It absolutely is gambling. There may be a wealth of information provided; however, all parties are incentivized to lie. Is the board going to sell out to private equity? Is the next CEO going to be an utterly incompetent nepo baby? Is a hostile takeover going to happen? There is an infinite amount of information that the investor knows nothing about; therefore, it is ALL gambling.

"Buy index funds" Why? So Goldman Sachs can dump losing stocks into my portfolio?

It is gambling.

As well they should. A parasite is still a parasite, regardless of its other behaviors.

If you think it is about money rather than control, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you.

That is a possibility; however, they have proven over and over again that they do not care what the customer wants and only seek to enrich themselves and maintain the maximum amount of control, so it doesn't matter that there is no conspiracy here. Any gains they see absolutely will be used against the customer.

Indeed. They removed the ability to reorient the taskbar, an ability that has been around since Windows 95, merely because only a million people used it. You trust those people? Moron. Stop shilling for them.

As your dumb ass was typing that, The big orange Nazi (R) is having his DOJ sue in federal court to have this Minnesota state law overturned.

Beyond that, this isn't even a partisan issue. This is about "tribes." Reservation casinos. You see, moron, Minnesota tribes don't want competition for wager money in the People's Republic of Minnesota. They oppose any attempt to introduce additional gambling beyond what was already established before their rise in influence: sports betting, prediction markets, whatever. Being a cultural pressure group, their casino money pays for lots of (D)s in the state legislature. And those (D)s do their job, outlawing what they're told and mouthing stuff about "safety" or whatever, providing a plausible narrative.

So congratulations. You're officially a Useful Idiot.

Advertslop is a severe problem.

I was hoping to find out whether this is a viable business model for new startups, but they only ruled that it took too long for Musk to bring the lawsuit.

Someone failed to equip you with adequate cynicism. Upbringing issues.

Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

I could see that. But if we get that kind of social collapse no-one is going to care what the tech bros think. The 'haves' will discover that their bodyguards have a lot more power than a geek does in a post-collapse world.

Interesting. I had noticed the enshitification of Youtube ads with AI junk recently, but that just goes along with the general enshitification of Youtube with AI videos.

> It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work.

It doesn't work and they don't have magic to make it work. To the extent it does work, it's mostly automating away jobs which could have been automated away long ago but have been kept around for political reasons.

Sure, they can sack people and claim that AI will magically do what they used to do, but that just causes an Enshitification Cascade which leads to nothing working any more. And then we get social collapse.

Short of simply outlawing the collection of this kind of data (which is problematic in the US), that genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. You don't even need license plates, just access to enough cameras. It isn't exactly hard these days to track e.g. a blue 2008 Honda Civic through a well-covered area, and coverage is filling in by the day. Things like supermarket loyalty cards, credit card transactions, property tax records, etc, can answer the "who's doing the driving" part.

Ever growing automation is going to make for nice searchable databases. Which surely will never, ever, ever, be used inappropriately by those with access to them.

What we want doesn't matter. What people with money want is control of you and I, and might makes right, so they will get it. Enjoy.

ROFLMAO. Not even close to the biggest theft in history. I am guessing you are too young to remember Savings and Loans and FSLIC? Trillions stolen. OpenAI is chump change. Or, how about Social Security? All of that money goes into bonds which moves that money out of Social Security accounts and moves it all into the General Fund. Trillions stolen and meager Social Security checks for the people. There will be absolutely nothing left for you in a few years.

Billions stolen. Largest theft in history. LOL.

"Might makes right" is the national motto. Only losers care about rules.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.