Thank you for the comment and your sig. Just one of the best things I've read in awhile.

Reminds me all too well of how Nestle wants the license to water...

My biggest issue with the current trend in capitalism is that it seems like a pyramid scheme that requires an ever expanding customer base to sustain. That is literally unsustainable.

We are on the verge of having a real existential awakening...keep going the way we are going and we will be forcefully disabused of our power over the world, or start taking meaningful steps to understand how best to live within the ecosystem we are in and understand that much of our way of life is an illusion, and needs to change.

Wait until Google releases their next streaming game console: Quantum

When we get Enders Game levels of immediacy in remote communications, that's when I'll start paying attention to streamed gaming.

Sure, and then you'd see something similar pop up to deal with all the realities such a view tends to ignore.

There will always need to be some form of objective organization...until we're one with the stars.

Explain to me the possible end-points for shit that factories are dumping into our air, water and land?

What about the obvious fact that the earth is a closed ecosystem, like a septic tank. What happens when you keep pouring shit into such a contraption?

Observable data is fundamental, but isn't hypothesis as well? Can't we take a smaller model of the world and dump chemicals and heavy metals and such into it and see that that shit goes nowhere...just collects?

Or is it arguable that when a factory in E. St. Louis dumps chemicals into the Mississippi River, that those chemicals, upon hitting the ocean (or wherever they land)...catch a space shuttle into the sun? Get eaten by magic giant carp, which they then convert into rainbows?

No worries...the market will ultimately decide this, and when meat is 500 dollars a steak, it will be decided for most people.

I'm hoping we can find a balanced approach, going forward, to hopefully avoid that, because I love meat.

People have long said that private companies can restrict speech, as long as the government isn't involved. This is the ultimate test, of that...a sustained economic attack on our freedoms.

Thanks. To bring in the history I'm most familiar with, even if on a limited level, Charlemagne and his children. Charles the Great did some amazing things to unify Europe, and yet one generation later, it all started going to crap, with his children immediately fracturing that unity. I'm not sure their motivation, but a certain form of greed seems likely. So, perhaps my reference to Capitalism was more about greed and reflective of it as a symptom of the societal decay you mentioned.

I think the Salesforce CEO nailed it when he said that Capitalism needs to evolve. We've basically become batteries for our capital holding overlords. One can see how it would be more efficient to just store us in pods and suck our energy like a modern day vampire (didn't Buffy have a season just about such a contraption?).

Social media is largely a reflection of the modern day capitalism...and selling selling selling selling. It also highlights the human challenge of having to adapt and understand so much information. And at the same time, it all feels a lot like Kafka's "Auf Der Galerie", which describes the modern human despair. Despite all of the awful things we feel about the nature of the world...it's all hidden behind a carnival of lies. Influencers are a pretty good example of how social media enables this.

Now Zebra's will start to get bitten more.

That is, it's infected our economy with more than just cheap toys...it's in everything.

They are testing the waters with the NBA and Blizzard. There should be nation-wide outcry about this, even if you don't care about Hearthstone, or games in general. They will slowly anesthetize America to their horrors and make us prefer our comforts over others freedoms.

I really don't like authoritarian countries who can only exist by strong arming their own people, and increasingly, everyone else.

...player called out their personal support for Hong Kong protests?

That is...aren't all of our entertainment players tied to China in seemingly spider-like fashion...webs woven over the fabric of our life? China has infected our financial system with cheap toys...they are in everything and will let it be known more and more, as time goes by.

Aren't they covering up cleavage on to make China happy, as well?

You were so wrong in your predictions. Well, you got the name right, at least.

https://local.theonion.com/ghost-of-christmas-future-taunts-children-with-visions-1819566694

So, we've filled up the cache...does that make things easier? Now we get to use the hard parts of the earth.