The proximate reason is that there are no editors on Slashdot.

The broader reason is that the fortunes of tech companies are often caught up in financial headlines, so publications that cover economics are invariably syndicated here. The intended audience of these publications—the capitalist class—is deeply anxious about any changes in their host organism that may result in the contraction of their debt-based casino, so they eat up stories with pearl-clutching themes. Naturally, slave shortages are a major concern.

Patrimony is a word already. It refers to a son inheriting possessions from his father. The -monium suffix is productive in Latin and means "obligation:" testimony is the obligation to testify; patrimony is the obligation to act as a father; matrimony is the obligation to act as a mother, i.e., fulfil "womanly duties."

Whoever sold you this bullshit was lying to you, and not even doing a particularly good job.

You are being scammed.

Ads: The homescreen has a couple of small store links at the bottom that are relatively unobtrusive. There are no recommendations forced on you unless you go to the store. There is a store button at the bottom of the homescreen, which I imagine is pretty handy if you actually want to get your eBooks from them.

Organization: You have to set up book categories after putting files on the device (like how the Kindle 3 was back in the day) but there are no forced labels or anything. There are at least 2 homebrew launchers that replace the homescreen, one of which lets you use a directory structure for files.

There is no screensaver advertising at all, unlike the Kindle—you can set it to display the cover of the last book you read, a generic "sleeping" message, or upload your own pictures for random display. I was really surprised by this; it's like they asked Kindle modders what they wanted and just made it the default.

There is a trick for skipping user registration during the onboarding experience by plugging the device into a PC and editing a YAML file, allowing you to use the device without giving them any info at all—unthinkable on Kindle!

Rakuten is a small Canadian company, so their niche is being less shitty than Amazon. If they ever stopped doing that they wouldn't have any customers.

This got me interested. What exactly is he saying there? Does it mean what I think it means - that they immediately shift that money around, possibly through some mixers, to muddle the origin? And, of course, make it better suited to pay their proxies now that Qatar isn't sending suitcases of cash to them anymore?

Thank you for writing that. I was starting to think I'm going crazy and I can't possibly be the only one who sees through that.

And if you realize that Trump is just the clown at the helm. There's literally an entire bureaucracy underneath him doing most of the planning, deciding and executing.

Douglas Adams was right. The role of the president is not to excert power, but to distract from it. President of the Galaxy, president of the USA, no difference.

This.

You don't need billions to be care-free. Even double-digit millions in some nice safe assets already give you enough fuck-you-money to be good. And while everyone looks at the super-super-rich and they're in various public lists and tracked by not just the tax authorities, barely anyone knows the multi-millionaires. I know three or so that I'm sure nobody on here has ever heard anything about. They stay quiet, comfortable, private.

Don't you think you have the absolute best reason to not be revealed right there?

Can you imagine what criminals the world over would do for a few percent of that money?

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

True enough, he's definitely in group #2. No question about that. Though he and people like him are kind of a special (pathological) case, straddling the line between #2 and #3, in that they seem to believe their own current bullshit, even when it directly contradicts their previous bullshit. Not that they actually care about ethical behavior at all, but I think at least some of the time, they're deluding themselves into thinking that they're "doing the right thing" -- and they (sort of) are, but only for themselves and their cronies -- they can't see outside that mindset at all. When they're harming people they think of as "losers", that doesn't even count for them, since they consider them not worthy of being treated fairly, which is almost worse than people who know full well all the time that they're villains pulling the wool over everyone's eyes and glorying in it. It's the difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. The psychopath literally thinks that the harm they cause isn't wrong, whereas the sociopath knows that it's wrong, and does it anyway. This is necessarily an oversimplification, since humans are infinitely complex creatures, but I think it distills down to something like that.

Also if it wasn't for group #3 running amok for the last several decades (or centuries, depending on where one wants to draw the line) he'd most likely still be doing reality TV shows, at best.

Yeah, on reflection, that statement I made is not a maybe/sort of, it's a no/not at all, as you say. I guess I was lazy and didn't think that through: what "Ethics" "is" ultimately gets defined by the people already in power who benefit most by defining their unethical behavior as actually ethical, and their opponents behavior, whether ethical or not, as unethical. In other words: "My bad behavior isn't bad, it's good, because I support the system as-it-is, which is good by definition, and hey, you're just complaining about 'a few bad apples', but your bad (and good) behavior is very bad because you're a dangerous and subversive [insert pejorative] and (more to the point): Hey! You don't even have standing here, go away." That is, I guess, more or less, the established order. "History is written by the victors" may be an oversimplification, but is nonetheless part of a larger, very real phenomenon.

Wasn't familiar with Brickman, thanks for sharing him.

Yeah, that's a definitely a thing, though for the most part, that's willful ignorance, since the foundation of ethics (an innate sense of fairness) is rooted in biology [citations widely available]. And "do onto others" isn't quantum physics.

Though you're right there is a fourth group that legitimately "doesn't understand what ethics even is", though I think that group is vanishingly small, and most people with an IQ above 50 that couldn't tell you what "ethics" is know what the "golden rule" is.

"Fake Kevin Bacon" definitely knows what ethics is and understands it perfectly well, he just chooses to engage in the opposite. He's a perfect example of someone in group #2.

"I think that lawyers who understand how to effectively and ethically use generative AI replace lawyers who don't,"

There are three kinds of people in the world:

1. Those who strive to behave ethically.
2. Those who don't give a damn about ethics at all and make no bones about it.
3. Those who pretend to behave ethically.

People who want to "do the right thing" aren't a problem. They sometimes make mistakes, but try to correct them. I think this is most people, like more than 80%.

People who don't give a damn aren't really a problem either, since in a world populated by mostly good people, they'll ultimately be shamed and marginalized or end up in jail.

People who can successfully project the illusion of behaving ethically when they have no intention in doing so are a HUGE problem. While there aren't a lot of them, they're highly concentrated in positions of power and hold most of the world's wealth.

Maybe in the field of law, you can sort of cancel out the pretenders over time, since everything is (ostensibly) reviewed, so maybe "AI" will help the unabashedly unethical lawyers to self-destruct, but everywhere else, the problem remains, and "AI" is mostly going to make them worse.

It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.