Well, of course, it’s different than a Casino. It’s bigger. It’s a longer running game. But it still pushes those “get rich quick” addiction buttons. You’re right, there are addiction awareness resources built up around traditional gambling channels, disclosure that “the house always wins.” In a sense, the stock markets are a long enough, slow enough running game that many players do actually die before the longer running Ponzi schemes collapse - so maybe the lack of addiction support groups is a little big justified there.

There’s also an unclear distinction drawn between “day traders” and “long term investors” which is so fuzzy as to be meaningless anywhere near the boundary, if there even is a boundary. How can you tell if your mutual fund is day trading?

I used to think that the market “drove engagement” - keeping people with money interested in the dealings of the companies they invested their money in.

Lately, I feel like it’s just a giant Casino.

I wish we could cut her suffering short somehow – for us as much as her.

Our legislators and judges are enormous chicken shits for not addressing this issue better. In a way, I would call them demented torture masters for their lack of clear and humane definition of when assisted suicide and mercy killing are legally permissible. Not required, but when all competent parties are in agreement? Keeping people with no quality of life and no hope of recovery alive with technology can’t be called anything but torture, in my opinion.

many many people are either directly, or indirectly related/responsible for someone’s death.

You want to get philosophical? Every mother and father are both directly responsible for the death of their children - even when that death is natural causes by old age, it wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t born.

You have definitely met someone who will kill themselves in the end. The rate is about 1/70 people in the US, and for every successful suicide there are 32 attempts of varying seriousness.

I may “be used to” Autotune, but it’s not in 90%+ of the music I listen to.

In some, limited, circumstances… jobs done using a computer should be done by the computer, with human oversight. Instead of having a manager who handles a “typing pool” of 30 wives and mothers and girlfriends with all their personal issues and needs beyond the time they spend typing information from forms into the computers, three managers who oversee that the data is being ingested into the system correctly could do the same work, with a similar error rate - probably different kinds of errors but a similar rate, for much less effort. That scales all up and down the range. Instead of 1000 line welders assembling car bodies, a team of 20 can install, maintain and oversee the operation of welding robots. And now, those 20 welding overseers can be reduced to 5 who just make sure that the computer visual inspection devices are doing their jobs properly.

Them being cheap means consumers no longer value them - which is what the wars are all about: value translated to sales and profits. Price is a function of what consumers will pay, which has little or nothing to do with what a thing costs to make.

If consumers went with HDDVD you would be saying the same thing about them.

Absolutely. BluRay was Captain of the Titanic, and is going down with the whole physical media ship. Vinyl LPs are the lifeboats.

I’ll agree that Apple is the big red nose on a much larger clownshow, but… between Microsoft and Mac, I’ll just say that I’ve got a request in with IT for a MacBookPro when funding becomes available. Some of that is because our IT has crippled Windows beyond its usual hobbled state, which is bad enough, and they haven’t hit the OS-X image as hard. But, even so, bone stock Windows 11 on a modern desktop i7 still has HORRIBLE performance issues that OS-X generally doesn’t suffer from. Intrusive virus scanning, intrusive file indexing, intrusive cloud backup… Apple does these things, but generally does them a bit better (though the clowns do mess up plenty along the way.)

I’ve used Ubuntu as my desktop for the past 15 years, it’s a different kind of clownshow - one that I prefer to the other two choices, but it has definite flaws of its own.

Blu-ray appears to have presided over the premium segment of the video-disc market just as it went down the tubes entirely. These days you can buy used DVDs 2 for $0.99, and Blu-Ray for $1.99 each - super 4x premium market they’ve cornered there.

And all the corporations are looking to put all the AI in all the places… because: magic free labor fairy dust, and all that.

There’s only one way to be sure: nuke it from orbit.

It’s also not hard for the IRS leadership to direct their agents to skip all that time consuming audit and verification stuff and just start slapping seizures on everybody who owes more than $1000 in presumed tax liability.

I can imagine the IRS could start seizing bank accounts and other assets like they already do for tax violators, but if it got to be a crisis they’d step up their pace.

In today’s climate I can also imagine ICE coming to your door to kidnap whoever they can get their hands on, if you’re a tax violator who posts the wrong kinds of messages on the internet (including brown skinned selfies.)

Education is a good thing, but in a society where everybody is well educated just having an education doesn’t get you the most desirable real estate…

More efficient for whom?

That would be the people paying less tax…

Learning isn’t a guarantee of a higher income. It might help temporarily, but when all the poor are educated they will still be on the bottom of the economic pyramid, and possibly less complacent about their situation having been educated…

The piece of paper is a barrier to entry, an entrenchment of academia in the global economy.

Read some Ivan Illich on the topic (Deschooling Society), he’s pretty lucid and still very relevant 50+ years later.

That may be, but politics does you - whether you let it or not.

Those would be optional, before the expense, votes for the choice to spend the money or not.

This is a case of necessity, they’ll be in violation of various laws and judgement decrees if they don’t raise the money.