This is one of the most unknowable questions there are. There is absolutely no reason to think that they have, and there is absolutely no reason to think that they haven't. I imagine an intelligent anthill trying to work out whether any other intelligences have ever come to their island by looking for unrecognised pheromone trails.

No aliens, ever, is obviously possible, it's the simplest way of explaining why none have ever said hello or left behind stuff which has no other explanation. There are huge distances involved, it might be incredibly rare for for machine-building intelligence to evolve, and there are plenty of plausible reasons for machine-builders to not end up crossing those distances.

But it also wouldn't be remotely surprising for a few or a lot of alien things to come here without us noticing. They might be so strange we don't know what we're looking for, they might have hiding technology which is just as good as their interstellar travel technology and ethical and/or legal reasons to remain hidden. Or they might have just been here a long time ago, and picked up all their litter.

Or... they may have only been around hundreds of millions of years ago, with anything left behind having long since broken down and become atoms in rocks. Humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of this planet's lifespan. There's a tendency for people to think of official representatives visiting now and doing secret deals with governments, but when someone talks about aliens having visited Earth, I imagine things like a group of scientists and thrill-seekers coming down to collect organic material samples and have fun back when mammals weren't really a thing yet.

I mean on that standpoint if an employee at Meta fucks something up on the scale of $80B they won't get fired if the stock and revenues are doing well? I'm not even necessarily justifying his firing, he probably can't even be fired with how much he controls. I'm just speaking to the perceptions it creates. This guy can fuck up and no reasonable change to his life will happen. When people act incredulous because "why hate billionaire" that's a big part of it I think.

Like you said, even just losing his job which would have zero effect on his lifestyle, he won't even face that for reasons probably not even totally up to his decisions since even with Meta's share price I would have to be shown that the share price also wouldn't go up with a different CEO. Maybe it would be doing even better.

Yes, that's the reality right now, I wasn't arguing that, I was arguing the perception and perverse incentives it creates.

Also maybe we should make it so that when a company reaches a certain size there can't be a single controlling interest. Meta employs 70k people, a large amount of stock value, they control a very influential media platform. Their actions have effects on way more people than Zuckerberg.

On what basis do you suggest shareholders remove him as head of the company? It's easy to point to fuckups, but the hard pill to swallow is they just reported another record net profit of $25bn for the quarter keeping their upwards trend. Their share price is high. Their revenue is down slightly from their record Q4 2025, but they made a bigger profit on that slightly reduced revenue.

So if you were the board, or a shareholder, why would you shoot the golden goose who has clearly run a company that has healthy and sustained massive success, not just riding the wave of today's hype?

They didn't make a loss. They invested in an idea that didn't generate a new revenue stream. In fact you can't even point on their historical profit chart at which point they spent this money. Line goes up.

I think for Blizzard the success of Classic WoW (and Classic+ which is expected to be announced and likely part of the timing of this) proves that as you said, some measurable amount of people are willing to pay up if given the right offer.

Exactly, if you don't trust Blizzard with the game then go play FFXIV or ESO or GW2 or any of the various other MMOs. If you want to do this private server thing then you also have to expect that shit will get shut down as Ascension players will find out shortly. Losing all your progress sucks too and something that wont happen with Blizzard if you enjoy WoW that much.

Minecraft and WoW are two very different games with different goals. Asking WoW to be like Minecraft is a little silly. WoW was never intended to be a private server game, its an MMO. There are plenty of open world RPG games with coop modes to play if you don't want the subscription. If people want to play on private servers, go for it but you can't also martyr yourself over it or really say Blizzard is out of line here, it's a pretty clearcut legal case and these operators clearly knew it.

The damage from covid being blamed on cell phones.

We had a period of 4 years during which everything in a kid's life got completely upended and we wonder why we're having problems with academics.

There's also a nasty little bit of business that we don't think or talk about. We spent the last 45 years automating every blue collar job we possibly could. Massive amounts of factory automation. And what we couldn't automate which was about 30%, we either shipped it overseas or we brought in cheap labor for it.

This means if you aren't cut out for college you don't really have a lot of options. Yeah everyone will talk about how much money you can make in Blue collar but the thing is those jobs are brutal on your body and you can really only do them until you're late 30s or early 40s at best. You can of course find the occasional genetic freak that can just keep going, I've known some. They are genetic freaks and they are not the norm. Meaning that you're going to be killing yourself for two decades and then suddenly have a large drop in your pay.

And that's best case scenario if you're not somebody who can hack one of those brutal jobs like working on an oil rig or diesel mechanic and you're not one of the handful of people that blenders into one of the really sweet gigs that are few and far between like the guys who maintain elevators or large industrial cooling and heating systems then they're just isn't anything for you.

So we've been taking those kids and basically forcing them to stay in school longer and longer because we just don't have anything to do with them and if nothing else while they're in school we don't have to face facts that there aren't any jobs for them.

What this means is that even though class sizes keep going up per capita spending on students is also going up. Those two things shouldn't be compatible in theory if you're spending more on each individual student your class sizes should be shrinking but my kid when they graduated high school had 45 students in their math class. Some of the kids had the stand in the back because there weren't enough chairs for fucksake.

You end up having to spend a lot more money because you have all these kids that normally would be on their way to trade schools but we just don't need them to do that work. I mean we could be fixing our infrastructure and rapidly switching the wind and solar power but fuck that. Elon Musk needs to be the first trillionaire because he invented the electric car and the rocket.

None of this is sustainable and the Epstein class knows it so they're moving to shut down elections and put a dictator in charge. And we are well on our way to letting them do that because fuck those trans kids in sports or whatever the fuck we're currently panicking about instead of anything that actually fucking matters. Because we didn't learn what a moral panic was when motherfucking He-Man was being attacked by Evangelical rapist assholes...

Everyone keeps thinking of AI is a product. It's not. It's capital. It's something that gets used in the production of products.

And it's something more than regular Capital like we are used to seeing. It's Capital that is explicitly designed to eliminate jobs. It's an entirely new automation technique. Something that we haven't seen since the assembly line was invented.

And yeah if you go back to the industrial revolution it's going to look pretty fucking primitive compared to a modern factory. But the difference between the ruling elite that are pushing for this massive automation and you is that they think in terms of decades and generationally and you think about whether or not you can pay rent next week. Or your mortgage if you are upper class and scoffing because I said rent and you're one of them highfalutin homeowners.

The goal and purpose of all this automation is to free the Epstein class from the bonds and chains of us filthy filthy working slobs.

Just the fact that they can be called the Epstein class because anyone could possibly call their behavior into question infuriates them. And the only reason that's possible is because they still kind of need us to do jobs and they still kind of need us to buy their shitty products.

Do you think they didn't notice that? Do you think they are happy about the fact that they stand at the Apex of human civilization but are still dependent on people like you and me?

The only real question is are you going to die before this shit really hits the fan? If you didn't have kids then I guess you haven't done any harm at least but it's kind of fucked up that you're leaving this completely screwed future for your kids. And this assumes that you're going to die before everything collapses which is looking increasingly unlikely.

I'd like to tell everyone to start thinking about how they're going to solve these problems but I just don't think human beings are equipped to solve these problems. How the fuck are we supposed to get people who are thinking primarily about next week's bills to think about even 5 or 10 or 20 years down the line. Hell there was a massive automation push starting in the late 1970s that has had significant impact on the economy that we just pretend didn't happen... There's no reason why we won't ignore the next big push

The fact Zuckerberg is still at the head of this company is an indictment against our economy, our culture and the entire problem people have with the wealthy: once you are wealthy you can fuckup seemingly an infinite number of times and not suffer any consequences.

First the general social issues with Facebook with it's corrosive algorithms. That should have sunk him. Then sinking how many billions into the metaverse, so much so that you renamed the company? Could any of us make that scale of mistake and not only keep our job but even make more money?

And now this, another failed billion dollar loss and even if he is removed from the CEO role he'll get a multi million exit package, keep all the stock, remain on the board and probably be able to swing more venture capital to new companies.

I don't support what Luigi Mangione did by any stretch but I also find it incredulous when people act perplexed about people who do support his action and like, when you see shit like this...

DOE is combining #1 and #2 to give us Nuclear Slop.

Yeah they stopped giving me mod points a while ago even though my karma is consistently excellent. Notice how as soon as I post I have a +2.

What I suspect they are doing is that there aren't a lot of posters because this is a dying forum so anyone who gets engagement doesn't get mod points because you can't comment on a thread you moderate on.

So it's actually the opposite, my posts are popular and well written and well received and drive engagement at least what little is left on this dying forum.

Oh and I've been here a very very long time and when I still used to get mod points it was five not 15. So get off my lawn and get away from my statue of Natalie portman, naked in petrified, covered in Hot grits and my greased up Yoda doll.

Considering these custom servers was what compelled Blizzard to launch Classic WoW as an actual product and it has stayed popular since then I think there is something to be said about that theory in terms of how it applies to an MMO like WoW, seems like many of those players were willing to pay for the experience and Blizzard in that case was smart enough to give it to them.

If the tweaks this server made to the game are compelling enough maybe Blizzard will launch an official product with them as well.

There's a second difference. When the collapse happens bitcoin has no functioning floor to its price. Gold however will settle to where it was before speculators went batshit crazy with it as its industrial uses and general desirability set that price.

People don't want money... in what world? No most of the problems with money have typically occurred on the supply side. Virtually all examples of currency collapse are due to government financial mismanagement.

Tell us you don't understand basic economics without telling us. A currency which doesn't depreciate (slightly, the ideal target is 2-3%) causes economic depression as it promotes hording rather than being used to transfer wealth in a way to promote economic activity. There's nothing evil about currency reducing in value, it's actually to your benefit, but only if you're not a moron who thinks that an "investment" is stuffing cash into a pillowcase.

False narrative, silver hasn't dropped beyond it's long term average price. In fact it's still trading double what it was last year. The monetary and industrial uses set the *floor* for a price, it doesn't preclude the ability for idiots to use it as a speculative investment.

What is this bitcoin crap and how does it relate to the only coin which matters: $TRUMP?