Intel wants my tax dollars with no strings attached. Buying shares attaches pretty obvious and heavily regulated strings. That's what I like about it.

As for influence if you don't think giving somebody 50 billion dollars in free money doesn't get you some influence I don't know what to say. The whole reason Intel is building anything in this country is that cash money influence. All buying stock does is formalize it into ownership.

Nixon was a rat but he did have principles and he was dedicated to the strength and power of America. He was also a son of a bitch that started to drug war so that he could use it to attack political opponents. But he at least believed he was doing the right thing with that.

Windows bastards that pick Reagan as their figurehead took over the party that's when shit got real. The ones that Goldwater warned everybody about. But that goes all the way back to reagan. That's when the party gave up any semblance of morality and went all in on taking care of only the richest of the rich.

This would be great news. I much prefer the government buying stock in a company instead of just handing my taxpayer dollars to it with no strings attached.

And yeah Intel gets a bail out. If they go under we only have one viable x86 CPU manufacturer and like it or not virtually every single work computer on the planet runs off x86. There are a handful of people running Macs mostly for web programming or a handful of specialized animation tools.

It's the same reason we got stuck bailing the auto companies out. We need their capacity so we can't let them go under.

These companies know that and they are abusing it. That's why buying a stake would be a good thing. Normally.

We passed normality around the time a guy with a Nazi iron Cross got appointed to head the military because he was the only one that will order troops to fire on American citizens...

Facebook isn't very good at much of anything but they are good at one thing which is tricking users into engaging.

So I would expect a lot of those users if not most of them are engaging with the content.

Sadness.

I won't flog the dead horse (CSB) in detail, but I think the thing they most needed 40 years ago was a viable economic model.

(I wonder if I could get a Funny mod point if I could find the email discussion I had with rms on the CSB topic? Must have been around 20 years ago. He didn't like the idea, but my fuzzy recollection is that he actually asked an extremely useful question about it. Without really perceiving what he was asking about?)

Not too surprised by the lack of funny. Not much of a target story.

However disappointed by the lack of "band". If I had spotted the story before it was about to expire I would have asked about those new warning wristbands that are supposed to help protect against heatstroke.

NAK

I don't disagree with anything you said (though perhaps I should do some research to confirm the parts I'm unsure of), but my interest in the story was for humor (and Slashdot failed again) and the specific puppeteer who told the YOB this was a good idea. The YOB just signs stuff that is put in front of him, sometimes with a brief mumble about the part he thinks he understands.

I actually think this deal is a kind of forced fire sale, so the highest probability for a real motivation was to get some of Intel's assets on the cheap. On that side, the most likely author would be a vulture capitalist of some stripe. However the way things work in YOB-world, it might be some kind of vengeance thing. But in either case there must be someone who wrote whatever the YOB signed.

No, that is NOT related to what I actually wrote. What part of my poor writing were you unable to understand? I can attempt to clarify. Or was your reply actually intended for some other part of the discussion?

This story had mucho potential for funny.

But not really a complaint. Not a great target for humor as stories go. This time I just peeked because I had to install it recently and I was annoyed at how large it has become...

Too bad the alternatives seem more evil or insufficiently functional?

Mostly lamenting the lack of humor for the rich target, but the lack of interest on Slashdot is also interesting in a negative way. Remember when $10 billion used to be a lot of money? But "thoroughly modern money" has become an imaginary joke in its own right... I hope they got paid in crypto?

But on the big topic, I think the joke is sick. Everything links back to AI and there is no form of "playing gawd" that can be worse than trying to create one. Just about finished with The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman. Even though most of the book is about threats from AI, he doesn't seem to understand the full scope... And so far his suggested solution approaches seem laughable, even though I'm pert' shure he wasn't going for funny. And yet this "clever young fool" is also one of the "elder statesmen" of the AI community? I think we are about to meet an "angry and jealous" gawd of our own making. And unmaking.

To figure out why being able to say the n-word was so important to them.

It's not the n word itself. It's that they grew up around their dad and their granddad and hell their mom and grandma constantly saying the word in normal conversation.

So the word is normalized to them and not all that bad but they know that when they say it it instantly outs them as some form of racist.

Now they could care less if you think they are racist except that it cuts off employment opportunities.

It has to. Racism is the only thought crime in america. That's because it's basically impossible to separate a man's racism from a man's actions.

Once you have been outed as a racist we can't trust you with a leadership position because we can never know if you're hiring decisions or firing decisions are going to be racially motivated and traditionally they very very much are.

Getting back to the n-word put a few drinks in any of those guys and they're going to start dropping n bombs like it's going out of style. It doesn't take a lot of booze to lower their inhibitions to the point where they are acting like their granddad again. Like that family Guy joke where Brian barks at the black guy and then stops and says that's my father talking sorry.

This is especially bad because everybody has cameras now so if you go off on a racist tirade you are probably going to get recorded and it's probably going to make its way to your boss who is going to probably fire you.

Frustratingly you can be as racist or as bigoted and especially as homophobic and transphobic as you want if you are a member of the ruling class or even just one of their Court jesters. There are numerous cases of people getting quote unquote canceled and then after a couple years coming back to their careers.

Because like everything in America we selectively enforce that law.

But despite that every single year of my life the world has gotten measurably worse. There's a little bit of new medical technology and a little bit of new food growing technology and that's about the only positive things I can say are species has done in the last 70 years.

Absolutely everything else has been shit on a shingle. I guess video games are better. I mean it kind of has to be when you're a competition is pong consoles and the Atari 2600 but honestly I would trade a functioning civilization for video games.

Hell the only reason we haven't had world war III is because people are afraid of nukes and they are gradually getting over that fear. We used them to stop hurricanes now right?