Robot as Buyers…and as Advertisement Targets?

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Meta has released its broad-spectrum AI agent Muse, which does the user’s shopping, handles his email, handles a significant measure of his financials, maintains his calendars, and on and on. Leave aside the security concerns of such a broadly capable AI agent, especially one produced by Meta.

Amazon has blocked it from shopping on Amazon‘s sites.

In addition to selling goods, Amazon‘s shopping site has a large advertising business, and it won’t want to cede any ground to Meta in that space, analysts said. If agents do more shopping for users in the future, that means fewer humans to show ads to, and a potential rethinking of Amazon‘s business model.

It seems to me, though, that most folks shopping via AI agents tell the agents to go buy this sort of thing, not buy this particular thing. Thus, one answer would be to write ads tailored for AI agents as well as human-targeted ads.

Now we’d have robots selling, and advertising, to the robots that are buying stuff. And the ripples ripple. One ripple: humans, in addition to off-loading some of our work onto robots, could now off-load some of the burden of sorting through or ignoring advertisements onto their robots. Indeed, and this is part of Amazon‘s early-stage problem, humans using AI agents already are unburdening themselves of much of the hassle of dealing with advertisements.

Naïve or Ignorant?

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Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R) and Donald Boudreaux, an econ prof at George Mason University, centered their op-ed in Monday’s WSJ on the premise that if the Republican party gets suitably drubbed this fall, the remnants will revolt against President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs and revert to Reagan-esque free trade economics. On regaining majorities in the House and Senate, there will be a Republican backlash against Mr Trump’s tariff policies and those policies suitably altered or rescinded.

I’m hard pressed to determine whether these two, who should know better, are really that naïve or they’re that ignorant.

An ascendant Progressive-Democratic Party, whose leadership has sworn to fundamentally change our nation and our economy will set about doing exactly that. Beginning with their elimination of the Senate’s filibuster, they will transform our nation’s republican democracy structure, a structure that protects minority party rights and authorities, into a popular democracy, a one-party structure that ignores minority party imperatives. Popular democracies in this way are indistinguishable from authoritarian- or tyranny-run nations. They will continue their “transformation” with packing the Supreme Court, installing a majority of activist Justices instead of Justices sworn to defend our Constitution and to apply it and any statutes before them as they are written rather than as the newly installed activists, or their Party masters, want them to be written. Party has long opposed election laws that limit the franchise to citizens; once they’re in control this time around, they’ll not only control voting laws, they’ll also control vote counting process.

Party has already begun its promised transformation, beginning with that filibuster elimination commitment. It’s continuing with its open clasping of the Democratic Socialists of America to its bosom. The DSA is committed to centralized government control of our private economy, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) fundamental economic transformation. DSA, and so Party, are committed to subordinating our Court system to Congress, although this would be redundant with the packed Court. More long-term, they’re committed to eliminating the Senate altogether, although this may prove unnecessary: with the elimination of the filibuster, the Senate would be indistinguishable from the House—each State would simply have two legislators elected at large along with those elected district by district. This is ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dream of changing our nation.

With Party control of government, there may well be no further Republican majorities in either house of Congress.

Child Abuse vs Social Change

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The lede laid it out.

Child sacrifice is wrong. I thought we’d sorted this out a long time ago. Evidently some are still struggling with the concept.

Then he expanded on it as carried out by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who sacrificed her own daughter on the altar of her own social justice ego.

Ms. Hannah-Jones writes that she and her husband “felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.”
… It’s child sacrifice. Ms Hannah-Jones had the means to provide her daughter with a good education and chose instead to use her as a political pawn.

Hannah-Jones wants social change? She shouldn’t have abused her daughter by actively denying her a quality education. Instead, she should have sent her to quality schools while instilling in her Hannah-Jones’ own values. Then she could have let her daughter use that quality education to work toward social change from a position of knowledge and capability.

Or not. The daughter grown to adulthood is not Hannah-Jones’ pawn or her Talos constructed to do her bidding. Forcing her daughter into that is precisely the slavery against which Hannah-Jones pretends to rail.

Progressive-Democratic Party Power Grab

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Now they’re coming for our children. Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democratic governor Maura Healey has announced a new State government program that will send a government nurse into every newborn’s home.

Everybody in the state, when you have a baby, you’re going to have a home visit within days, weeks and that will be an opportunity for a healthcare provider to make an assessment to see if you need some additional support and resources[.]

A government nurse, and the government’s assessment of “need.” This is Party’s claim that our children belong to Government; they are not our families’ youngest members. Healey’s rationalization is nothing but political points harvesting in the aftermath of Lindsey Clancy’s trial for murdering her children.

Postpartum depression, anxiety, and other maternal mental health conditions are real medical conditions, and no mother should feel ashamed to ask for help or feel like she has to navigate this journey alone.

She’s pretending to solve a problem of miniscule proportion. The scale of the problem as it regards infant safety is this. According to the Deseret News, there were 2,282 babies killed through their mothers’ “maltreatment;” of these 912 were from deliberately inflicted injury (things like fentanyl poisoning were deemed accidental maltreatment in the DN‘s wisdom) between 2022 and 2026. In the same period, per Google’s AI, there were 15,394,000 babies born. Those 900 babies outright murdered represent 0.009% of the births. Those killed through neglect/maltreatment amount to just 0.0015% of the births. That’s certainly a tragedy for the babies involved, but it is in no way a justification for a Government intrusion of Healey’s scale.

Healey claims the program is “voluntary.” Sure. Think of all the tools Government has with which to harass a family that declines this government “favor.” Think of the liability Government will seek to apply should an accident befall the child whose family declined this government intrusion. Think of all the negative publicity and innuendo Government can let slip regarding any family who declines this government intrusion. Along those latter lines, recall the social opprobrium that was inflicted (and still is inflicted) on those ordinary Americans who declined to be vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus.

Nice kid youse got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

This what we can look forward to if we let Party get control of our House of Representatives and our Senate this fall and of the White House in 2028.

Press Dishonesty

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This one is exposed by Just the News as it describes a blatantly slanted Reuters “news” article.

Reuters on Thursday published a photo article bemoaning the injuries to a teenager who was wounded when his father’s pager exploded during Israel’s targeted attack on Hezbollah terrorists.
In the article, titled Two years after Israel’s pager attacks in Lebanon, teenage survivor rebuilds his life, Reuters never mentioned why Israel conducted the attack, nor did it mention Hezbollah or terrorism once in any of the 15 pictures it used to garner sympathy for 14-year-old Lebanese Ali Abbas. In one photo, Reuters explained how Abbas received his injuries, saying only that “his father’s pager” detonated when young Abbas went to pick it up after it began “vibrating intensely,” according to his mother.

This is lying by omission, the most typical mechanism the journalism guild uses for its dishonesty. The omissions are centered on “editorial decisions” regarding what news to present and what not to present or to spike outright.

The Reuters piece can be read here.