USDC has missed it "peg" (e.g. it's dropped to a value of below a dollar) more than once, and there's a *lot* of evidence that it's been off it's peg for ages and that market manipulation is hiding it (google it).

It's primarily used to get real money (e.g. fiat currency) into and out of the crypto markets.

We learned from a recent story that minting $1m in crypto costs around $3.5m. We all know what's making crypto run these days is crime of one form or another. Money laundering mostly.

That's all well and good, but integrating that into our main line economy is eventually going to cause a massive crash that'll hit us all. If we let that happen it'll make 2008 look like the .com boom days.

Personally I'd like a plug-in hybrid (PIH), and hope those are perfected soon. It gives one more fuel options. For normal commuting I could plug in at night to charge and never have to visit a gas station, yet have gasoline as an option for longer trips or blackouts.

I expect more pandemics, civil wars, Yellowstone eruptions, petulant Presidents, and/or zombie apocalypses. PIH's are a better fit for chaos.

A shutdown would cause a political stir in the US because it's a popular app.

But this shut-down threat may be a ploy to scare USA regulators etc. If the algorithms were really that unique, they'd patent them to protect them, and then agree to license them to the split-off as part of the settlement as long as the split-off doesn't use or sell them for other apps.

If they are relying on trade-secrecy instead of patents to protect their ideas, they are probably already swiped via mole employees, and/or deemed obvious by others.

Instead of a cooperative one then or gradually going to see profit go away as an important metric. That's because we're going to gradually become a kind of neo feudal civilization with a very very tiny handful of kings and queens at the top (socially we will probably still call them CEOs or just company owners) a tiny handful of people who serve and protect them and then a massive number of people living in staggeringly abject poverty.

You're kind of assuming that everything is going to stay the way it is socially because it's really hard to think of those kind of massive social changes to completely remake the fabric of our civilization. But with the huge automation pushes going on and more and more and more consolidation every year into the hands of a smaller group of people at some point they're just going to take their ball and go home and they're going to have ai-powered drones and robots that will gun anyone down who tries to fuck with them.

Again this all assumes we stay on the course we're on right to the moment. There are plenty of people who can see this coming and are trying to do something about it. And younger voters are smart enough to know it's coming. It's just a question of whether or not the major world powers are going to be democracies long enough. The older generation is hell-bent on giving up democracy for a variety of stupid reasons and if democracy goes we lose that fight and we become a Neo feudal dystopia.

My cat is related to Chairman Meow.

I've heard that also. Plants don't have to outrun predators and thus can waste more DNA weight on marginal genes.

A species known as "the cops". We warned you about your tentacle porn.

Looks like somebody beat us to it.

They'd be better typists. And while at it, put arms on top of heads and eyes on the back. You'd be the best basket-baller out there. And give them 3 wankers to compensative for all the jokes classmates will make about them.

Big co's spend a lot of lobbying and bribe money to rid competition. It's more cost effective than doing a better job.

> Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002

It seemed designed as mostly a company fleet vehicle, not a consumer vehicle. If there is a lot of wait time between deliveries, then you don't need big/efficient batteries. For example, for repairs, the average onsite repair may take two hours. The EV doesn't have to use batteries during that two hours.

Many believe it's a reinforcement mechanism between flowering plants and insects. Once both plants and insects got into the symbiosis pattern, it flowered (pun half intended) as both sides gained a big advantage: one was able to disperse its DNA further, and the other got an easy meal.

Why nature didn't invent it earlier is hard to say. Maybe because most insects have crappy eyesight. One then happened to have good-enough eyesight that they could spot flowers at a distance, and evolution improved both bug eyes and flowers after that.

Is it just price? The iPhone SE is around $400, but that seems pretty stiff. I know my kid's locked into Apple for their messaging app because it's like a little social network with their friends. And I know if you go as far back as high school being a kid with the "green" chat bubble was bad news. The equivalent to wearing cheap cloths and handmedowns when I was a kid.

Hell, at one point my kid wanted one of the fancy Samsung phones but the messaging app kept them on Apple. Samsung briefly made their phones as desirable as iPhones but that just didn't last, and nobody seems to be able to stand out.

For two reasons. The first and obvious one is nukes make it impossible to just invade a country that has them.

But the bigger one is that multinational corporations owned by global ruling elites who do not think of themselves as citizens of a specific country own factories and property in every country of the world. They are not going to let you have a big nasty war that blows up their stuff.

You can blow up as many houses and hospitals and schools as you want over in Palestine because those are poor people and it's basically an open-air prison. Nobody's really making any money off that the speak of. It's just a wedge used by a variety of people in the Middle East to jockey for power where the actual wealth is.

But go take India and Pakistan. Years ago Pakistan looked the other way while several terrorists attacked India's capital. It's the kind of thing that should have sparked a war between the two but the corporation stepped in and said no. They didn't want to lose their cheap Indian labor.

So if you're counting on a world War to save humanity in some kind of weird way no you're not going to get that. The only way out of this is the one way all us old farts hate the most. We need to change from a competitive society to a cooperative one.

And that is fucking hard because nothing is pounded into your skull harder when you're a kid than the idea that competition is the best thing in the world. Every fucking movie I grew up with was about that in one form or another and about how it made everything better. Hell even just mentioning that we should be transitioning to a coperatives society is probably going to get this post modded into Oblivion because it's such a boring alien and frightening concept

Or even abuse it seems.