They don't have money to spend. They have collateralized debt. The collateral for those loans is usually company stock. The value of that collateral is mostly set by high-speed trading algorithms. Those algorithms value the stock based not just on current earnings but also on projected future earnings. Those projected future earnings are based on past growth rate of the company. If their growth rate slows (slows, not stops or contracts), it results in a significant downgrade of future earnings. This will drop the share price of the company by huge amounts in fractions of a second. This has already happened before in '22. Facebook reporting lower than expected growth resulted in an instant loss of about a quarter of their stock value.

That's a bad loss on its own. What worse is if your shares are collateral on a loan. When your collateral drops in value by 26%, you either need to add more collateral, something relatively difficult for a company to do, or you need to pay a higher interest rate. Servicing the higher interest rate lowers the company's profits. That lowers profit projections. Those lowered projections result in a devaluation by trading algorithms, sparking a selloff. That lowers stock price, which then triggers higher interest rates, which then lowers profits, which then lowers market cap... This is a negative spiral that ends with bankruptcy as the company tries to deal with the suddenly crushing debt.

This is the situation that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and several other tech giants find themselves in. Any one of these going into the death-spiral described above will affect the entire tech sector when it goes. That collapsing giant can trigger other giants to collapse. Before you know it, everything is in freefall and trillions, with a 'T' of dollars of wealth just evaporates.

That's several times worse than what happened in the 2008 crash.

Whoever at Alphabet signed off on this is a fool. It's an entire culture of spendthrift on longshots caused by the founders of all those companies having hit the jackpot once and them and all their investors blowing their money chasing another one. The whole industry is going to collapse in like 5 years. It's going to make the dot-com bust look like a minor market correction.

Counterpoint.

An elephant trunk is a type of tentacle. But you need rigid lever arms for lifting weight efficiently. So, I'd suggest one of each.

It's not American football. It's Canadian gridiron football.

You're still stuck in the chauvinistic mindset of your experience. It wouldn't look like a centaur. It would look like a crab with slug-like eyestalks and antennae for sensing and one or two manipulators sprouting from center of mass like either a multi-articulated arm, or an elephant trunk. Maybe both.

No, there won't. First, because all those companies are going to go bust. Second, because all those companies going bust are going to take out the entire industry and destroy trillions (with a "T") of dollars of notional wealth. (Anyone who wants to argue with me that we're not currently Y2K levels of over-valuation in the tech markets needs to first explain how Chewy's business model is sufficiently different from Pets.com's that the former makes economic sense while the latter's famously did not.) Third, the aftermath of all this will just be a new level of acceptance for fundamentally broken and worthless code being sold to the public.

That's what I was wondering. Because there absolutely have been 4-door hatchbacks. And people hated them. That's why they stopped making them and settled on 3-door and 5-door hatchbacks.

Because, unlike a trunk, it allows access into the main cabin of the vehicle.

I think you'll find that opposes the well understood definition of a "door". It has hinges, it has a latch, it is used to reversibly occlude a space. It's a door.

How the fuck can you have a "four door hatchback"?! I assume they mean five-door hatchback? The hatchback is, in fact, a door.

It is not easy to report. They do not quickly follow up. Wage theft accounts for billions of dollars of lost income in the US every year.

Might just have to check out LibreFox now. Good to know.

At least one of those was a joke, right? You're just sending up stupid fork names, right? Right?

I started using Netscape 1.0 decades ago. I switched to Firefox after Netscape was murdered by Microsoft. The only reason I'm still using Firefox is that Google is worse now than Microsoft was back in the 90s, so that removes Chrome as a possibility. Opera doesn't have the extensions I want (I'm never surfing the web without script and ad blockers on again). Everything else is too small to get much support from website developers. So, as best I can tell, my best option is to turn of updates and never update Firefox again. I really wish someone would explain to Mozilla that the lemonade doesn't taste better after you piss in it.