you cannot copyright a drawn apple with a piece bitten off

That's correct, you can not do such. Apple does not litigate its logo with copyright but in trademark disputes. Prepear and Georette are examples of this.

You too can create a logo of an apple with a piece bitten off. It's up to a court to decide if it's coming too close to the Apple trademark, most people want to just avoid that and settle amicably, but if you've got to the pocket change to fight it in court, you can argue that your bitten off apple isn't a trademark infringement.

If you find a company that isn't keen to defend their logo, you can totally get away with it. Apple is on the other end of the spectrum of being someone who will protect their trademarks to the bitter end. Jack Daniels and Disney are two more examples of companies that will legally punch a five dollar start up into a bloody mass over trademarks.

This is the thing we found out way back in the 1500s and 1600s. The various teams don't play nice with each other. The only reason they are accepting of one another at the moment is common enemy. The second that State religion is permitted, South Baptist and Catholics are going to be kicking each other's teeth in.

There's a shit ton of money to be had in the church. No one is going to let some other team take it willingly. They will absolutely eat each other and in the process wreck collateral damage unlike anything anyone has seen since the 17th century. That's not guessing, that's like a for sure outcome. We've got a little under 20 centuries worth of history that tells us what the outcome is every time.

High inflation: I'm losing money faster.

Low inflation: I'm losing money slower.

That's how it should be read.

Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, people are losing money a lot slower than its June 2022 peak of losing a shit ton of money per quarter.

Literally a slight video edit made a particular group think Biden was chasing after some invisible chair during D-Day. For a particular group of folks it won't matter about AI, they can't even detect objectively provable false information that was done with the most minor of functions a video editor provides. Not even when the proof is literally a two second Google search for the YouTube clip of the original footage.

AI isn't ruining the Internet, the Internet was already ruined by people whose mind wasn't ready for the ability for the entire world to speak to every other person on the Internet.

I think back to that one episode in The Orville when they're talking about how they gave some backass society a food replicator and they killed each other within five years. That's the Internet right now. We are still in the baby phase of the Internet and there are still a ton of people who just can not wrap their mind fully around the tool that's in front of them. For some, it's like I gave a five year old a PSRL-1 and said, don't hurt yourself and called it done.

AI isn't going to hurt people with critical thinking skills, it's going to hurt people who never had critical thinking skills and those people are already rabid fiends running rampant on the Internet like there's no tomorrow.

Yes friend. They totally went down that road.

Go in reverse of so much that's come before the court should be grounds for most of them coming under impeachment.

Like that should kind of be a rule. If any court made up of at least 40% the prior overturns case law more than 50 years old absent a constitutional amendment or Federal law laying the foundation for such an overturn, should be brought before the Congress on impeachment inquiry.

Like the whole way they've redefined the 2nd within the last ten years that overturned 200 years of prior understanding, that alone should have most of them barred from federal office for the rest of their lives. And how they redefined it without so much as a Federal law to point to or a hint of a Constitutional amendment suggesting the way they've made it now.

A literal garbage court sits the bench. What's worse is that one day the lean in the court will change and Republicans will cry about judges legislating from the bench.

Gustafson said in a statement following her defeat. "What we have to say about giving birth and everything related to it is secondary to whatever the men of the Republican Party want."

Any woman in support of the GOP is asking for this outcome in the end. Subjugation at the heel of their man. Someone elsewhere had mentioned Uncle Tom's, folks who kowtow to those who would enslave them in desperate acts for a glimmer of affection. Fundamentalist see people as pawns, not friends, not allies, not equals, but as tools to further their agenda. That's why towards the end, Uncle Tom was flogged to death by the very people whom he sought to curry a modicum of favor.

Similar story is Phil Valentine, mocked the COVID virus, derided any notion of a vaccine. Did exactly as his Republican peers did and said. Wanted nothing more than to kiss up to Trump and had bigger aspirations in the political sphere than his talk radio show provided. Got sick from COVID, spent the remainder of his life suffering to catch a breath alone in a hospital. There was a big moment of silence and remembrance on the radio the next day, by the end of the week it was "Phil who?" The people who he sought to have elevate his status in life forgot about him the second his situation turned unfavorable to their agenda.

Today, outside of his family, the majority of people who remember him are the exact people he mocked and taunted on his radio show. And it's not a remembrance of who he was that those people remember him, it's a cautionary tale. One doesn't get "into the group" with fundamentalist. You simply exist in the group until your utility runs out and then you are removed from the group as demonstration of the group's resolve.

I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don't think there's any debating this aspect.

At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn't want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don't because "reasons". We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don't because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or "it's complicated". And then there's China demonstrating at small scale that it's doable. So instead we say "oh well it wouldn't scale" or "oh well you stole all that tech" because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they'd like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can't do right now because their hands are tied.

For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I'm not going to debate it. But there's still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they're showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you're willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying "well oil interest are holding us back". No, there's only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It's a lack of will power.

Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they're false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don't because oil companies don't want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they've got right now.

We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this "oh we couldn't possibly do that here in the US" is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

I mean, great, we're all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don't get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

I mean yeah, let's call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let's not forget all the damn windows we've broken ourselves in our glass house here.

AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged

Man you wouldn't guess how airbrush artist felt when Photoshop came around.

Just a reminder that the last of the tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 for citizens ends in 2025. The flat 21% rate for businesses tax cut will continue long after that point.

The Republicans are the ones who passed the TCJA with the whole point being that they would run on this plank hard in 2024. The reason the income tax on people are ending in 2025 was because the House and Senate (both controlled by Republicans at the time) couldn't agree on a unified measure and decided to instead use reconciliation to move the TCJA through. And they're planning exactly this same tactic if they win in November.

Because they don't want a solution, they want a never ending problem.

This court is absolutely raring to go on major questions. In the past, when Congress left things wide open, the High Court usually gave deference to the agency to handle the details. Examples are things like:

• Congress: "Protect endangered animals" - Executive: "I've created a list of what I think is endangered."
• Congress: "Build a highway between Chicago and the Mexican border in Texas" - Executive: "I've come up with a way to string already existing roads and upgrade them to create this road."
• Congress: "Ensure that companies pay the full cost of environmental damage" - Executive: "I'll will bill them for CO₂ released into the air"

Congress doesn't list in massive detail every single possible permutation that's possible in law. That would create thousand page laws. But as EPA vs WV has shown us, the Supreme Court wants incredible detail. So we get the over 300 pages of new law that indicate six gases, fifteen different levels of municipality, and over ten thousand different industries plus all the various ways those three things interact with each other, to address what was "missing" from the original grant of authority for the EPA.

And the thing is, Republicans will bemoan these large tomes of text, saying "how can we know what's in it?" That's them breaks. If the Supreme Court say "a government agency can not do XYZ because it doesn't say XYZ in the law" then that means we have to be very detailed about what's in the law. That's how we get thousands of pages per law. That's kind of the reason why prior Courts didn't harp on this stuff. The President changes every four to eight years, regulation can change at that rate too. Law change very infrequently. So that whole EPA vs WV result, CO₂ regulation was something that basically bounced every time we swapped parties, NOW it's in law and it's going to be there for decades.

The ISPs are getting ready to shoot themselves in the foot here. Because if NN is enshrined in law, NN is here to stay. As long as it's a regulatory process, it can change President to President. But push come to shove, if Congress really wants to, they can enshrine Net Neutrality into law. And it only took the Democratically led Congress in 2021, three weeks after the SCOTUS case to pass the new 300+ page law giving the EPA those new powers explicitly.

That's the thing, the Republicans in the 118th Congress have shown they can not get anything done. They've pass 64 laws so far, most of them are renaming Post Offices and reupping funding to VA hospitals. They've spent almost 65% of the time in committee investigating various impeachment hearings. It's so weird how they've had a majority in the House, could have worked on budget related things, and they've barely talked about the impending tax increase that's coming once the tax cut act of 2017 runs out next year. They literally had planned to run on that sole thing back in 2017, that's why they set it up to expire during an election year, and not a peep from them this year on it.

Meanwhile the Democrats in the 117th Congress passed 362 laws, with bangers like the CHIPs act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the whole turn about is fair play with the whole EPA vs WV case. Because they took the majority they had and got things done.

So ISPs better hope Republicans can keep the mayhem up forever, because if Democrats do get into power in the House/Senate/and President. This whole stunt with the Supreme Court they're pulling could massively backfire on them. Because if NN gets into law, well then it's way harder to undo that.