Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

The audience for USENET and slashdot was about 400 times smaller than the people participating in broader social media. It was much harder for a critical mass of fringe ideas/susceptible people to coalesce into isolated circles when the population was just so tiny.

Australia's youth emerge as the smartest and most together in the world....

Oh should this bubble pop, it will take out a *lot* with it.

A lot of tech companies have effectively retooled themselves so they don't know how to keep being a functional business without the AI hype spending.

The level of dedication to the LLM game dwarfs the dot-com bubble, and so too will the negative consequences...

It's the boiling frog approach to revenue. Start at an attractive rate and increase it by 'no big deal' until eventually it would be a big deal.

See also, microtransactions.

Companies have learned that customers barely pay attention to the absolute costs, and just note the incrementals they incur in the moment.

What is 56 billion dollars?

BTC market cap is $1.8 Trillion....

Might not be about the popularity, the popularity is good, it's about the affordability.

The student loans were well intentioned, but just turning the money faucet on has significantly reduced practical concerns about pricing.

There are two sorts of campuses that have been *way* nicer than almost any corporate campus I've ever seen, medical and universities. In my day it was already pretty plush, and recently toured some and it's just gotten even more crazy, super large campus in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate with just amazingly nice amenities...

These easy loans started to help tackle the problem of higher ed being a *little* expensive and unfortunately made it a *lot* expensive over time. Needed to come with some regulation on the pricing side, at *least* for public universities.

Similar story on health care, by all means help people with premiums (even better would have been public option, but putting that aside), but don't just write whatever checks the insurance companies demand, regulate the health care costs.

It's worth *something*, but the price has been outpacing inflation by a wide margin for years and years.

So we have value, but the price has been running away...

Think the point would be that even if you try to opt out of AI summaries, you end up hearing someone read a script that they used AI to generate, or read comments or emails that AI generated without your awareness. Then there's a tendency to adopt speech patterns that you see in use.

So even if you refrain, you are still inundated by the content by virtue of everyone else overusing it without specifying. Even if you have a tendency to recognize AI BS a few sentences in and go away from it, you still read probably two or three sentences and may have influenced your speech a little.

no problem.

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

I mean, sure you can mine some crypto, but the perceived value of those is essentially nothing.

The market cap for all those cited coins together is considered about $7 billion (Monero being the vast majority of that). So mining that won't do them any good to recoup expense unless they suddenly got all the crypto-bros to abandon BTC in favor of Monero (Etherium is at $380 billion, BTC is at $1.8 Trillion).

It's become just another form of wealth transfer from the poor to the upper classes in the economy. Perks and incentives to earn "points" and cash-back by spending on credit cards are financed by those merchant fees, so the entire country is subsidizing them by paying hidden fees in the form of higher prices of goods and services. People who buy a lot with credit and can easily pay off their credit card bill every month come out ahead. People who can't or don't purchase much or who cannot always pay their bill in full get screwed. And card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) are leeches in the middle sucking blood from everyone.

Once you understand how the system is rigged, it's actually pretty disgusting.

The question is mine what? Etherium went away from GPU friendly proof of work, and Bitcoin proof of work hasn't been viable on GPUs in ages...