You say that like you think it's a bad thing. That has already happened.

Okay, but I'm skeptical that America is orderly enough to qualify as a province. Probably need to start out as a territory and work its way upward.

At least the story generated some funny and I would vote yours the funniest if I ever had a mod point to bestow. However too many sites for each of them to have a team. They should have a football team for each company, the way the corporations own the baseball teams in Japan.

I don't follow any sports these years, so I had to check to find out that Softbank (mostly a phone company?) defeated the Nintendo team in the Japan Series. (It's like the World series, but limited to Japan.) Computer games lose again? (Like my recent Slashdot submission?)

You seem to think that "monopoly" still has some meaning after the Borking. Most evil legal genius of my lifetime who didn't manage to get onto the Supreme Court. But now we've reached the point where you can't tell the geniuses from the idiots even if you have the score card. (Or convince me you have a better solution than "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse"?)

I actually submitted an idea for an AskSlashdot that used the famous game of Monopoly in relation to educational software. The Slashdot editors apparently think there is no interest in constructive usages of computers around here, and I'm inclined to go along. That the cesspool formerly known as Twitter continues to exist is additional evidence that is the correct position. (Maybe I should have suggested a computer-based version of Twister as a better example?)

Pretty weak FP thread but the general lack of response shows that the Slashdot editor was right to dismiss the idea of a "constructive" AskSlashdot submission for "educational" computer software...

Of course Snap was smart to avoid a potentially binding judicial ruling. But if the Supreme Court is relevant, I think we should start by fixing the Court, and I even have a twisted solution approach in the form of a simple procedural rule:

It addresses the root of the problem by making nonpartisan Justices much more valuable so that all presidents would be strongly motivated to nominate them and even the Senators would be motivated to confirm them.

Perhaps two definitions should be clarified? Nonpartisan would mean confirmed by a major of the Senators from both parties, which used to be the norm, though in my lifetime we have gone from all nonpartisan to all partisan Justices. Junior would have at least two options, time on the Court and birthday.

And yes, I have heard about LOTS of suggestions to fix the Court and if you're interested I can explain in detail what is wrong with each of them if the political motivations are left untouched. However I think a threat to pack the Court might be the best way to get the current minority party of that time to provide some candidates that both parties can (finally) agree upon.

Really disappointed by the lack of Funny on the story. Have we all lost our funny bones? Or are we too afraid of being called anti-Chinese or even racists? Or maybe it's manufactured fear of Chinese sock puppets overrunning Slashdot? New and improved AI slop and powered with Chinese genAI copied from American genAI LLM slop generators!

Having said that, the only joke that came to my weak sense of humor would involve a crew of Chinese astronauts with names that sound like English words, thus creating a new "Who's on first!" scenario. But I'm pretty sure that the Chinese name Fu or Hu is not really pronounced the way the English interrogative pronoun "who" is pronounced. (But "who" itself is a French lie because William's conquering French scribes didn't want to write the H sound first. So awkward in French that when spelling the English word they just had to add the W that isn't even there. Talk about Funny ears?)

Except that they don't. Data centers create a tiny number of jobs and not for the people who usually are looking for a job in rural communities, they don't draw in visitor, tourists or other kinds of customers for local business, they don't create any product that the community would benefit from - what benefit is he talking about, much less "transformative" ?

So many words for "lol, yeah that's a them problem, we don't give a shit".

That this is even a matter for insurance is pathetic. The police caused this to happen, it needs to pay the bill, in full, including any costs the innocent person had for the time they kept the vehicle illegally.

Once cases like this drain the police budgets, they'll have an incentive to actually do a good job instead of fucking around and offloading the cost of their stupidity on ordinary people.

Yes. But folding clothes is not high on that list. Of the entire wash cycle, that's literally the easiest part. Now if it could put together all the socks into matching pair and store them away, we might be talking.

Other companies have moved us away from that model. It used to be that you buy a washing machine and you're done for most of your life. Ok, maybe you'll need a second one one day but that's about it. Not anymore. I'm on my third fridge since moving into this house a decade ago. They barely offer repairs anymore and it's often cheaper to buy new. It's ridiculous, really.

If it would iron, fold and put away, I might think about it. Folding is not the time-consuming part there.

Lol, yeah. 99% of cats will ignore that. :-)

Upon rereading, I don't like that wording of "sales to suppliers or manufacturers" because the final sale to the end user is still pending... Monopsony is about control over how the suppliers and manufacturers are able to reach the ultimate customers. It's also confusing because the way Amazon plays the game they may never even have possession of whatever is being sold. They are controlling the communications between the customers and the sources?

But it's now reminding me of some of Enron's creative accounting games. Perhaps the biggest one involved creatively booking gross values rather that net values. One of the ways they made Enron look much larger than it actually was...

Basically the ACK, but I think I mostly disagree because banks are regulated from outside. In theory, if the regulators have not been captured, they should be establishing safe limits linked to reality. I have yet to detect any safety or reality in crypto.

If Binance was a legitimate company then it is possible they might have other assets to use in "replenishing" the assets stolen from their customers, but I don't believe that is the case here. First of all, I don't think Binance would have said anything at all if the theft hadn't happened, and second of all the ability to make anonymous and untraceable transactions is supposed to be a feature, not a bug.

So my theory is that they are replenishing the stolen crypto with other crypto. The only trick is how to juggle the books to make the numbers look similar, and so far they have only juggled 90% of the way. Sort of like being 10% pregnant?