This is the problem with letting these things get out of handle. Crypto and Bitcoin are large enough that they could potentially have an impact on the broader economy when people lose money in them.

You can't just wash your hands of things. Not in a modern economy. Everything is interconnected and sooner or later shit rains down on everybody.

Because we are locking up trillions of dollars of money for use by about 2,000 or 3,000 people. We have levels of wealth inequality that are worse than the gilded age right before the Great depression.

You're mixing up should and is. This is a common mistake people make.

There should be plenty of money. There isn't. Because a very tiny handful of people have taken it all for themselves and are grinding civilization to a halt. Money is no longer properly circulating in the economy because so much of it is being pushed to the top. This means that the share left over after Elon Musk launches his rockets and becomes a trillionaire is too small to sustain a functioning economy. And as it gets worse it'll become too small to sustain a functioning civilization.

The basic problem here is there's a finite amount of resources in the world and there are a near infinite number of psychopathic assholes who want to be trillionaires. The supply cannot meet the demand. And try as anyone might you can't convince the 12 year olds in adult bodies that you can't have a functioning civilization and billionaires let alone trillionaires...

At least for the time being there's a weird thing where you go deep into the settings hit a button and then wait 24 hours and you can install whatever you want. It's clearly there because they are afraid of antitrust law enforcement from Europe.

Eventually assuming all goes as planned they will take that feature away once they get Europe under control and get their people in charge over there. Europe can see that coming but it's going to be hard to stop it because frankly America just has too much money and power and we keep interfering with people's politics. Europe could stop letting the Russians fuck with us over here in the US but their billionaires are hoping that America will collapse so that they can become trillionaires themselves. So that's not on the table.

So there is less inventory hitting the market. This is been a consistent problem with the car market for some time. Our entire transportation network is built around cheap affordable automobiles. Better off people sell their cars and then struggling people can buy them for cheap. I'm pretty damn sure people around here are old enough to remember driving a beater that cost you a summers worth of minimum wage pay throughout your entire College life.

You can't do that anymore. A buddy of mine who has much better off relatives just got gifted a 2014 Toyota with relatively low mileage and I was shocked how expensive the damn thing was worth.

And my kid is still driving the same Toyota that I bought them 8 years ago or so and their sophomore year of college. That will change when they get out of grad school I'm sure but you're talking a viable used car with somebody who has been making what is good money for an American for about 8 years off the market.

It's all well and good the wax poetic about how great it is to be frugal but our economic system can't function with frugality. It'll break down just like it would in 1930. When the boomers die studies show that they are going to take around 75% of the money with them. It's all going to get spent on survival and healthcare. And thanks to wealth inequality the remaining 25% is going to be given disproportionately to a tiny number of people.

This is a major economic crisis literally nobody is talking about. Because the baby boomers are the only ones who were allowed to have good paying jobs. They are the ones keeping the economy going because they're the only ones who have any discretionary spending.

So when they drop dead in about 5 or 10 years all that money gets hoovered up by our healthcare system and goes away. If you're not planning on being dead of old age by then then congratulations you're looking at an economic collapse. And with all the automation going on even more so.

But hey how about them trans girls in sports am I right? Look over there be distracted! They're going to take your cookies! Excuse me cookie, singular.

So even those countries tend to have systems that lend themselves to winner take all. For example the UK still has you only casting one vote per politician. That's the basic problem. You need something like ranked choice voting where you're able to cast a vote for someone you want to win but if they don't you're not throwing your vote away. That's the problem with winner take all voting. It forces you into binary choices and then the billionaires, now trillionaires, can exploit that.

To be fair America's voting system is uniquely vulnerable to these kind of attacks from billionaires because it was set up that way on purpose by the wealthy landowners who created our government. Just like how they didn't do away with slavery they put all sorts of nastiness in our systems to protect their wealth and power. They knew what they were doing was wrong but they did it anyway and they were expecting and hoping future generations would fix it for them. At least the ones who want just bastards there were plenty of those.

There's an old saying, history is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable

Doesn't mean it's not music. But that means you made the music using the software. So all those cool Sega Genesis chiptunes that were composed back in the day and even some today or c64 sid chip music is absolutely music. Same with Amiga mod tracker files. Just like painting a picture with deluxe paint.

With AI slop you're not doing it you're letting the software do all the work. It's got no soul. When you listen to it there's always something a little off a little wrong. That's because it's a mishmash of 100 ideas haphazardly thrown together instead of the careful effort of an actual human mind.

It's like that ice cream that isn't ice cream. The frozen dairy dessert garbage. I buy it by accident every now and then because they try to hide the fact that it's not ice cream. You taste it and it's sweet it has kind of the right flavor and you pretty quickly realize something's wrong. It's artificial and fake. Like eating plastic. Even when I don't know what I bought as soon as I get it home and have a bite I quickly figure out I screwed up and take the shit back.

On the other hand I guess if I was 12 I wouldn't care because sugar is sugar. And maybe kids raised on the worst garbage imaginable will be so used to it. But I don't think so. You grow out of lunchables. As an adult I tried one and they are God awful. The kids love them.

Wait what? You don't understand how the PlayStation abandoning physical media relates to another competing game retail service that gives you true ownership of the games you buy.

Yeah you might have to abandon the PlayStation platform. If you want to own your games you don't get to own a PlayStation anymore. You buy a PC and if you really really really want to own it for sure I suppose you're also going to have to buy games that run under Linux using proton which is valve's translation software for running Windows games on Linux.

But that's about being able to play them. At the very least if you buy the games on GOG you own them. The data is yours. You are stuck backing them up yourself if GOG goes away

But at the end of the day for the 15% of people that care there are perfectly good options for owning games still. Maybe not all the games because some companies just aren't willing to sell you their games they're only going to let you rent them.

And like I said I don't see anyone talking about GOG. So all these articles are just bullshit content farms generating outrage for clicks. Because if they actually cared they'd be talking about alternatives.

You forgot to throw in a "back in my day".

This is why young people hate us old farts. Things have changed from when we were Young and we refused to acknowledge that and blame young people for the problems we caused them. And when they become maladapted because of all the dumb shit we dumped on them we get even angrier that they didn't turn out the way we wanted them to. Which is especially fucking hilarious because it was our job to raise them.

Meanwhile you completely misunderstood my comment. Or you didn't read it.

I literally said people are interacting despite distance. They're using social media to do that. That's because there isn't enough time in the day for them to interact physically. With long hours of homework you can't spend an hour on a bus going to hang out with a friend after school. That's just not in the cards.

You put kids into a situation where they're doing something unhealthy, having all their social interactions through the internet on algorithm-driven social media websites, and then you got angry at them that they're in the situation you put them in. And when anyone suggests fixing that with walkable cities you have a hissy fit because you love cars and walkable cities and cars don't mix.

You're not going to give up your car and you're not going to give up your Sweet suburban home with its ginormous backyard and personal pool, at least you're not going to give it up until it's taken away from you because suburbs aren't sustainable due to population density not being large enough to support the government funded services you want... So you're not going to give any of that up so the very least you could do is get the fuck out of the way and let the kids have their maladjusted social relationships rather than having no social relationships whatsoever.

This is why I hate old people. When you get to a certain age you just don't want to face reality anymore you want to bury your head in the past.

In America taking away social media from your kids would be pretty fucked up. At least assuming you can't either taxi cab them around town, buy them a car and get them a license or pay for a shitload of taxi rides

That's because the suburbs have basically spread us out to such a ridiculous degree that kids don't have a lot of opportunities to socialize. And no school doesn't really count you get maybe a half hour for lunch.

Hell people have been talking about how suburbs isolate people for ages. And it's only gotten worse. Back when my kid was in high school they were a good 40 minutes away from their closest Friend by bus. By car it was something like 10 minutes but like most places my city's bus system sucks balls. And when you have two or three hours of homework a night minimum sometimes as much as four or five that's just not going to cut it.

I suspect it was less of a problem for us old farts because not only were a lot of us in denser living conditions but even if we weren't we didn't have the crazy amounts of homework that modern kids get. Admittedly it's been years since my kids have been in high school but as far as I know that hasn't changed and kids still get multiple hours of homework a night despite all research showing that doing that's very counterproductive... More of the puritanical bullshit you just can't shake from our shitty culture.

So pretty much the only place your kids get to socialize unless you are very well off or they are very lucky is going to be on social media.

We could of course do away with the suburbs and make walkable cities but the car companies are worth tens of billions of dollars so there sure is shit not going to let us do that even if you could convince old people who are hung up on cars to do it

I suspect that old people are just going to keep grinding their kids into dust. Honestly I think most of us didn't want to have the little shits anyway. Men want sex and women want babies.

Although I would like to see the breakdown between actual game purchases and buying DLC it's still clear people are mostly buying games online and downloading them.

As for ownership gog.com is right there. I have not seen a single person mentioned gog. So honestly I think that all this talk of doing away with physical games isn't coming from a groundswell of opposition to the idea but it's just the usual content Mills looking for something they can shovel into our eyeballs. This is something it's easy to get outraged to buy and outrage sells.

It actually kind of pisses me off because I really like the fact that I own the games I buy on gog. And this was a good opportunity for them to get a bunch of press so that I could buy more games there because more games would get put there.

But that's not what the internet is for anymore. It's not there to be useful it's there to make you outraged because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives profit. So instead of a useful conversation about a digital service that allows you to own your games free and clear we get more worthless articles like this that were probably written by AI...

I hate this timeline

You don't just roll over and take it. This isn't necessarily just posturing even if they know they're going to lose. Sometimes you just have to fight a losing battle.

At this point the supreme Court itself is corrupt. These gambling dens are extremely unpopular with anyone who isn't a gambler and many people who are. So this is going to be laying the groundwork for public opinion and getting people aware and ready that the federal government is at this point completely corrupt. That's an important step in taking back the Federal government from the grifters and the criminals.

It's important to fight losing battles so that people can see that you're willing to fight. It does help to pick your battles but we are talking tens of billions of dollars being bilked from young men who very much cannot afford it.

If you don't think you want this then you're incorrect. You do not want this level of gambling going on in society legally.

I'm guessing most of the people who click on this thread already aren't fans of legalized internet gambling but I know there are some right wingers out here that will back anything the president is backing and the president's son is knee deep in all of these gambling companies so the president is backing it.

So put aside that for a moment. Let's talk about what widespread gambling is going to do.

You are going to have a shitload of young men brought up on the idea that luck is a skill that can be developed and that American exceptionalism means they must be skilled in everything or they are inferior human beings. This sets them up to gamble. A lot.

They will of course lose because that's how gambling works. The House always wins.

So congratulations you have a shitload of young men who are already broke as shit because there are no good entry-level jobs for them, and no working as a plumber at the entry level isn't a good job it pays about 15 to 20 an hour, and suddenly they are up to their eyeballs in debt from gambling.

This is going to create all sorts of problems for you personally. Many of those young men will work longer hours at their jobs and doing that reduces the value of Labor in the market reducing everybody's wages. Shit runs downhill and it's going to hit you just like it hits everybody else.

That's before we talk about the ones who get desperate and turn the crime of one kind or another. And yeah lock them up right? But you still have to pay your taxpayer dollars to keep them in that prison because you do not have the stones to execute somebody for sticking up a convenience store or doing some petty white collar crime like minor embezzlement.

What I'm saying is even if you think this is cool because freedoms and the president likes it it's going to bite you in the ass.

This is another classic chesterton's fence moment. Don't take down a fence unless you know why it was put up. In this case it's a little worse because we all know damn well why we limit gambling to one city in one state of the union.

Yeah Google is going to tell everybody that AI is the new hotness allowing them to make all their software the bestest. And I have no doubt that their tools will find some bugs that nobody cares about.

It would be funny if all these tools really did work though to the point where all the security vulnerabilities that that Israeli company uses to break into our phones for law enforcement got fixed up so that law enforcement couldn't just break into your phone anytime they want.

On the other hand the way the laws are changing right now and the way our civilization is rapidly going back to a feudal system of government we're not going to have enough civil liberties for any of that to matter but it's still an interesting thought experiment.

Governments have the right to do anything your stupid neighbor lets them.

And about 45% of the country is composed of your stupid neighbor.

That's not quite enough to sell the other 55% down the river. But since most countries have winner-take-all first past the post voting all you need to do is apply a little voter suppression at the county level to stop about 6% from voting and your stupid neighbor gets to decide how you live your life.

That's sex, not gender. And sex is not so simple either.