The proximate reason is that there are no editors on Slashdot.

The broader reason is that the fortunes of tech companies are often caught up in financial headlines, so publications that cover economics are invariably syndicated here. The intended audience of these publications—the capitalist class—is deeply anxious about any changes in their host organism that may result in the contraction of their debt-based casino, so they eat up stories with pearl-clutching themes. Naturally, slave shortages are a major concern.

Patrimony is a word already. It refers to a son inheriting possessions from his father. The -monium suffix is productive in Latin and means "obligation:" testimony is the obligation to testify; patrimony is the obligation to act as a father; matrimony is the obligation to act as a mother, i.e., fulfil "womanly duties."

Whoever sold you this bullshit was lying to you, and not even doing a particularly good job.

You are being scammed.

Ads: The homescreen has a couple of small store links at the bottom that are relatively unobtrusive. There are no recommendations forced on you unless you go to the store. There is a store button at the bottom of the homescreen, which I imagine is pretty handy if you actually want to get your eBooks from them.

Organization: You have to set up book categories after putting files on the device (like how the Kindle 3 was back in the day) but there are no forced labels or anything. There are at least 2 homebrew launchers that replace the homescreen, one of which lets you use a directory structure for files.

There is no screensaver advertising at all, unlike the Kindle—you can set it to display the cover of the last book you read, a generic "sleeping" message, or upload your own pictures for random display. I was really surprised by this; it's like they asked Kindle modders what they wanted and just made it the default.

There is a trick for skipping user registration during the onboarding experience by plugging the device into a PC and editing a YAML file, allowing you to use the device without giving them any info at all—unthinkable on Kindle!

Rakuten is a small Canadian company, so their niche is being less shitty than Amazon. If they ever stopped doing that they wouldn't have any customers.

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

Politicians: How do we stop climate change?

Experts: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth

Politicians: Unacceptable! AI, how do we stop climate change?

Every single LLM since GPT-3.5: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth

Politicians: Unacceptable! Techbros, how do we stop climate change?

Techbros: FEED ME!

The actual answer is that Discord has a serious problem with teenagers producing and selling explicit images of themselves, and the company is well aware that a single well-timed news article about this fact will obliterate their stock price—unless they have something to point to as proof they've made efforts to address the issue.

I doubt this take would hold up in court. No consumers will have the right to "adult" status without providing the aforementioned biometric information, so the California logic is out, as nobody is being singled out. In Illinois they can simply put a EULA clickwrap agreement before the camera part, which they'll probably already do to cover their asses.

It's not a false dichotomy. Volume is a separate axis. We will always need some hydrocarbon source. Better it comes from circulating carbon than fossil deposits.