bigbangdangler

We could be beyond it. What hasn't happened quite yet are things like failing currencies, but it's entirely possible we are beyond the point of no return. Once the giant ring of investments catches up with itself, the snake eats its own tail, the bottom drops out, and the greatest economic crash the world has ever seen stampedes unfettered through the lives of every person on the planet.

This. The GOP has wanted to privatize USPS forever. They keep it barely functioning so they can point at it and claim that only private industry can save it. Then they bring in their friends and throw those sweet taxpayer dollars into their own coffers.

Amazon's role isn't surprising here, either. Bezos couldn't get closer to the Trump admin if he were sleeping in Melania's bed.

Expect similar moves to be taken towards privatization of ATC in the US. Thankfully it's much more heavily regulated, so it has at least taken more time and is harder to choke as quickly.

It's wild that one party can control basically everything and there are still people stupid enough to blame the remnants of the opposition.

Almost too good to be a dad joke. Almost too bad to be repeated.

Outrage mounts for some, but not for all. Just check comments sections on conservative outlets. People are cheering this slush fund as a win.

The GOP has spent the better part of 100 years convincing its base to vote against and put support against their own interests. That drive is now literally paying dividends.

To look at this another way: the government of South Korea has decided to give people the feeling of a strike without actually letting it affect bottom lines in any meaningful way. That is, they have relegated the strike (a key utility of those fighting for workers' rights) to being a tool used solely to assuage discontent in the short term. Without economic teeth, it cannot be used to enhance the lives of workers, which is ultimately the explicit goal of any strike.

South Korea is of course not alone in reducing or eliminating the rights of its citizens so that corporations continue to profit at their expense.

A fantastic summary.

Addendum to #2: to add insult to injury, a lot of the training data in AI models was used without consent. That means that the output of skilled people was stolen from them in order to train systems designed to steal from them again.

Aside from scientific research (which can be mostly or entirely done remotely by machines), there is exceedingly little reason to inhabit Mars, or any other planet for that matter.

There are sociopolitical implications of extraterrestrial missions (think: space race), but in terms of human habitation at scale, what would be the point? In science fiction, there is usually a major impetus: the earth is dying, the earth was stolen by aliens, etc etc. In these cases, though, the fiction part handles most of the stuff that would be hardest in real life.

From a practical standpoint, anything that can be done on Mars can be done for mere fractions of the resources here on Earth. At some point, it just comes down to the economics. Even if there were major issues with pollution or resources shifting the planet towards uninhabitability, fixing or mitigating those problems is likely to use orders of magnitude fewer resources than going to Mars. If such problems were beyond fixing, it wouldn't mean Mars gets cheaper. It would mean humans go extinct.

Now, there are charlatans who will say we absolutely need to inhabit Mars and will give you a barrage of tenuous reasons. Musk comes to mind. Usually this is done to drive investment in companies or technologies which have been nudged into seeming Mars-adjacent, but at the end of the day, they're just raising funds for regular rich people stuff here on Earth.

That is a good point. There's a lot of overt cruelty which seems to Literally exist to "own the libs", as Onion-y as it sounds. It's quite disgusting considering the party pretty much owns everything at the moment.

Schoolyard charades, but with higher stakes and real, human victims, at scale.

That's funny because I'm not coming to PlayStation.

I guess they just sell less then.

I would have said start betting like Biff Tannen, but that probably will end up changing the timeline "too much".

But if I can't die and am immune to disease, I guess I exploit that. Can't drown so I'll hop in an ocean and go somewhere. No need for food or lodging. I'll just wander for the next 100 years and peoplewatch.

This is Sony, folks. Once they get in a mood to hang onto something needlessly, they do it.

The last Betamax cassette was manufactured in 2016.