I actually bought it quite recently, so I could take three bricks out of my laptop bag and replace them with just the one. Less space, less weight, and I love that built-in display. (it won't charge my watch unfortunately)

I've got a few spare older bricks from previous laptop purchases, so I can't say I'd need to buy a brick if my next laptop didn't come with one, but that shows my experience that bricks usually outlive their product. I also believe that most people have started accumulating unused bricks. (maybe it'll slightly lower the price of the next laptop I buy?)

They will have plenty of Saudi money to prevent that. Instead what you're going to see is more embrace, extend and extinguish.

You're going to get more buyouts and more small struggling studios snapped up and crushed.

You should learn a little bit about current politics. Our supreme Court overturned the decades-long president Roe v Wade citing a literal witchfinder general from the 1800s because they had absolutely no other case law to make it possible.

Our highest courts have been compromised and are now a fully owned subsidiary of the Republican party. They will rubber stamp using whatever bullshit they need to come up with

Let me guess you probably think America was founded as a Christian Nation or some bullshit?

...hacked spaced-out RoboCop.

When I point out that AI is a fundamentally antisocial technology because of its excessive water and electric use while destroying jobs in a society where you don't work you don't eat inevitably a shitload of people come out of the woodwork to tell me I'm being a Luddite and then start using the good old buggy whip thought terminating cliche.

Then along comes crap like this to remind us that we are rapidly descending into a techno feudal post-capitalist hellscape.

The socialists and the Communists have always said capitalism what eventually fall to whatever their preferred system was.

But what if there's a third option? An option that doesn't include you and me? Where we are relegated to the kind of lives native Americans had on the worst of the reservations before the casinos?

There's about 2,000 people in America with virtually unlimited money and power working towards that goal and automated policing and military is a big part of that.

If something doesn't work in America, you sue the shit out of them.

If it doesn't work, the victims won't remember to sue.

...would gain if they cracked Alzheimers. It would be comparable to the Apollo landings.

Note I'm not disparaging it, USA needs a good kick in the science ego to help purge the Orange Brainworm Posse.

Well, your brain size qualifies you.

Mice also have flying cars and cold-fusion by now, researchers just can't scale it to human-level.

Can't tell with GOP.

Because he saw how much good it did for Bush Jr and he thinks that it can cinch his third term election. Honestly he's probably right.

Americans have very little understanding of politics. Last year right before the election the number one search on Google was "is Joe Biden running for president" . Biden had dropped out months ago...

I don't think the average American is going to understand just how bad a deal it's going to be when Trump runs for a third term. So it's not going to occur to them they shouldn't vote for trump. I mean for Christ's sake's Trump has 28 credible right accusations eight of which are against children. Americans are clearly not paying attention.

No. You can rip people off by making them work long hours for little or no pay. You can use work visa programs and steal people's passports so that you can force them to work your farm and that's okay. You can do tens of billions of dollars of wage theft and that's absolutely 110% okay.

But we get really uppity about these kind of minor little scams no matter who is doing them.

Pirates and emperors I guess. It's like how if a postal worker steals your mail we send the prison for 20 years but when a rich guy from Florida steals a few hundred million for Medicare you make him a senator.

The key is if you're going to rip people off you want to do it right in the middle, you want to do it in a complex way that people can't understand easily, you want to make sure along the way you are bribing people who can pardon you, and above all else you want to make sure you don't rip off any of the 2000 or so billionaires in the country

If you can manage all that then you are in like flynn. My advice would be to try and rip off the taxpayer. You can almost always get away with that as long as it's meeting the criteria above.

So about a 50% chance we are screwed, eh.

There was a Superbowl ad in 2000 where an "up and coming" dot-com* had a monkey dance the entire ad, and at the end said something like, "We just wasted 2 million because we can".

This smells like the same kind of arrogance.

* Oddly I think the company somehow survived the crash.

Is that I have come to realize they are preparing to destroy capitalism and replace it with a new kind of feudalism with themselves as the Kings.

Don't think any of us ever imagined capitalism falling to neo feudalism instead of something like socialism or something. Even most fascist regimes tended towards capitalism like China does. So the idea of the trade of goods and services for money with the goal of people obtaining and using capital fundamentally breaking down not from the bottom but from the top is something I don't think people can really wrap their heads around.

Heck I have a hard time doing it the sentence above is just terrible