They're like locusts! These big tech companies want everything for free, whether labour, personal or content. They won't always give it away for free.

It depends how loosely you want to define "tool". Certain other primates, birds etc use very primitive tools out in the wild. More sophisticated ones, with multiple parts etc turn up much later in the record.

From the people who brought you the film Sisu.

For some purposes, but not for others.

There seems to be a pattern of underfunding things and then replacing them with AI.

Harari has very specific ideas. He is a transhumanist for one, seeing humans blending with machines as an inevitability, even necessity. He does not see religion from the inside and possibly misunderstands how people operate within it. He has controversial views regarding free will (that we don't really have any), and that the human mind and genome should be hacked.

Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones.

A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.

I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a heavy TV viewer.

TV has a fairly bad record of keeping shows that are already shown to be good alive though because good does not equate profitable for the network or individual decision makers (which are again no the same thing).

That's just one of the things that has to go right: marketing, finding the audience, being in the right places and place in time for your target viewers, etc.

I think the problem nowadays is that there are so many channels and so much space to fill. TV runs 24/7 now on hundreds of channels. In many cases, it isn't worth the while of a small channel to make an expensive programme as they would lose money.

Sometimes, the "wrong" programme is the hit. I know the History Channel started off with serious documentaries (some of them excellent quality) which not enough people watched. They then tried Nazis and Ancient Egypt, but it seems to be "Ancient Aliens" which is their biggest hit. Its version of history is questionable, to say the least.

How many people even watch TV "channels" these days? Seems most people have moved to a la carte streaming services. I don't really like either myself and prefer local copies of films but seem to be in a very small minority there.

I've been having a lot of trouble with Amazon Prime. I specifically have it so that I can download films and watch them offline when I don't have internet, and yet the player keeps glitching. I do prefer physical media because at least I'm owning it instead of just hiring it.

Yeah, I don't really consider it a local copy when I can't play it in a player of my choice on any device I want. I'd be fine with digital files (although having a movie shelf is nice) but that isn't really an option so physical media (ripped to a hard disk for convenience) it is.

Well, A-Team was objectively terrible but I have a nostalgic connection to kids shows like that, Knight Rider etc. In retrospect Bay Watch was an effective CPR training tool at unprecedented scale.

I would be hesitant to pass judgement.

The A Team was objectively terrible, but I think it had a good main cast and never pretended to be anything it wasn't. Ditto Knight Rider.

I think Glen Larson was behind both of these.

Baywatch was often terrible, but many of us watched for other reasons.

Terrible shows are still better than actively malicious ones.

I have mixed feelings about television and no longer have one. Some great series but also tonnes and tonnes of forgettable and insulting trash.

I think television has had a negative effect on community and social interaction.

Restricting cars from town centres isn’t about a war on cars, it’s about making the centre usable for pedestrians

Some studies show that pedestrian friendly centres actually lift economic activity

Much of it is tax farming, e.g. parking permits and entry fees. In other places, councils pedestrianise space so that they can set up their own funfairs and Christmas bars etc in competition with local businesses.

I do not own a car right now, but I don't see much evidence of areas becoming more economically active, except in tourist traps. A lot of businesses and even retail has moved online or out of town to deal with rates. Most of the town centres round here I have seen are deserts filled with vape shops, tanning salons and hairdressers/barbers.

As I say elsewhere this is not just a city problem but a rural one. At my old home I would have to walk several miles to catch a bus which would appear several times a day. The majority of country areas here are not well served by buses.

> A lot of businesses and even retail has moved online or out of town to deal with rates. Most of the town centres round here I have seen are deserts filled with vape shops, tanning salons and hairdressers/barbers.

I think there is a mix of factors. Boomers started the giant supermarket trend, and there has been a giant megastore for everything that followed them. In my relatively small town, many things have moved to the city periphery because people like having a lot of choices and cheap stuff. Most of the offering is low-quality crap, but they don't mind; they actually like to buy more and more. The less it lasts, the better. Then you have the increased taxation by cities, of course, but this also applies to the megastore. It's just that they deal with much bigger volumes and exploit cheap labor, so it's easier to cover them. Finally, many things have moved online indeed, and very often it's not worth physically going to a store if you need a specific item because there is a 50/50 chance a store will have it or it's going to be the same cheap Chinese crap, just marked up.

There are still some decent stores in the cities; the problem is that their volumes are so low that the pricing is very high, and funnily enough, the people most likely to afford them (rich boomers) don't go there and instead flock to the megastore. You can't fix a problem with the "intelligence" that created it.

In the big EU cities it's a bit different; since most people will be on foot, it's very impractical to drive around even if you have a car.