Exactly. Stocks weren’t meant to be traded as a way to make money. They were meant to represent ownership in a company that payed out dividends.

But then finance bros being finance bros, figured out they could gamble against a stock’s value and potentially make even more money.

Then it became normalized.

At least there are rules now and some oversite. It used to be a literal secret group of men, in a room, deciding value and who gets what.

Yeah, the ban on TP-Link is for good reasons.

If they are still on Reddit, then they fucking deserve the enshittification.

I am not sure how much to trust this article but what they have been doing is not concealed at all.

They are literally passing the money in a big circle so it looks like actual revenue.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that the established marketplace hasn’t already torpedo’d the fuck out of it.

They have been spending money like water to try and build data centers but doing such a terrible fucking job of it that they have just managed to piss off every landowner in America because their way of doing business is, “Trust me, bro”, then shitting all over the towns they build in, because they think somehow the towns should be grateful that XYZ has a data center there that doesn’t absolute fuck all for the actual community.

The demand is so high that tech bros are coming out of the woodwork, just like the dotcom era, trying to get a piece of this pie, but then these tech bros are the reason these large companies are shitty at their job. They don’t understand that rural America isn’t smoking the jerk off crack that they use to convince middle management to slave for them.

They look at “stakeholder engagement” as some sort of bankrupt woke ideology, then wonder why cities, counties, and states are legislating moratoriums on data centers.

They see the money these idiots are throwing at the problem and just want a piece of the pie. They don’t think, “Ooh, I can do that better, faster, stronger…” They think that the want a piece of that revenue. They think they can put together some data center EPC, maybe even with an electric generating component, then turn around and sell the EPC company.

It is snake oil salesmanship from top to bottom.

Every single motherfucker actively trading on these guys are part of the problem.

AI is not the problem, it is the tech bros selling it.

They should all be buried alive in concrete. They are so delusional they don’t even think they are doing anything wrong.

So now we have a confirmed list of 700 fucking monsters.

People see your nonsense brigading and you’re just going to get .ml defederated.

You’ll have to start all over from scratch again.

Your China apologists arguments are so tired, overused, and just … lazy.

Yes, I want some slave labor RAM.

He got a personal burner as well.

He bought new luggage and clothes for the trip, knowing they would be paid for and discarded. He said it wasn’t that big a deal.

It’s not like they surprised him on the way back, telling him to throw his stuff away.

I assume they would sometimes plant bugs and it was just easier to discard than to sanitize.

Yup. Move all the production to China to take advantage of their slave wages/conditions, and instead of passing any savings on to the consumer, they push all profits to the share holders.

That has worked out so well for us, hasn’t it, especially now that we have such a hostile relationship with them.

Companies are the worst.

China’s gonna own us all.

My brother-in-law traveled a lot for work, from the early nineties, to the 20-teens.

He visited, China, Russia, the U.S., India, all over Southeast Asia, Australia. Maybe South America, but not sure. Anyway, the point is he visited a lot of places, and the big ones fairly routinely. China is the only country, where his company had a whole list of requirements. He had to leave his personal phone, any personal electronics, and his work laptop at home. (They provided him a phone and laptop that would immediately be turned over once he returned and he could NOT log onto the company VPN with the laptop/phone they gave him and had to have his work email forwarded. )

They gave him money to buy a new suit before he went over there and to replace his luggage and clothes when he came back, because it was all discarded.

He said it was not so much government spying but industrial espionage. And he just worked in human resources.

I was in the Navy and visited Hong Kong a couple of times and they never said boo to me outside of the usual, “Loose lips sink ships.” spiel we got at every port.

They let him take his phone to Russia, but they did made him take a different work laptop, but that laptop could access the company VPN. He said there is was more about the government spying. I did not visit any Russian port while in the Navy.

They made the gasoline tax raidable. In other words, they can use it for stuff other than road maintenance.

They can pull from it without much oversight.

It is also a way to raise taxes without the necessary votes to actually raise taxes.

Nevermind, looks like they fixed it since I left.

Can it be any worse than what we have going on right now?

Do you want fat bees? Because this is how you get fat bees.

Ok~maybe I want fat bees.~

Right.

And what do you know about editorial controls or how journalism has worked in the last 20 years?

Wake up. The decline has already happened. It’s now a game of compromise.

You want to complain and whine like these guys are sitting on a beach, sipping mai thais, while telling their AI agents to write an article.

It’s ignorant and inflammatory. Just makes y’all look petulant.

My point still stands.

You can argue that EVERY fucking thing in the world is in the beginning , mid, or late stages of enshittification.

But calling Ars an internet rot site, at this stage, is just fucking stupid.

Are they as good as they were a few years ago? I honestly can’t say. I do know that there was better news a few years ago.

The people at Ars have a tough job trying to navigate this modern world of oligarchs and autocracy, keeping their identity, while being owned by a corporation whose only job is to make money.

They’ve done a pretty good fucking job, all things considered, of staying their course.

A much better job than internet assholes who want to act elitist and whine when the world falls apart around them while they blame their fellow class instead of the controlling class.

Weren’t you whining about other people making comments like this one to you?

No, the issue we are talking about today and calling Ars an “internet rot site” is a huge leap. Yeah, they post shit articles from Wired and such, (they are owned by Conde Nast), but their core writers are still great and have plenty of good articles.

You want credit for what? Over exaggerating an issue then whining about it?

You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then spitting on the baby. It makes no sense.

So many people at work are having frustrating issues with Windows now.

It takes so fucking long to start up. Sure, you get a desktop and can open a program, but it just keeps locking up repeatedly for a good 20 minutes while whatever bloatware is running in the background during startup.

They cram OneDrive down your throat and it has constant issues.

They put so much shit in your way, in the name of “productivity” it makes your actual productivity worse.

FUCK COPILOT.