1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

...Nothing on them but cranky bastards contributing to climate change while moving between ticky-tacky, 40+ hours of indentured servitude, and temples to Mammon.

I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.

Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.

The primary reason companies advertise with Google is to drive search results to their site.

If AI summaries become good enough that nobody needs to click the links anymore - What are advertisers paying for? "Brand recognition" only takes things so far, at some point they need real customers to drop in and throw money at them or they won't have anything to advertise.

My company ships data dumps like this to multiple vendors on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis.

My side of that equation takes security very seriously. The recipients... Well... When someone offers to send you credentials out-of-channel, the right response is never "Just email it, this isn't a shared account" followed by getting cranky at being told that ain't happening.

Yes but people do and companies selling agentic AI are encouraging that they do.

But I'm not a customer of Bank of America or any American bank so I don't quite understand the description that goes with this story. I thought every bank uses MFA - pin readers, authenticators, biometrics, email / SMS verification etc. in addition to username / password. I assume Bank of America does too, in which case even stupid customers should be protected. But maybe it doesn't.

Perhaps banks should also figure a way to allow customers to use AI if they want, e.g. issuing some kind of limited purpose token that an agent can use according to some max spend / txn limits, that the bank might even randomly challenge and seek authorisation for.

I used it (Gnu Emacs) 30+ years ago when the alternative was vi and there weren't really IDEs to speak of. But these days 95% of the stuff I edit is in an IDE or graphical text editor. If I need to edit something quickly I'll just use nano or vi because they're easier to get in and out of.

Even back when I did use emacs, I preferred microemacs because it had most of the normal commands but loaded faster. Emacs was s..l...o..w. It was also infamously bad for accepting patches, practically moribund in fact. Forks like xemacs demonstrated it was capable of being a lot more, e.g. offering proper GUI support when running in X11, but emacs never bothered with that. Even when I open emacs today it feels arcane, like it just gave up. It does have some GUI support but it's a joke. Frankly it's no wonder most users gave up on it too.

You're the one who politicized this, not me.
Or did you forget that you asserted ex nihilo that Trump was going to get it from Putin and then throw Zelensky in the conversation?
You just used those names what, coincidentally? Having a seizure?

Precisely what "stupid shit" re Helium is happening today, that's not just in your hate-Trump fevered imagination? Looks like the US designated helium as a critical resource - that's not "stupid shit", that's sensible.

I don't see any point in your post BUT the political, thus my point that if we're picking sides, it was democrat that put us here.

There's growing evidence for a ninth planet.* https://www.skyatnightmagazine... (real stuff at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.172...)

I've seen some vastly speculative bullshit (including still today "what if it's a micro black hole!?!!??!!?" which is fantastically unlikely, but the evidence does seem to be accumulating about a substantial TNO 500-700 au out.

*assuming the IAU doesn't again set up a bullshit scam-vote after nearly everyone left the conference to deprecate this one too.

Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

At least in regions like the EU where they are taking EV adoption seriously. Provide additional tax relief or a grant for any car that supports V2H with battery tech that supports the charge / discharge cycle. It means if you have a power cut you can plug the car in to supply the power or even use the car to power the house and lessen the cost (& strain on the grid) during peak periods.

I can already, completely above-board, sell someone a block of DRS'd IBM shares for crypto if I want to. Let's all be clear this isn't about denominating stocks in Bitcoin.

Rather, this is effectively about recording stock transactions on a blockchain. Nothing more and nothing less than swapping a distributed transaction log for a traditional ledger.

The implication is clear, the SEC is at least considering the idea of creating shares as a token cryptocurrency. In this case, the tokens are backed by real shares. That's not a technical requirement, though, and a future company might someday skip the major exchanges entirely to list only as a token. To be clear, there's nothing sacred about the exchanges and their "house rules"; there's nothing inherently wrong with using a blockchain vs a ledger; and to reiterate, this has nothing to do with "buying stocks with Bitcoin".

On that last point, I consider OKXICE's decision to accept payment in some nondescript "stablecoins" as extremely unfortunate. Not because I'm a cryptophobe, but because it muddies the waters as to the viability of the core concept of tokenized equity itself - Though that's a bit of a tautology, given stocks are already "tokenized equity". Whether we denominate them in USD or BTC or cowrie shells is an entirely separate issue.

Sad to hear about Brave. I like the idea.

The enshittening proceeds.

This puerile crap passes as +5 insightful on slashdot now.
Great.

Instead of just calling you a politically-motivated retard, I'll quote Mr Bill Clinton, who lobbied aggressively for and then signed the Helium Privatization Act in 1995:
"...We propose to cut $130 billion in spending by shrinking departments, extending our freeze on domestic spending, cutting 60 public housing programs down to 3, getting rid of over 100 programs we do not need, like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Helium Reserve Program...."
(https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-the-congress-the-state-the-union-11)

This is a reasonably literate and intelligent forum. Or it used to be.

Can we at LEAST recognize the blatant idiocy involved in presenting as equivalent:

"some things that have been declared harmless turned out to be harmful"
and
"things that are harmless will likely actually be harmful"

I don't know what retards will buy that* but it is such a very internet-flavored-argument it makes me recoil.

*that's actually a lie: I know *EXACTLY* what sort of retards will cheerfully gobble such nonsense up and likely chase off to reddit, tiktok, and twitter to spread it among their legions of co-retards.