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 Tesla only makes a few models, and I think only the Y and 3 are available in China. With Chinese batteries, BTW.

Also because they are aspirational. A lot of Audis are crap, they charge a subscription for heated seats. Range Rovers are unreliable and uninsurable, but people think they compensate for their micro penis.

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...

You are getting shafted by the lack of competition from Chinese manufactures. Here we can buy a brand new long range EV for around $30k before tax, and it's better than a Tesla.

You greatly underestimate the EU. I know it's hard to imagine politicians that aren't working for corporations first, but the way the EU is set up it's very difficult for them to gain traction. Look at all the pissing and moaning about GDPR, RoHS and so forth. The EU made it happen anyway.

So at least for Europeans that option to side-load any app we want isn't going away. What's more, Google is now required to allow third party app stores on Google Play, and I think it's only a matter of time until those stores are allowed to certify apps themselves.

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.