Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

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

"Superfood" has got to be one of the stupidest words in existence. If I had to pick one plant to live the rest of my life on, potato would be high on the list. So-called superfoods like blueberry or kale wouldn't even make the running. What's better than any superfood? Having a large variety of not superfoods.

Well, yes, we certainly can make potatoes a lot less healthy by shoving them in a vat of vegetable oil and cooking it at high heat for a lovely combo of unhealthy fats, as well as boiling out as much vitamin C as possible. It would be a logistical nightmare to bring enough oil to Mars or the Moon though.

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.

Probably misremembering the original copyright statute: Statute of Anne

It was 14 years, extendable to 28 if the author was still alive at the end of the first 14 years.

The same way I wrote university essays. I write from my understanding and memory of what happened and how things worked. I then identified presumptions in the writing. I then searched for references that backed them up. Sometimes that would prove my understanding wrong and I'd have to rewrite bits.

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.

I run Android on my Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and RTX 5090 you insensitive clod!

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

Sorry, but, the US has spent much more on aggressive actions than any sort of defense since WWII. DoW is more accurate, though I wish they would behave more like a defense force.

Denying reality and thinking it really is about defense is more in line with being a fascist collaboration in my opinion.

Department of War is more accurate though. The US military spends much more time in foreign wars than doing any sort of defense.

So.... like humans then.

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.