Cowboy Neal told me to

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking - Sir Joshua Reynolds

Altered Carbon
Forever
Homecoming
Buster Scruggs
A Series of Unfortunate Events

when it costs more to mine a bitcoin than to buy one on the futures market, miners will lose their motivation to mine. and since mining is a key task in transacting with bitcoin, there could well be a downward spiral: slower transactions > fewer transactions > less demand > lower price > fewer miners > slower transactions....

Another common practice not mentioned here (that I could see), is that of a retailer getting a name brand manufacturer to make cheaper versions of the name branded products to sell; buy a pair of Levi's at Walmart and you do not get the same quality as a pair of Levi's from Macy's. Most people, however, just see the name and assume some baseline level of quality. Poor them.

I'm sure your explanation works for some; but the linked article in the summary actually has a great layman's explanation that is extremely clear.

CAPTCHAs are actually training for AI image and pattern recognition software. So I anticipate that soon there will be bots that can solve them as easily as we can.

Finished this month:
Solaris - Lem
Valis (reread) - DIck
A Scanner Darkly - Dick
The Idiot - Dostoyevsky

So instead of relying on existing methods of delivery, UPS, USPS, FedEx, they want to get individuals involved. What that really means is that reasonably well paying jobs with delivery companies decrease in number, while poor schmucks in debt to Amazon increase.

This is happening throughout the US labor landscape. It's one of the reasons labor unions came into existence way back when. Unfortunately "union" is now treated as an expletive, and the very people that unions can help most are the ones who object to them most strongly.

But don't forget that UPS drivers are Teamsters, and won't take kindly to a bunch of amateurs taking a bite out of their livelihoods.

I read Foundation and its sequels as a teen, and I remember thinking it was pretty cool. More recently, when I saw that people were writing additional Foundation-based novels, I went back to reread the originals. What a disappointment that was.

The writing is really bad; Assimov had some good ideas, but should have let a writer put them into story form. The concept of psychohistory and predicting future events seems quaint now, given what we have learned about chaos theory (or sensitive dependence on initial conditions), quantum mechanics, and more.

I couldn't get through the first one without a deep sigh for my lost youth; then I returned them all to the library.

Whoever decided to adapt this for TV will have to rewrite so much of it that they might as well just forget using Foundation as source material and come up with their own plot, characters and narrative.

I have attended many concerts since 1976 (Jethro Tull at Shea Stadium). I can recall them just fine (well, most of them) without having to watch a grainy, badly lit video clip. The annoyance factor of someone near me using a phone to record a concert far outweighs any alleged benefit. Now cut your hair and get off my lawn.

DOS is not done, till Lotus won't run, right?
this brings back memories of working at The Computer Factory back in 1990. as I recall, we also had to replace (not flash, pull and insert) the BIOS on a bunch of NEC PCs because they wouldn't run 1-2-3.

it was the era where Excel came with a runtime version of Windows because businesses didn't run Windows yet.

now get off my lawn

sounds like my friends who always tell me stories about big wins playing blackjack at a casino. they seem to forget all the times they lost money at the same game.

for now bitcoin has made people some money, assuming that they have taken opportunities to turn it into cash. at some point a clever person or persons will find a way to hack the blockchain and all confidence in bitcoin will disappear. it will be good to sell before that happens.

Amazon may be dominating from a pure infrastructure standpoint, but with every new feature added to Azure it becomes that much easier for an org using MS programs and OS to move somewhat seamlessly to the cloud. I know because I'm in the midst of doing it.