No adult should be, either. About the only thing anybody should be doing 16 hours a day is breathing.

And as such, is nothing new whatsoever. The National Endowment for the Arts was established win 1965 for that specific purpose.

The only difference is that's generally a one time grant, where this is pretending it's permanent (but will only last until money is short and their parliament needs to cut expenditures).

No, they're expecting the free money to dry up, and the company's value to plummet. If they cash out just before that happens, they maximize their own bank accounts.

This is basically an admission that the bubble is about to burst.

I have doubts there ever was a Plan A, beyond "Let's see how much money we can get from the marks," but injecting ads has always been Plan B.

Even if there was a Plan A that would have made them profitable, and even if it had worked, there would still be a plan in place from Day One to "enhance shareholder value" by adding in advertising, more and more advertising, until there's nothing else left. (And if they time it right, the IPO will be just before the stock collapses, and they'll all go buy islands in the south seas somewhere, populated by nubile youths of their chosen persuasion.)

You know I'm right.

Did you really just say you want Donald Trump, personally, to control every business in the United States?

No wonder you posted anonymously. Wouldn't want the nurses to revoke your internet privileges. You might not get a cookie at bedtime. Or they might up your medication, and you know how that makes you feel.

Did "Andre Norton" identify as a man? If you expand "identify as" to include pen names (and nothing else), then yes. But I suspect J.K. Rowling (who published under the name "Robert Galbraith") would take issued with being told she "identified as" a man, though.

But the longer they can keep the pyramid from collapsing, the more they can pay themselves.

We can only hope.

Often, they are appointed but have to run for re-election, but yeah, in quite a few states trial judges are elected. (Federal judges are always appointed for life.)

It is, by far, the more formula driven genre of fiction, and always has been, because that's what the market will buy. (It is also, by far, the biggest market for fiction, because those who want that same story, over and over, with different names, buy a lot of it.)

Like the way women who write science fiction had to publish with a man's name?

Nothing new there, not for nearly a hundred years.

There's always room for more bullshit. With any luck, they'll amass so much bullshit, it becomes a black hole and sucks in all the other techbro companies with it.

I hate to tell you this, but those donation nags are ads. They are just advertising themselves, but they're still ads, just like the ad for a different TV show than the one you're watching (which happens when they can't sell that slot).

When you have a lot of users, and are losing money as fast as you can get it, everything is an ad platform. There's no other way to stay in business.