His incompetence and evil wrecked the global economy but everyone's afraid to say it because he keeps sending the doj after anyone that crosses him and nobody can stop him. The courts are fighting over whether Trump's cronies can be held in contempt for ignoring orders from more sane judges and so far Trump is winning and his cronies can ignore Court orders

I don't think this is just dumb I think this is people running bots.

We saw exactly this behavior when blockchain and nft and crypto blew up where if a company just put those keywords into their name suddenly their stock shot up. Sometimes even if those words just ended up in their name by accident.

The people who own the mall don't care that they're losing tenants because tax write-off structures in other businesses they own mean that having property that loses money is incredibly profitable and they can sit on that tax write off for a long time until the property becomes valuable again for a different reason.

In the case of movie theaters they know people are going to figure out that the ads are running and either show up late or use their phones to hang out before the movie actually starts.

Now the people buying the ads no that nobody's really paying attention to them all that much but it's their job to sell ads so they don't pay too much attention to that. As long as they can get their boss to sign off on the ad buys they've done their job.

There are entire advertising industries that only exist because they have existed for a long time and the people involved are good at protecting their jobs. They stopped working ages ago.

That doesn't always happen mind you, if you remember one video game magazines stopped publishing it was way further along than you realize, like mid-2000s. The internet didn't actually kill video game magazines Big Data did. Companies like EA and Microsoft and Sony and Sega were able to run the numbers more effectively using big data tools and figure out they weren't getting any sales out of the magazine ad buys anymore. So they stopped advertising and the magazines went tits up because it's not the sale price of the magazine that keeps them going it's the ad buys

You're buying the patents and the engineers. You will pick through the engineers and there will be some people who know what they're doing but on hamstrung by a variety of issues. And you will get a patent portfolio from those engineers that you can use to defend yourself as you build your own Internet satellite company.

You are right that being able to blow 10 billion on just that though is pretty fucking insane. But as an added bonus you are making sure that there are no competitors besides the one big one.

Remember Amazon didn't get big with good technology and good service it got big by buying up all of its rivals because bezos was a finance bro with good connections to other finance Bros so he had lots of money

And it's going to be a disaster for your 401k because that's the only place that big of a scam can be dumped. You are the rube you on musk is planning to bilk so he can be the world's first trillionaire.

SpaceX has a basic problem. There are not enough proper launch customers in order for them to grow. The only other launch customer they have that could potentially grow is muskrat's own satellite internet company.

That market is basically already tapped out. There just aren't enough people who can afford pricey satellite internet and don't already have a landline to their home.

And now here's a competitor expanding into the only space SpaceX could possibly grow into.

Rules and laws are being changed to make it so you can't protect your 401k even if you are a sophisticated investor. And don't forget if you have parents who are still alive they're probably going to be moving in with you soon after their savings get wiped out by this nonsense.

If Sony wants fewer ads they're going to have to pay the theaters for fewer ads. And if consumers want fewer ads they're going to have to stay home because it's very very profitable to sell those ads. We see that same behavior with cheap TVs where most of the profit these days are coming from deals made by the TV manufacturers.

As a consumer though honestly you're just going to show up 20 minutes late for showing and browse on your phone until the ads stop.

But you are still the closest to an old school captive audience and AD man can get. That's the real problem with television ratings dropping traditional advertising is looking for a place they can just kind of force people to watch their ads for a bit. Internet ads just don't work unless it's a influencer pretending to be your friend.

You would have to get voters to put politicians in office that agree to those fines and that don't just allow the courts to quietly renegotiate them down to zero.

About 40% of voters are currently super super concerned about trans girls in sports having suddenly become big fans of women's sports in the last couple of years after spending their whole lives ignoring them.

Eventually they'll forget about that and move on to some other pointless moral panic and continue to ignore there ever worsening economic situation except in a few situations where there's an opportunity to vote for a particularly pro corporate politician who promises them cheap eggs or something...

Seriously this is very much a political problem but I don't know what you do with the voters we have. Maybe if there wasn't so much voter suppression but there is so..

It's painfully obvious this is just a shake down and I'm wondering how the money is going to change hands and who gets it besides Trump.

I'm sure Papa Nurgel will get his cut but I wonder who else is going to get in on the action.

Assuming we managed to get rid of the Republican party the way the hungarians managed to get rid of Victor orban we are going to have so many years of cleaning up this mess. And the worst thing is is the majority of old farts that put us in this mess are going to drop dead before they have to deal with the consequences.

Has several people here have pointed out the way Macs get those numbers is by heavily optimizing their CPUs and the software that runs on them. That means if you're going to run the Adobe suite on your Mac then yeah you're in good shape because Apple built custom features into their silicon for you and Adobe wrote software to use those features.

But if you go outside of the stuff Apple made specific optimizations for things get much less Rosy very quick.

To be clear there's nothing wrong with what apple is doing. They made a purpose-built computer for specific tasks and you get very very good performance and very good battery life if you're doing those specific tasks. Think of the old commodore Amiga computers it's like that. They could do all sorts of amazing things in certain spaces but they were kind of pants as general computers.

If you want a general purpose computer you're not going to beat what AMD and Intel has on the desktop right now. You trade a little bit of battery life to performance for that though. Depending on how much money you spend and how well built the laptop you get is sometimes you trade a lot.

Of course the absolute shit show that is Windows 11 isn't helping matters though. But that's another matter entirely and Linux is a viable option for a lot of things.

Even if Microsoft didn't do any AI crap whatsoever they would still have to jack up prices because the bubble is devouring all the ram. Storage is also up quite a bit in price though not as bad as RAM.

The price of ram has quadrupled. And it's not going to come back down in price anytime soon. Even after the AI bubble bursts and the winners are decided and demand comes back down you will not see prices come back down probably for 8 to 10 years.

That's because like everything there will be collusion between the manufacturers and eventually there will be enough Democrats in charge of Congress and various attorney general positions that they will go after the ram producers and give them a little slap on the wrist and make them lower prices. But it's America's political system is so fucked up that's going to take a long time and Europe just does not have enough weight to force something like that. If the European Union could act as a United Force they probably could but it's too easy for one corrupt politician in one of the European Union states to screw that up. Although without Victor orban that might be a little bit harder it's still a problem...

You have a double whammy of out of control demand and inelastic pricing caused by zero competition in any markets because we stopped enforcing antitrust law. Like out for the longest time flat panels were stupidly expensive even though the technology had come down in price until the Democrats in America got around to smacking the panel manufacturers around a little bit.

These lawsuits are terrible for consumers. McDonald's has been doing them with beef producers instead of lobbying for antitrust law enforcement.

So what happens is that instead of competition the beef producers pay out settlements to a few big guys that can sue. McDonald's pockets the money, they can run their competitors out of business because smaller guys can't force settlements and prices keep going up along with corporate profits.

That's what's happening here instead of law enforcement we get back from deals from billionaires

Something like 60% of the country reads at a 6th grade level or below.

As a country we don't do nuance. We are All or nothing. We just do not have the educational equipment to pull off nuance.

AI data centers are bad. Really bad. They guzzle drinking water and they go straight for drinking water because their design requires very pure water and its pricey to purify it and they're already losing money hand over fist. They also guzzle subsidized electricity. When one of them gets crapped down into your city it's guaranteed that your water bill and your power bill are going to skyrocket.

And God help you if they are near where you live. The noise they produce causes active physical harm. It's a weird sort of low pass filter noise the damage is human psyche and physiology in a variety of weird and frightening ways. If you remember that story about The Havana syndrome it's like that only 24/7.

Oh, and no jobs. I mean I guess there's a handful but literally you could count them on one hand. The administration is done remotely overseas so you've got a couple of security guards and a couple of guys that show up every other week to change out some parts. Everybody is contractors making a little bit more than minimum wage. You don't even get a lot of jobs building them because it's highly specialized work so they bring people in from out of state to do it.

They offer absolutely no advantages except the bribe to your local politicians. It is absurd to greenlight these things in your community. The only reason to do so is that your voters are too stupid to say no.

Between 100 million and a billion dollars. It's a really huge gap that people have a hard time grasping because human beings are bad at grasping numbers that large.

The absolute top Stars might have net worth in the hundred million range or so but besides one or two super duper Stars none of them approach billionaire status. They simply do not have the money to start their own production studios that are capable of competing with Disney and Warner Bros.

And nobody is going to give them the money to do that because it's a good old boy Network and they are not going to fund their competitors. Because why the fuck would they find a competitor that is just going to dilute their market power? They are literally merging so that they can have less competition not more of it.

I said this on another comment but it's worth repeating, we stopped and forcing antitrust law and that is a fundamental underpinning of capitalism. We broke capitalism. It doesn't work anymore. I suppose we could try fixing it but we have to try first.

Nobody's going to give you the money to compete with Hollywood. At best you might be able to crank out a b movie or two that you can dump on Netflix but even that is dodgy because the people in charge of everything all go to the same golf clubs and they all belong on each other's board of directors so if you're actually going to try to break into that by competing they're just not going to let you do it.

If you happen to have enough money to start your own thing then sooner or later you will trip up and lose a bunch of money and they will be there to deal The killing blow. Either they will buy you out or if they can't do that they will create a competing product and sell it for a fraction of your price running you out of business the rest of the way.

We stopped enforcing antitrust law. As soon as we did that every system designed to create better products and make capitalism work broke down.

Capitalism is supposed to be a contest among equals but that requires a referee and we fired the ref.

But it doesn't and so it doesn't.

Yeah a few million might get lost here and there but it won't create openings for competitors because competitors aren't allowed to exist anymore.

I don't think folks really realize just how much damage we've done by installing pro corporate judges and politicians throughout our entire political system and picking the absolute most corrupt ones we could get our bloody hands on because they pushed our buttons the way we wanted them pushed.

Capitalism requires a complex system of referees and we fired the referees because we didn't like them. We are just beginning to see the consequences of that and it's going to get a lot worse.