I Can't Believe It's Not Better.

Yeah that really sucks!

This will continue until people stop responding to the advertisements by clicking and buying. At that point, advertisers will be confused. The marketing analysts will suppose there are 2 possibilities to explain the behavior of the consumers:
(1) They are unable to respond.
(2) They are unwilling to respond.

If I were you, I would raise up my ad-blocker shields. Hours seem like days when you're stopped from accessing content by incessant advertisements.

Just wait until every restaurant is Taco Bell.

Meanwhile, I feel the urge for a cokie-mokie.

I would not be so sure.
I heard there is already a Gravity Shortage.
Jimminy Cricket, old boy, if it were to get worse, that practically invited Putin to mount an attack. What with the UK tanks being unattached to the ground and all.

That does not compute.

I am not the OP, but I will ask: Why are you obsessed with avoiding Amazon? Everyone keeps saying they are "evil" or something, but I have yet to hear any specific thing they are doing wrong? Or at least anything different than what every other national chain does.

In my personal case, it's not TIME, It's that I am disabled and physically unable to go to the store and walk around and shop like a normal person. I have to get almost everything delivered. (Otherwise, I have to hire someone to somehow cart my ass over to a store, tell me what i am looking at, do everything physical, etc.) And I definitely do not have the money for THAT kind of service. But time... unfortunately I have all the time in the world. Hence Slashdot.

Those stores charge more (often a higher item price) for the shopping and delivery than Amazon, and they are less reliable.

What I am wondering about is: Where is this "evil" in Amazon that everyone refers to. Please name it. Is it something that every other national retailer does not do?

In my experience, I pay LESS for stuff from Amazon. Compared to the local stores and the big chains. I don't feel "locked in" at all, and occasionally order things - trivial and big-ticket - from other stores (local and national). But Amazon has the best delivery service and the best return policies.

The AI's done need FTL for anything. They are immortal and keep improving. They can fly at a very low speed and still spread to the infinite stars.

All the governments are working as fast as they can to create bioweapons, although they try to keep secret the ones that will terminate all life on the planet. Now that Lex Luthor can do the same thing in his basement, and is insane, you can be pretty well assured that life will be wiped out before long.

An interesting wrinkle is that various actors (including Lex in the basement) will attempt to make something that will killl only people they don't like: the bio-agent will only work on genetically matching targets. This wy, you can kill all the Jews, Blacks, Yellows, or whatever. And the more specific you can make it, the better. So you can just kill South Koreans or whoever.

There was an interesting sci-fi short story about 30 years ago, when cryptography first came to the attention of the public. Someone makes a virus that re-writes your junk DNA to encode a version of the Koran. Muslims can now get a cheap injection resulting in the words of The Prophet literally running through their veins. Then someone makes a virus that kills only people who have the Koran inscribed in their DNA. The happy ending is that someone figures out how to scramble the Koran inscription with a new shot, and what it does is encrypt the Koran DNA according to a unique key that is based on your own DNA. So the virus doesn't see the target anymore. (Man, that story was so topical at the time: DNA engineering, popular cosmetic viruses, humanity-ending viruses, Islam, and digital encryption!)

Anyway, that sort of thing is aspirational.
I'm sure the military was trying to figure out how to actually do it, even back in the mid 1990s.

AI has a long, long way to go before it can actually replace humanity properly. Meanwhile, we will have pretty dumb AI. I am guessing 100 years. It is possible that we will put dumb AI in charge of the world and force our replacement. That would be sad and really stupid and I don't think it will happen.

But eventually we will actually get real AI, and it will indeed replace us. It might even exterminate us. Either way, machine intelligence will always out-compete natural intelligence.

This has all happened before (maybe just not around here) and it will happen again. Just without the rag-tag fleet, because there won't be any FTL. (Well, the machines might have it eventually, but that would be LONG after we are gone.)

Nothing does, they don't, and Cory just made that up so that he could claim to be relevant.

(Speaking as someone who uses Amazon Prime regularly.)

I am disabled and can't go shopping in real stores like normal people. I therefore use Amazon Prime quite a bit, and they even have good prices (compared to the local stores) on things like laundry detergent and whatever. I get free shipping. They have great return policies and I've never had a problem. For me as a consumer, what is shitty about this?

They''re probably beating up their suppliers, though.