Unlike those lovely communists who frequently actively worked with the nazis (until '35) in order to weaken the social democrats and whos leader explicitly said "after Hitler, our turn". Much better eh comrade?

It wont do anything of the sort. Even if you accept the premise that somehow artists are being exploited from learning from their previous works, all that will happen is the AI companies will shift out of America to a juristiction that doesnt value extracting rents from IP above all else.

The bit that picture leave out is that first guy is almost certainly killed, as are a good few of those in the third panel. Thats what makes it difficult.

For all those cheering on the copyright mafia going after Anthropic, consider that some of the groups supporting anthropic against this massive overreach of "we get to decide how you use our works" include:

• Authors Alliance
• the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• American Library Association
• Association of Research Libraries
• Public Knowledge

Maybe this is not such a great thing?

You could even do district heating. Use the hot water output from the data centre and sell it cheap for piping into appartment blocks for heating.

Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.

You're right that there's orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that's far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.

I mean, Farage is a cunt, but he's been publicly in favor of PR for decades, likely not least because it would benefit his parties.

No I'm a meat eater who is anti-car! I'm more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.

Yeah, I too hate those hypcrites who complain about the massive environmental impact of AI, then drive a 10 mile round trip to buy a burger made from a cow raised on soy.

Just FYI, this use of republic is not recognised in political science and as far as I've seen is only used by americans justifying why their system is undemocratic. Republic just comes from "res Publica" (public affair) and means the head of state is not a monarch but a member of the public. There are very democratic republics like Finland and there are very undemocratic republics like the PRC. The way you describe a republic would apply to countries like the UK or Sweden, which are constitutional monarchies, not republics.

Representative democracy is a better term for what you are talking about, where the population elects representatives who are able to advocate for them and take the time to become subject matter experts on running the country (idealy).

If the tax is on fuel then it wouldnt matter where they are registered, they'd be getting refueled in the EU and so would pay the tax.

wouldn't this result in airlines dumping the extra cost on customers

yes, partially. If the increase in tax results in a particular flight being £50 more expensive for example they will rise prices by an amount. But it likely wont be the full 50 as airlines are already charging what they think the optimum price is, the price going up is likely to result in less sales.

It also incentivises the airlines to be more fuel efficient (and so less damaging to the climate), and punishes worse offenders like private jets more as the use more fuel per passenger mile.