Honestly, if FTL travel is never invented, the future is going to be so incredibly boring.

Look, the kind of people who show up in Epstein’s files are the kind that deserve zero sympathy. They’re the kinds of ultra-rich people who should be lined up for the guillotine just because of their obscene wealth hoards, even if they had nothing to do with child sex abuse.

But, just look at the phenomenon of SWATting. People phone in a malicious tip to the police in the hope that they kick down someone’s door. In addition to malicious people, a tip line is going to get people having schizophrenic episodes, people suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, etc.

To me, these allegations seem about as likely as there being a secret basement at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria where the elites were draining children of their adrenachrome. And, I’d really like it if my side didn’t go all Q-Anon and start believing every possible rumour just because it makes someone they hate look bad.

It was a bribe, but they still made a movie, and they still put that movie in theatres. It’s still going to be embarrassing if nobody sees the movie. There are reports of movie theatres where there are 3-4 people in the audience, and every one of them is being paid to be there because they have to write a review of the movie.

They could have paid Melania for her life rights, pretended to make a movie, and then not released it, or made it streaming-only, making some excuse about protesters, the safety of the theatre goers, etc. Instead they actually put it out into the world and invited the kind of ridicule it deserves.

Look, I think he’s a piece of shit. But, I also think we shouldn’t judge anybody based on anonymous accusations phoned into a tip line. I mean, can you imagine the kinds of nonsense MAGA folks are constantly phoning into tip lines about every prominent democrat?

Sure, like I said, they own lots of IP from their various acquisitions. But, they’re still fundamentally a cable company.

as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks

Theme parks.

“Kids, pile into the van, we’re going to Comcast World!”

I’m sure they own lots of IP from their various acquisitions. But, fundamentally they’re a cable company.

Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it’s not as bad as feared.

Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That’s the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won’t grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

For a typical car company that’s well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla’s stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn’t as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.

It’s a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.

It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot’s fault. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they’re misled by the chatbot. That’s excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.

Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don’t have competitors, you don’t have to work as hard to provide search results – especially if you’re actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they’re interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn’t responsible for the decline of search quality.

Yeah, this is why polling is hard.

Online polls are much more likely to be answered by people who like to answer polls than people who don’t. People who use Duck Duck Go are much more likely to be privacy-focused, knowledgeable enough to use a different search engine other than the default, etc.

This is also an echo chamber (The Fediverse) discussing the results of a poll on another similar echo chamber (Duck Duck Go). You won’t find nearly as many people on Lemmy or Mastodon who love AI as you will in most of the world. Still, I do get the impression that it’s a lot less popular than the AI companies want us to think.

I mean, that’s such a broad take, any system can change, doesn’t mean it’s inevitable

It also doesn’t mean that they’re all the same system. So, if capitalism is one of the many systems that can backslide into authoritarianism doesn’t mean that authoritarianism is a part of capitalism, despite your claim to the contrary.

We have had systems of feudalism and monarchies that have stayed steady for hundreds of years. In pre history, people lived in communes for thousands of years.

Yes, in the modern world things change much more quickly. Technologies didn’t change for thousands of years. That meant that the number of people a farmer or a plot of land could feed stayed constant for thousands of years. That meant the maximum size of a city was pretty constant. That dictated the kinds of governments that were stable.

It was technology that has made systems unstable, not capitalism.

You’re claiming that if capitalism tends to backslide into X, then X is part of capitalism. My point is that every system can backslide into something more primitive where a strong man makes the rules. They’re not all the same, so your idea that X is an inevitable part of capitalism is wrong. Capitalism is what we call it when it has a certain set of characteristics. If it no longer has those characteristics it’s no longer capitalism.

I’m claiming that capitalism in particular is one of the most corruptible systems

And you’re wrong. There’s nothing about capitalism that makes it more corruptible than feudalism or oligarchy. In fact, those systems are much more corrupt in general.

It tries to harness the power of greed and turn it into positive sum games

Whereas feudalism doesn’t even try to do that. It just skips the positive sum games part and accepts greed. At least with capitalism there’s an attempt to make things better.

I think greed driving society maximizes corruption

Maximizes corruption? You think capitalism is more corrupt than a strong man system where everybody is forced to constantly flatter and pay tribute to the strong man? A system where the rules are whatever the strong man says, so bribery is baked into everything?

think we should replace that with something else

Sure, let’s do it, what do you propose? And how do we get there from here?

Nothing is inevitable. Backsliding is always common. Most forms of government tend to backslide towards a strong-man at the top who is above the law. This is exactly what’s happening with the American democratic republic that was previously a mix of capitalism and socialism. That doesn’t mean that a strong man is a natural element of capitalism or democracy or republics or socialism or capitalism. It’s that a strong man who’s above the law is a common feature of human communities.

Pretty much every form of government that allows for more participation by the people being governed tries to put constraints on the rulers. The US called theirs “checks and balances”. The British started with the Magna Carta.

It’s like saying you like playing monopoly but then after all the properties are bought out you turn around and say it’s no longer monopoly.

You’re talking about monopoly, the board game, previously called “the landlord’s game”, a game designed to teach about the dangers of monopolies?

It’s not baffling when you realize that there are only 2 remaining car manufacturers in the US, and fewer than 20 worldwide.

Look at the number of car companies established just in 1900:

• Auburn: 1900 to 1937
• California Automobile Company: 1900 to 1902
• Massachusetts Steam Wagon Company: 1900 to 1901
• Dodge: 1900 to 1928
• Friedman Automobile Company: 1900 to 1903
• …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Vehicle_manufacturing_companies_established_in_1900

When there are only 2 manufacturers in a space, it’s no surprise if they ignore certain consumers. If there were a hundred different manufacturers like there were in the early 1900s, then there would almost certainly be someone offering something closer to what you want.

For example, instead of a lever to flush, you get a button. If the software isn’t up to date, the button won’t work.

But then they have the audacity to FORCE us all into it by outright destroying anything else

That’s because there’s no competition. Capitalism requires competition. Adam Smith thought it was the job of the state to step in and ensure that monopolies were broken up so that capitalism could work.

You cannot buy a good car anymore

There are only 2 US car manufacturers, 3 if you want to count Tesla.

rolling malware that is unfixable by the user

Because they’re weaponizing section 1201 of the DMCA to prevent people from competing with them.

What you hate isn’t capitalism, it’s that you can’t even get capitalism because the government refuses to regulate businesses. For capitalism to work, the state has to ensure that there’s healthy competition in the marketplace. But, when there’s competition a rich person who owns capital might lose. So, a rich person much prefers feudalism or a corporatocracy to capitalism.

Could be.

Sure, but you still have to respect the form of the statement. You have to pretend that something happened to someone else.

For example: “How would someone remove a 4 1/2 inch cylinder that’s stuck in an m&m minis tube. Asking for a friend.”

Not: “I got my dick stuck in an m&m minis tube, how do I get it out? Asking for a friend.”

Everyone knows that you’re talking about yourself, but you’re supposed to pretend that it’s your friend who’s the idiot.

Aside from everything else, apparently this guy doesn’t understand how “Asking for a friend” is supposed to work.

Not every big change is necessarily something you can meaningfully break up into small changes. Sometimes when you could break it up into small changes, you have to change its structure in a meaningful way to half-implement it and test out that half-version. It takes experience to know when it’s best to get the whole structure expressed it code, then to go back and tweak it based on any compiler errors. Most of the time the compiler errors are very minor things like a typo, so you don’t lose any meaningful time fixing them.