Virtually everyone I know is using AI, from helping with creative writing, to making video series, to programming, to homework help, to writing speeches.

And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it.

Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.

An excellent analogy would be the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles: yeah, the oil wells were dirty and everyone knew it, smog became a thing, sitting in traffic became a serious problem, and fatal vehicle crashes start happening, yet everyone kept using them.

The idea is that we give up the land tax revenues in exchange for the services the non-profit provides. (And of course the government does not decide which services are useful or not, the people do.)

One thing I might agree with is land tax for non-profits that charge fees for services, as opposed to those who work off of donations. I think that would fix the issue without destroying non-profits.

A profit for who? It's a non-profit. If the sale netted extra money it goes back to the people who donated, or to another non-profit.

The Mormon church has nearly $300 billion dollars in assets, mostly land. "Non-profit" indeed.

Non profits pay salaries.

Pastor, I mean the church, needs a new Ferrari.

There are almost no places where a housing shortage is due to a lack of land. Housing shortages have all sorts of reasons, from constructions cost, to zoning, to restrictions on what can be built, but it's virtually never a lack of land.

And parking is a productive use - they have services once a week, and parking means people can come to the service. That's the definition of productive use. Something does not need to be used 24/7 to be productive.

Church goers using parking lots like this is a use, but I doubt it's a productive charitable use that should to be subsidized by localities.

Every other contemporary development in my area that faces real economic reality is ground floor retail, commercial/residential on top, and optionally underground parking.

There are certainly productive religious charitable efforts using facilities like this: homeless shelters, community low-cost/free clinics, soup kitchens. I think these uses should be tax subsidized, but other mystical efforts should not be whether they generate a profit or not.

I think a good reform to the 501c3 system would be to make non-profits like these churches and hospitals classify their actual charitable activity and separate it from their other activity, just like individuals with a mix of personal/small business income/expenses are required to do.

Why should churches get great real estate in central locations but not housing? If people only come to church once a week, surely they can spend the extra time driving further.

No, the bottleneck is the desire to have children. Unless you are planning to force the women, you need policies (such as these) that encourage them to want children.

A state can do it, but it might fail, and the result of a failure would be a catastrophe so everyone is very cautious.

I'll happily pay more if that means less trash, less microplastics and less CO2. The current consumerism is not sustainable in the long run.

And when all those unnecessary increases in the cost of living lead to increasing vote share for the far right - eventually maybe even a far right government - what then? How sustainable will that be?

Have you actually read the science on microplastics? [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...

Why is that automatically bad?

> My feed is disastrous.

I've tested this many times. Your feed has what you watch. If it's disastrous, that's because that what you actually like to watch.

Stop watching a topic and it will go away. About 2 months later YouTube will offer it again to see if you want it, if you don't it goes away again.

I don't watch baby content. Somebody at home does, so youtube offers me that. No, we don't share accounts. No, we don't share devices. Sometimes youtube offers me Chinese and Indian content, and ads.

I seems your feed is more consistent than mine.

It adds some amount of "proxy content". But right-click or long-click and block the channel on the stuff you really don't want. Also if you watch a video you thought was interesting but it was lame, go to history and remove it.

And finally if you regularly watch stuff subscribe, it's a strong preference indicator.

I do get some junk in my feed now and then, but mostly I discover good stuff I enjoy. And that includes really small channels.

I think hard all the time, AI can only solve problems for me that don't require thinking hard. Give it anything more complex and it's useless.

I use AI for the easy stuff.

Not at all. IMAP can do a lot of complex operations on the email while leaving it on the server, for example you can have the server search the email, flag it (mark it important, or read, or unread).

POP can download the email, and that's about it.

Yeah, because then the client can do whatever it wants with the messages. The operations don't need any further support from the protocol.

The idea with IMAP is multiple clients can work with your email - for example your desktop and your phone can both see the same messages and manipulate them, even offline.

Gmail basically is IMAP with a couple extras, and your desktop (via a browser) and your phone (via a dedicated app) can both see the same messages. Only the phone can work offline though, because there is little demand for a dedicated desktop email client, it's always via a browser. But Google could easily make such a thing if they wanted.