Middle management and above:

"Hey, Mista Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you".

The last three corporate hackers in a mop closet somewhere:

"Still had the idea, though."

You're thinking of the modern civilized places. (Do the weirdos consider those joints woke?)

The one I used to live near was the original Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge, which burned anthracite until it closed.

I have no problems with coal-fired pizza joints and similar. The amount of pollution from this is minuscule, and in general small-scale, artisanal use of stuff doesn't hurt. It isn't that coal is morally evil in and of itself, it is the massively abusive use of it as a routine energy source that's destructive.

Those places suck for the neighbors, though. I lived a few blocks from a coal-oven pizza place for a few years. Only smelled it sometimes when the wind shifted the right way, but I would not want to live any closer to one.

I suspect this as well. I would not touch blockchains for stocks with a 10' pole. I think it is just another way to disconnect the stocks from actual stock certificates.

Consider - for years now the SEC has allowed brokers to get away from reality with shorting stocks. Many times I have seen aggregate short volume that exceeds the *entire existing number of shares*. That used to be impossible.

Originally, the brokers had to literally track down someone who owned shares and agreed to "rent them out" for a short seller to sell on the market and perform a short sell.

Now? The brokers just act like bookies, take the 'bet' from the short seller, and "we'll settle it all up in a few days or so".

This tokenizing is ultimately just another way to *tell* people they have shares in a company. Supposedly it is backed by actual shares, until we find out one day it was all spent on hookers and blow. Regulations and safeguards have been stripped away every year - it's getting back to a wild west mentality - no one is keeping everyone honest. Same people who idolize the characters from "The Wolf of Wall Street" are behind all this. I will stay far away.

Like nearly every product in this area, these podcasts are scams.

The equivalent of all those LLM-spam "books" you see on Amazon.

They are product pumped out with no regard to quality control, dependent on potential consumers mistakenly thinking there's something like fact checking or editing going on because of the name on the tin.

Worse, this is all "hello world" style LLM programming - give it your cute little prompt ("That's where the real engineering goes!"), throw it a couple links to RAG in, and slap an ad on it. There's nothing here a vaguely competent teenager can't build for themself or the robot can't build for them.

That itself is a nested scam - pretending that any of this crap is difficult, that you need your betters at WaPo to write it for you.

And that's just the tool itself - the next problem is Bezos made it clear that anyone with integrity should hit the road, and those folks did. So all the source material may as well be robot poop already, quality-wise.

I suspect there's several different versions of something like this, only with interior floorplans.

I mean, sure, the real estate industry. But I like to imagine high-tech cat burglars using them to plan their heists. More likely someone will turn it in to copware to sell to SWAT teams for planning drug busts.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them read it.

That's on the horse, of course.

There an interesting, little-known new tool called "Google" that can help you with such questions.

Musk's real "innovation" in the category is paying shitposters for engagement, thereby outsourcing the gaslighting. He's literally paying people in developing countries to pretend to be US Americans ranting about keeping out people from developing countries.

Americans can't even go on our own frothing racist diatribes anymore, we just pay someone else to do it.

It would just be funny, and that's apparently good enough reason in Musk's view.

His Nazi bar will always be Xitter to me.

I imagine the installment payment companies pay Temu, or whoever, 90% (so at a discount) and collect the whole price from the customer over time. Similar to the merchant paying a CC fee (they get less there too). Klarna or whoever market it as making big sales more likely for the merchant, so they make the discounts up in volume?

I think this may be a signal that streaming services have achieved satisfaction-parity with cable.

Both deliver mostly similar service, both endlessly churn content, raise prices and spam viewers with more ads endlessly.

There was a window when streaming was actually a better experience than piracy. But they've fixed that problem, and bittorrent is once again the least aggravating way to get your couch potato fix. It isn't about the money, it is about steadily making the service worse than it was when the subscriber agreed to pay for it.

Proof positive we elected an idiot. Smart play is to ban drilling, shut down all oil production, and sit on our reserves. Let the rest of the world drain all its oil supplies, in competition with each other. THEN, when everyone else is tapped out, OWN the worlds petroleum markets as a monopoly.

Logistics mark ups as in it costs you $4.37 to ship out and you charged the customer $7.99 for shipping? I could see that being a revenue stream.

A free toy that was popular for a summer and a financial product held by major investment firms (in single digit percentages mostly, just so they may not be left behind in case something good happens) have one thing in common - both have ZERO intrinsic value. They may both be "up" at some point in time, but there is nothing keeping them up but shared belief.