In his defense: He didn't set out to make a porn site. It's called "Only Fans" because it was supposed to be a site for celebrities or brands to post exclusive content for their fans. It wasn't until the pandemic that it really took off as a subscription porn situation. When they tried to crack down and correct the site back to what it was intended to be, it was too late. The change would've been too big for the business to survive.

It's not good enough to insert new insulin-producing cells into a Diabetic's pancreas. That can be an effective treatment for Diabetes, but never a cure. It doesn't address the underlying cause. You have to fix the immune system, if you want to cure Type 1 Diabetes.

Type 1 Diabetes is an Auto-Immune Disease. Unlike Type 2 Diabetes, it's unrelated to your weight or diet. Also, Type 2 Diabetes can also be caused by thyroid problems, not just poor diet and sedentary lifestyle.

Circuit City fell apart before Radio Shack, though. Best Buy is almost certainly Circuit City's spiritual successor. Circuit City and Radio Shack both started focusing on selling cellphones before they fell apart. I may have the causal relationship backward, but it seems like making a deal to front for a wireless carrier just kills electronics retails.

The Best Buy in my town had a great location across the street from Walmart, right next to Lowe's. It came time to re-negotiate their lease, and couldn't come to an agreement with the landlord, so they ended up shutting down, and reopening in another location. The new location really annoys me: they are literally right next door to the old Circuit City that closed ~25 years ago. The gym that was in there closed down about two months before they started working on moving into the old Orchard Hardware.

Why are we trying to mimic a platform that doesn't sell as well as Windows?

Credit cards are a really tempting resource to abuse. Having $2000 in credit available feels like having $2000 in hand. You can just buy that thing you want.
Anyone in the situation can just step back and think it over logically, but there's a whole lot of, "Well, it's only $5, I can pay that off," that goes on. Both the dumb and the smart can get sucked in, because the problem originates with emotion, rather than reason. We want the King to be in charge, but for many people, it's the Wolf.

The internet connectivity on your CPAP is so that your doctor can adjust the settings. The general idea is that you, as the patient, aren't supposed to be able to mess with it, though by law, they can't keep you from controlling it, yourself.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to tune it yourself, I'm just saying that this isn't what your Ear, Nose, & Throat guy wants. If you want to control it, I say go for it.

Even the Big Bang Theory has some glaring problems with it. It's generally accepted, not because it answers all the questions or is even consistent with our observations of the universe, but because it answers more questions and is more consistent with our observations than anything else we've come up with, so far. It's well worth exploring other ideas, to see if they're a better fit for the data.

The verbal interface for the ship's computer in Star Trek is 100% an LLM with other generative features available in certain contexts. Usually benevolent, occasionally a problem.

That tracks.

While I enjoyed the third season of Enterprise, it really didn't seem like the right direction for Star Trek. Even when DS9 did their big war arc, they kept the show heavily episodic. It worked. It seems like in season 4, they knew that they weren't going to have time to do everything the way they wanted to, so they stuffed everything into the single season. It might be the best season of the show.

I think the complaint has more to do with never having any rest when central conflicts are resolved. In The 100, each season ends with the current situation being escalated beyond the problem they've been dealing with all season, rather than just letting the heroes celebrate their victory. I think the worst I've seen, was the ending of Season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise. The Enterprise returns home, big mission successful, Earth is saved. All that's left is to join the celebrations, and all of a sudden the crew is stuck on Earth in the late 1930s, hiding from Nazi Aliens.

That kind of thing can go suck an egg.

They're not going to be making much money, if there aren't enough people with money to buy things. That drives prices down. In the long term, as automation accelerates, it stops making sense to charge money for things. That's the onset of Post-Scarcity. We'll have a couple of difficult years, but on the other side, we have to figure out a whole new economic system.

Dark Matter is unconfirmed and largely undefined, but the observations that made us create it are very real.

I was thinking about that kind of thing, too, but didn't articulate it in my previous post. That said, if the fund is limited to something like 5% to 10% of a single business's market cap, and isn't allowed to vote or participate in shareholder meetings, its ability to tank a specific stock will be limited. I'm just spitballing. I do think it's a good idea, but the potential for abuse by a malicious administration is vast, so of necessity, there must be strict limits. Otherwise, it could be an amazing alternative to taxation.

Sovereign Wealth Funds allow countries to participate in investment markets, and earn money that way. Norway has a Sovereign Wealth Fund that they use to pay for their national retirement program. They can bring millions, if not billions of dollars into the government every year, just through dividends and advantageous trades, all without imposing new taxes.

Personally, I question the ethics of it. Norway can get away with it, because their Sovereign Wealth Fund doesn't invest in Norwegian businesses. The US investing in its own businesses like this is a bit too close to nationalizing them, unless the government can only buy a limited portion of the market cap, and isn't permitted to engage in ownership activities.