausible, from a position of solipsism.
Philosophy may be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority--because that's a category mistake--but philosophers certainly aren't.
Hauser's papers are just a part of a large literature rejecting/refuting Searle's Chinese Room, but he has probably taken Searle more seriously than most. After Searle's well known response that waves away numerous objections, many people dismissed him as acting in bad faith. (It would have been even worse if they had known about the accusations of sexual assault. Sure, that would be ad hominem and intellectually dishonest, but we're talking about human beings, same as with arguments from authority.) See, e.g., https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c... where Daniel Dennett writes:
> For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993).
etc. If you've never read any of this literature yet can facilely write what you did above about Searle's discussion of the Chinese Room being "the most important work here", I don't expect you to start now ... but at least reconsider posing as a philosopher who is knowledgeable about such things.
Your reason to be less open to "push back against" (an odd formulation--the burden is on those who claim that they are conceivable, and therefore physicalism is false) philosophical zombies seems to hinge on another radical failure to understand the issue and unfamiliarity with the literature.
Philosophical zombies are completely independent of solipsism. The conceivability of zombies says that, if this is a world in which you are the sole inhabitant and you are conscious, then there is a possible world that is physically identical to this world and has the same physical laws, but the sole inhabitant (scoofy'), while physically identical to you and behaves identically, isn't conscious. That is, consciousness is not a consequence of physical laws and contingencies but is some sort of ethereal goop that accompanies physical entities. Of course Chalmers and other modern dualists don't subscribe to Descartes' substance dualism, but their attempts to formulate "process dualism" or some other nonsense solely because they need some alternative to physicalism--which they reject because they are hopelessly confused about the nature of consciousness and "qualia"--are frankly incoherent.
I definitely don't want to underscore this point. I agree with you that the sense that "nothing matter, everything is fake" definitely feels more real today than it did a decade ago, or even four years ago.
I'm honestly just surprised that it feels like it's showing up on HN right. I suspect that the proliferation of machine learning into artificial intelligence probably brings a lot more laypersons onto HN that would otherwise not have been here.
My point isn't that it's about tradeoffs. I'm all for that. My point is that many-if-no-most interlocutors reject the notion that scamware could even be a problem. This is why I'm concerned about good-faith discussion here.
I definitely don't want to complain about people just disagreeing with me. My point is that it feels like many of the threads that end up in /active feel like they are in a kind of reality distortion field.
I guess a good parallel to real life is when I get into housing market discussions in SF and people start saying that "we have plenty of housing, it's just that investors are buying up all the units and then not renting them" (not some investors, most investors) which is trivially, demonstrably false, beyond the fact that it makes no sense. That's the kind of "wait what?" feeling I'm getting a lot.
It's very obviously not irrelevant. Google is not going to let their main phone app product become associated with Grandma losing her savings! That's not going to help the free software folks... it's going to send everyone over to iOS.
> Google is not going to let their main phone app product become associated with Grandma losing her savings!
How did they manage to survive as the grandma-account-draining brand for over 15 years, though? They're still the market leader.
One of the best arguing tactics the pro-control side has come up with is "The way it works right now is JUST not good enough". And then you don't need to argue any further or substantiate that. You just force your opponent into coming up with new measures because obviously right now we have an emergency that must be dealt with immediately. So far, this reasoning has worked for program install restrictions, de-anonymizing internet users, all sorts of other random attestation and verification measures, and it will be used for so much more.
My question to all that is - what has happened NOW that changed the situation from how it was just a couple years back?. Google hasn't been sitting idle for all these years, they've been adding measures to Android to detect malicious software and prevent app installs by clueless users - measures that were striking a balance between safety and freedom. Why is everything safety-related in the last few years suddenly an emergency that must be rectified by our corporate overlords immediately and in the most radical ways? How did we even survive the 2010s if people are less secure and more prone to being scammed with the new restrictions right now than they were back then?
I'm not saying there's not an issue, but without hard stats, these issues will always be magnified by companies as much as possible as the wedge to put in measures that benefit them in ways other than the good-natured safeguarding of the consumer. In an open society, there's always a point where you balance the ability to act freely with ensuring that the worst actors can't prosper in the environment. Only one of these things is bad, but you can't have both. You need a middle ground.
It's for the same reason governments all over started to implement "age verification" laws all of a sudden, they never tell us their real motivation. That we can only speculate on, but for many people it seems they just go along with it and believe them all on face value, that's what all the media does anyway. The overarching goal they all work towards seems to be total control and surveillance of people's information sources and communication.
Insufficient answer. "The past 15 years" is asking about that entire period. If you want to compare a specific point in time, they asked what changed since "a couple years ago". A fair point-in-time comparison might stretch "couple" as far back as 2020 because of how they talked about surviving the 10s, but no further.
So, 2020 or 2023 or so. Plenty of ransomware, plenty of phone banking. What changed since then?
The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people.
The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.
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