Good points. That said, "The Midas Plague" is a funny story that redefines laziness in a world of robot-and-fusion-energy-produced abundance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. ..."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/scie...
        "Death is the inescapable conclusion of life. But what happens after death is still a highly debated topic. Throw into the mix a heady combination of religious belief and scientific theories, and you have the potential to create an endless array of possibilities. One intriguing notion is called quantum immortality. Imagine that the universe splits into countless parallel realities after any small event. Now, say for example, you end up in an accident. In the quantum immortality theory, there will always be one version of reality where you survive, and this is the reality your consciousness keeps experiencing. While it sounds like an appealing theory, it is purely hypothetical and highly debated. Let's find out where the theory originated, how it developed, and the differing opinions on its validity. ...
        The roots of this idea can be traced back to Hugh Everett III. In 1957, Everett first proposed the concept which we now refer to as the Many-Worlds Interpretation. He suggested that the entire universe can be described by a single wave equation that never collapses. The many worlds idea was later popularized by physicist Bryce DeWitt in the 1970s.
        However, Everett never mentioned anything about immortality in how own work, with that idea only surfacing decades later. Various versions of the quantum immortality idea emerged in the mid to late 1980s and were discussed by individuals such as Euan Squires, Hans Moravec, and Bruno Marchal. So, while the Many-Worlds concept is still widely discussed by physicists, the quantum immortality idea is a recent addition considered fringe by many experts. ..."

Going with your main idea, if it has any validity, perhaps 1999 is a more likely year? :-)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=worl...

Your guilt will be determined solely by the company. You are guilty until proven innocent, *IF* they feel like looking at your evidence at all. If you ARE proven innocent they will either graciously allow you to use what you already paid for again or they will alter the deal until you are no longer innocent, depending on mood and if the representative's corn flakes got soggy that morning.

Wanna complain about it? The hold time is approximately 45 minutes. The person who answers MIGHT sound sympathetic or not but in any case has no power to do anything but read the script. They might or might not "accidentally" hang up on you.

Easier for you, perhaps. You only have to deal with what works on your distro. But think of the poor application developers. They have to build against every distro's oddball library configuration. Or build flat-paks and hope that they picked a stable one*.

*Which never happens. Because in the name of security, every other CS grad student has to sneak their new senior project language (Rust, I'm looking at you) into the standard distribution streams.

Some possible solutions to the changing nature of work (especially given AI) collected by me from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."

This video by me from 2011 focuses on the general idea of five interwoven economies that emerged from that exploration (with a Slashdot reply to a comment of mine suggesting adding "theft" which I did):
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Here is a recent article of how the "theft" economy is sadly increasing in the USA as the social contract breaks down with the increasing rich-poor divide:
"The United States of Fraud"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/art...
        "... Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy -- AI -- promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.
        Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see -- or at least excuse -- these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn."

As I see it, unless we strengthen those other four economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned) then theft and other forms of social breakdown are an almost inevitable response. Granted, the rich (1%) will have robots and AI now to use against the poor (the 99%), so it is possible things may play out differently this time. Either way we probably end up with a society of abundance for all -- as either the poor (i.e. the 99% will change the political-economic rules of the game and everyone will have a lot of abundance) or the rich 1% will kill everyone else and then the Earth will be left with just the uber-wealthy and their robots.

Well, that is unless violence arising from such a conflict destroys everything or the AI and robots take over from the 1% or some other such disaster happens. Sadly, this OSCOMAK project I hope for has not gotten very far yet to help mitigate such disasters: https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us: ... Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects ..."

Like Bucky Fuller said (paraphrasing), humanity is in its final exam in the universe, and it will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end leading to utopia or oblivion.

James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel is a great exploration of the idea of an post-scarcity robot-and-AI-and-fusion-energy economy where people focus on gaining status by their contributions not their consumptions.

I hope you have a good DVD collection. Because when Netflix buys the last remaining studio and locks up its content, the only thing you'll be streaming is their latest episode of "Ow, my balls!"

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "... Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ...
        It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
      I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

Of course, an imploding economy would be a nightmare for Wall Street... So, not a very electable platform...

Netflix says "No." You'll watch what they want, from their catalog, on their terms. Until they discontinue it and replace it with their new stuff. Because they know that you'll keep watching. Something.

I find it interesting that the Avatar series is still being broadcast on the TV networks. This is something that I imagine the streaming only services are eager to put a stop to.

Free software hasn't altered the deal. Perhaps it's time for more people to hop off the treadmill and vote by withholding their wallet.

... of the AI infrastructure is electrical power, Trump should be looking for backhoe operators an linemen*.

*Line persons. But then that DEI shit won't fly in his administration.

They own the exclusive rights to software updates that brick systems.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

It's not that much of a change, though. The USA has only ever paid lip-service to its "allies" and always seen Europe as competitors. It's not a shift from "friend" to "enemy", just from "competitor" to "enemy".

... I've see that pro AI group somewhere.