It's surprising that the suicided whistleblower didn't leave an insurance file.

Or did he?

> Isn't capitalism great?

Capitalism doesn't let you buy laws, that's Corporatism, a subset of Fascism, which is in turn a subset of Socialism.

A proper Capitalist systems speaks to economics, not poltiics.

Reconstruction US, Post-Mao China, Post-Soviet Russia all embraced capitalist economics to lift the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty.

Societies which did the opposite mostly killed their middle class ans then half the population starved to death.

This one is rather significant.

I wonder which private repos were made public. This could be the main prize. Industrial espionage ops?

Having lived through the Dot-Bomb it's basically the same.

You're not going to get a valuation bubble without a hype bubble. And nobody is buying companies for that much who have zero infrastructure. And the stock price is what they use to buy the infrastructure.

These are inextricably linked, not separate phenomena.

This is what Austrian Economists call the 'malinvestment' part of the business cycle. It's caused by artificially cheap money (not set by a market) and will unavoidably be cleared.

Our Orwell is so strong the eggheads artificially setting the price of money call themselves "The Open Market Committee". Because an open market in lending rates is de facto prohibited.

They don't have to do this but most "journalists" are hacks that engage in Access Journalism (which is a type of bribery).

They aren't hard-driving gumshoe drunks like the legendary journalists of yore who sought to speak truth to power. They're mostly stenographers for the rich and powerful now (yay, journalism school!)

It will be interesting to see if any leave out of principle. I doubt more than 10% will. You can pretty much distrust any stories from the ones who stay.

EVs would be residential, not wholesale, pricing.

Big AI Data Centers would be wholesale pricing.

Remember - the Federation reserved the Death Penalty for making AI Androids.

Noonian Soong had to exile himself to a remote planet outside Federation control to work on Data and Lore (and his sexbot...).

They needed people to be able to have jobs *that* badly.

Which ... stop sending redshirts outside the ship with magnetic boots in a radiation storm, OK? They could have at least had some astromech droids. Sheesh!

I recently got a "plastic" target that changes color and the holes mostly self-heal if you don't use a hollow-point.

Good for plinking but they do wear out eventually.

I didn't even know this material existed before a buddy told me they were on Amazon. Amazing times, for sure.

Heck, I picked up some 100-lb test fishing line the other day that is some sort of braided heavy-chain polyethylene that is 11 times stronger than steel wire at the same size. The company made mechanical spinnerets to mimic spiders' to get it to work.

Again, I had no idea until a buddy told me it was $20 on Amazon.

Wild.

Back in the day we'd install wild boards that would upgrade the Mac CPU's by a generation or two, add FPU's, etc.

All of this depended on the systems being too expensive to replace or buy new except once in a blue moon.

At $600 which is probably $200 in 1986 money, it's a bit harder to be mad.

Those systems were probably $10K in 2025 dollars. Heck, a few were $10K in 1986 dollars.

If they want it preconditioned? Yes, welcome to 2025, they can install the app on their phone. Or they use the 'remote climate start' option on the keyfob. Or they shoot you a quick text asking you to hit the button in your app.

You keep trying to paint these advancements in convenience and comfort as terrible burdens, and it's weird.

*nerd alert*

The original script had The Matrix running in parallel on all the human brains.

Studio execs said that was too confusing and that they should be batteries.

Also Neo is seen on the Nebuchadnezzar with hundreds of acupuncture-looking needles with wires to get his muscles working while he's in a coma.

Writers should have been left alone (a story old as time).

I guess I should clarify. In addition to "just the W2" there's also a monthly, quarterly, or yearly payroll tax report that goes to the IRS, along with a whopping large check for the withholding, as part of normal payroll processing. Different companies do different reporting standards, of course. But they're getting the data a lot more often than you think, just from the money paid in *during* the year, before the return is filed for.