Don't underestimate the coercive power of money and influencers.

Companies are going all in on the metaverse because they recognize that once you're in the metaverse the company has near total control of your perception. Which it can then use to monetize the living shit out of you.

Basically, the profit potential here is so astronomical that it becomes imperative to get in on the game 5-15 years early.

And once the metaverse become a practical system, you'll easily start to suck in people like DnD players by constructing a 100 million virtual world for Critical Role (and other such popular DnD content creators) and offering them millions to start playing their game in your metaverse.

I don't want to be too much of a doomer, but I don't think investing billions into this right now even thought there's really nothing there is as crazy as it sounds. They're investing billions today because there are trillions to be made 5-15 years from now. And the scary part is that these trillions won't come from a net gain to productivity, it will come from the monetization of control over people.

"don't do drugs, don't break the law, don't drop out of school, and do work hard"

You say that like it's a reasonable ask. It's not. The vast majority of successful people have failed at one or several of these as a teenager.

That's a classic: Republicans practically openly working against the interest of the people. Meanwhile democrats are lambasting republicans for doing so while simultaneously "mysteriously" being unable to stop them or reverse the damage regardless of how much power they're given.

Absolutely. And that's a start, but I'd like to see more options.

Unregulated cryptosecurities, I'm not going to touch those.

We can have some SEC regulated cryptocurrencies, sure. But the SEC doesn't seem to do it's job all that well, while still being quite the red tape. The mortgage crisis kinda proved that it doesn't protect investors that well. And the fact that everyone is lawyering up to NOT be regulated by them suggests that they're quite the hassle to accommodate.

I'd like to see some kind of free market of regulators, where issuers of securities can more easily pick and choose the regulators that suit them best. More or less red tape corresponding with more less risks and protection for investors. Investors can then, in turn judge crypto securities based on who they chose to get regulated by.

Investors who choose to purchase securities backed by shitty regulators will only have themselves to blame.

Where does this put the legal responsibility of BitCoin brokers like EToro, RobinHood, Coinbase, etc...

Do they follow the fork or the original or both?

This should be the final nail in the coffin for using reddit as an honest, open discussion forum.

Reddit itself, may continue and become even more successful. But the content quality will devolve to that of TicTok.

This should create a lot of demand for a better discussion forum for serious long form discussion.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this.

Microsoft is still fully invested in .NET .NET is a language platform and runtime similar to Java. It can run a number of languages (C#, VB .NET, Python, Managed C++, F# etc...) but the flagship language and most natural one to use is C#.

Microsoft continues to make massive investments in .NET and C# (in the billions/year I think).

The latest development is the .Net Standard and the .Net Core. Along with the purchase of Mono.

It gets complicated, but the .Net Standard is a way to improve compatibility between what was the growing number of implementations of the .Net: I believe there was Mono (it was a third party, open source cross platform implementation), .Net Framework (Microsoft's windows only implementation) and the Compact Framework for small devices.

Microsoft bought Mono, which is still supported. And started work on .Net Core which is cross platform and open source like Mono but supports more functionality than Mono but isn't fully compatible with the .Net Framework.

The "old" .Net Framework is now discontinued. The latest version: .Net Framework 5 is actually a continuation of .Net Core which has been renamed to .Net Framework to indicate that it is considered full featured and fully capable of replacing the "old" .Net Framework.

So all the various different implementations are getting merged into .Net Core which is also a bit more modular, so it's easier to just use some parts of the framework for when memory is at a premium (e.g. on small devices).

I'm also fairly certain that .Net Core is 100% open source.

IMO C# with visual studio is really the top of the line in terms of development productivity, in theory. But it is struggling to compete in terms of library support (it has ASP .Net for the web and XAML based UI for the desktop).

Also another interesting development is Blazor. Which lets you build reactive web apps that run on the web browser 100% in C# (the .Net runtime is compiled to webassembly and executes the application).

From the OP:

"that the sale price of $800 million will all go to a new nonprofit entity that will advance equity in education"

So the real question is, what is the name of that entity and what are they doing with that money.

Honestly, it's totally fine that the guys that payed $800 million for it can end up doing more or less what they want with it.

What matters is what's happening to the money now. All the focus is on the people that bought the thing. Whereas it should be all on the money and where it is and what they're doing with it now.

And I can't find ANY information about that.

$800 million shouldn't just disappear.