The Vatican confirmed that the Pope hadn't applied for membership of the Lutheran church, and ursine faecal material is still to be found in forests.

Perhaps what is interesting is that this doesn't come as a surprise - and would probably like to hope that the NSA is as good at this targeting foreigners, though not, of course US citizens, that would be naughty. I guess that society has always been this immoral; we've just not realised it until recently.

It is in the interests of home owners / landlords to discourage new housing not just because of the capital gain it generates for them, but also because those houses have to be built somewhere. Too often that will be to develop land that is a currently attractive, and will replace it with chunks of concrete. People like having green spaces around them, so will resist such development - and earn the title 'Nimby' for doing so. Note that to the Nimby this is an example of enshitification, and that is an understandable point of view; would you be happy if your view were to include a 50 storey skyscraper where there is now a block single families houses? This is a problem, and merely bemoaning it without understanding is unwise.

The kid from a poor background or who goes to a poor quality school deserves additional credit for achieving the same level in the standardised testing as the adequately well off kid. But do be colour blind here.

I don't think racism is inevitable in anti-immigrant movements; the UK's Reform party has serious representation of ethnic minorities in its leadership, and Trump attracted significant ethnic minority votes. OTOH the AfD has gone down that route.

The core problem is, as you say, that centrist parties can't have a sane conversation about migration without being labelled 'racist'. The result is that the 'ordinary Joe' - who can see the damage it's doing to him - ends up voting for those who are talking about it. Overall this is revealing some new problems with democracy that we've not got a solution for, though the core problem: 'what to do when the majority demands the unacceptable' is a long term one. The present behaviour of Trump is about to test the US's dependence on the courts for this...

I want to believe that only humans can create the truly great music that will last centuries in our culture. It would be nice to know that AI can't do and we remain special. And I suspect for the truly great music that is probably true. But I suspect it's only true of a small minority.

CEOs in both China and India have an expectation of 966 working at least - 9am till 6pm six days a week. As a result the work required to get a serious startup off the ground in the USA is less unattractive to them than to Americans - though given the ability of American C level offices to end up divorced, perhaps they suffer the same problem.

Who got a smidgen under the 5% necessary to get MPs in the Bundestag was founded by a member of 'The Left', the inheritors of East Germany's Communist Party. They left to add a strong anti-immigration plank to their platform which otherwise remained very left wing.

This shouldn't be a surprise; both the AfD in Germany and the Marie LePen's mob in France have very left wing economic policies, just holding onto views with the establishment label as racist. The BWS caused the Guardian a real problem, being forced to describe it as something other than 'extreme right wing'...

This, of course, shows that the Democrats in the US could recover nicely if they could show they were seriously opposed to immigration; sadly the perception of their record is otherwise ;)

'Music completely created by an AI is not really music at all, music is 100% human created thing.'

But can you, or most of us, tell the difference? The value of a product is what the consumer is willing to pay for it. If the consumer is willing to consume AI generated music, then it's our right to do so, rather than succumb to the demands of the Musicians Guild to pay their members for it.

What, of course, we need is a genuine double blind test with AI and new non-AI music being played to punters and see if they can tell the difference. Seems like a great Master's Thesis for someone!

It provides me with a steady flow of interesting conversations with people I would never have met in real life, often making me think hard. Of course that's not popular... Meanwhile amusing memes and other bits to entertain make it a good place for me, and I've never BOUGHT anything from it, though I've taken up free offers of stuff being otherwise thrown out.

It works because it offers a forum that some of us can use to our benefit. Eternal navel gazing about how it's mostly doing 'X' now is irrelevant. Of course it, like the internet generally, will be abused by some; like any sharp tool some people will get injured by it. We need to learn to us it correctly, and yes, that's hard. Our propensity to expect other people to do the hard stuff for us is one of society's least attractive features.

So no, not sarcastic; rather your ignorance is showing.

On the whole the evidence is against it...

' "Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you."

Robert A. Heinlein