I'm thinking this is the most likely scenario too. Another organized crime fraud operation rather than little yellow men twirling their mustachios out to defile our precious bodily fluids.

Stanford had a class on maximizing exploitation of and manipulating users that's no longer offered for political reasons: Captology ("The Facebook Class") by B.J. Fogg, head of the "Behavior Design" Lab. It explored ideas like all websites are similar to in-person nonverbal behavior because they always emit superficially-evaluated signals that are judged by different people ascribing to them different amounts of properties, and that changing things can subtly change the apparent values and appearances/site behavior change patterns like clicking, viewing, and purchasing. Social media companies A/B test the shit out of maximizing profits per users without considering the externalities they cause like teenage body image depression, loneliness, terrorism, genocides, echo-chamber reinforcement, etc.

"Behavior Design" comes across as wishful thinking a cryptobro would come up with.

Libertarian ideology is an artificial billionaire farce manufactured with attractive utopian, American nationalist ideals woven with Ayn Rand's extreme communism reflex to be palatable to an under-educated middle- and upper-class while concealing the aims of billionaires like the Kochs' to keep polluting, denying climate change, and rolling back regulations while denying the value of properly-functioning government regulation like pollution management and commonwealth shared infrastructure and services better funded as a risk pool from everyone's taxes. No one except a billionaire can do, self-insure, and provide everything they possibly need themselves because extreme self-reliance is a mythological mirage.

BuT bUt CoMmUnIsM aNd BiG gUbBeRmEnT bAd!

We must ruthlessly evangelize the essential need for the supremacy of fair and just democratic forms of government with strong independence, regulatory mandate and authority, and limited power per branch firewalled from religions, wealth, and media. These cannot and must not be allowed to endure for a second more to keep buying elections, policies, and rigging the system in their favor. The rich must sit their asses down and hope we don't take 99% of their wealth from now on, and that we will only take 75% for wage theft from workers and their crimes against humanity.

The problem is too many choices and indecision. AI should tell hiring managers and HR to hire a specific job candidate with unreasonable, irrational confidence plus a few key bullet points. Human nature is the source of the "problem" when really the problem is ridiculous pickiness of hiring managers.

And manufacturing consent. When viewed through the lens of these, a shitton of what's happened politically and mainstream socially in the past 30-40 years makes a lot more sense. A small cadre of greedy liars are holding back the potential and relief of billions of people with manipulative bullshit.

Socialism for the rich and anarcho-crony capitalization for everyone else. The goal of the current US regime is acting like a mobster and a thief to grab and extract whatever they can, for as long as they can.

If it goes through, it will be the single largest LBO in history.

Much, much more. Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are where the PEs take out massive loans to buy the company, shift the debt to that company, take out more loans, sell off anything of value, raise prices, fire employees, and enshittify everything. They don't care about the company's reputation, good will, or whether it survives or goes broke, they only care about short-term profit maximization.

Please drink verification can to continue, but first, connect fridge to internet to authorize and pay for cooling and opening.

And also their new fridges don't last very long and constantly break down and need parts. Current older gen basic fridge I have without a screen currently needs modifications to fix known problems where the ice maker ices up internally and won't make ice. It's a total piece of shit.

Sonny, I remember when the /. effect was a real thing, DSL was blindingly-fast, Perl was king, and CmdrTaco was active. (I lost my 6 digit account with a post c. 2003.)

There's just so much fucking destruction going on, it's impossible to keep up.

Private Equity.. the lowest ranking vampires with far too much money.

When the AI bubble finally bursts, there will be lots of cheap HDDs.