Sorry, Scottsdale is a dealbreaker.

I find it difficult to believe that a 1991 Geo Metro could possibly be that advanced.

Self-aware enough to realize he's getting checked out, 8/10... Imma press X to doubt.

The stock market doesn't work like this anymore and hasn't for several years... maybe decades. Share price is completely decoupled from fundamentals. The way you make money for shareholders is by getting the stock price to go up and what the actual company does or doesn't do is not particularly a consideration anymore.

I go one step further and say that I personally believe the market itself is rigged, has been rigged since just after 2008. It is fully under control by dark pools, algorithms, HFT and AI. We will never again see an appreciable crash in the market, just things which vaguely resemble "normal" market action as the overall line continues to go ever upward.

The stock market is now fully a money-generating machine for the Epstein class. I have been saying this since about 2014 when I read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis and the Dow was at 18,103, Nasdaq 4,773. Even today with this news, the Dow is up currently 72 at 51,564 and the Nasdaq is up 496 at 26,517.

And it's not just rich people. We hear that big CEOs make thousands of times what their employees make and we don't bat an eye. And so now, at least in America - this way of thinking has crept into the collective psyche as if it's just completely natural and normal.

Consider installing some complex thing at your home. A contractor can purchase the materials for the job for say $4000. He then pays two of his techs $30-$40/hr to install it, it takes two days. So $4000 for materials and $1280 in labor. He thinks nothing about charging the client $12,000 for this work and so it becomes the new normal that this costs twelve grand when what it really cost, between manufacturing and installation - was $5280. It's not that the guy who organizes it all's time is worth nothing, it's that his time is not worth more than what everybody else involved got.

But this is what everyone in America aspires to and is part of why we are where we are.

Yes, that's all true. I would temper that by saying if you can rig orders with front loading the way the book described ten years ago, the end game is not to make the market less predictable and more chaotic. The people architecting this stuff have now been working at it for over a decade.

The no more crashes thing is my own extrapolation based on my personal experience watching them control the price of stocks that were shorted to oblivion using dark pools and synthetics along with the sudden subsequent rise of crypto-capital. I am aware that this brings me into conspiracy territory, but I'm also aware that nothing that has happened since 2008 has done anything but reinforce the notion in my head.

Time will tell, I don't mean to imply that no crashes is a given but I strongly suspect the entire market is price controlled using all these tools (AI, HFT, crypto, dark pools, synthetics) - and not just this market, but any market that allows these tools to be used.

I like it here on Omicron Ceti III Jim!

Huh. I bought several decks of this game like. A long fuckin' time ago. Look what I found in the second deck I looked in!

Looks like my buddy I lost last year. He's gonna be the best friend you ever had, I'd wager.

Every time I say this I get this comment or one like it... since 2014. I invite you to save this thread and come back and make me feel like a complete moron when it happens. Eventually, I think everybody will come around.

Edit: I started to come to these conclusions when I read the book I mention above - it's more than 10 years old now. I'm not alone in thinking these kinds of things, the book's author does as well

Old Colby

I'll try to give an ELI5 kind of answer here.

Before the Internet, "networks" were mostly one-offs you would dial into with a modem. Big or small, users would dial into the systems to enjoy whatever content was available on them.

The Internet was created as a way to connect multiple, disparate network nodes like these. Now, instead of just letting people access your content, you could now let them access other people's content as well.

There were lots of programs made to do this. IRC for chatting, Archie and Gopher for searching FTP sites for downloads you might want. There was also Usenet - a threaded discussion forum. The discussions looked a lot like Lemmy - there were subject lines and when you clicked on them there was threaded discussion you could read and participate in.

When this was all initially going on the Internet was mostly text-based. We may have been accessing Usenet from our Windows 3.1 laptops (I used a program called Agent), but all these programs were doing was trading text. Slowly though, bandwidth started creeping up.

As bandwidth began to creep up, people realized that huge text posts to Usenet could be used to post things like photos encoded to text. And thus was uuencoding born - and it didn't stop at photos. But because Usenet posts are limited in size, big files would get posted as multiple parchives - in multiple sections/posts that could be stitched back together into a whole again.

It was in this way that Usenet - a system designed for conversation - became a way to trade files.

Meanwhile the web happened. Discussion quickly moved to the web because you didn't have to download a separate program to view web forums. At the time, web forums were inherently inferior (they couldn't do threaded discussion) but they were also inherently superior (they could be moderated). Yeah, Usenet was unmoderated and because of this it was basically a huge pile of dogshit by the time the web got huge.

Usenet did continue to flourish though - as this sort of Frankenstein file-sharing system. The problem is that most Usenet servers were hosted by ISPs because they wanted to host discussions - not file-sharing. So they shut their Usenet servers down. But the file sharing was just too useful to die, so dedicated Usenet providers popped up and picked up the slack where the local ISPs left off. It wasn't hard. Usenet is just a protocol - anybody can adhere to it and create a node.

And clients changed too - from the readers I used like Agent, to new readers that recognized that people using Usenet aren't looking for discussion anymore. They're looking for an easy way to find the files they want and a program that will seamlessly stitch together all those PAR files behind the scenes for them to get it.

This was the purpose behind Newzbin, which was an elaborate way to access the remaining Federation of (now mostly dedicated, paid) Usenet servers and easily find and download all they had to offer. It was super easy and worked very well, so naturally, it was fucked into oblivion by Hollywood in 2010.

The great thing about Usenet though, is you can't kill it by killing off one node. The other great thing is that it's pretty stupidly complicated by today's standards, so it still exists because it's been largely forgotten while Hollywood focuses on stuff like torrenting.

If you want to access Usenet, you will need to purchase access to a company that runs a Usenet server and get client software that can help you find and stitch together those PAR files. I am out of the loop, so I am afraid I cannot help you any further with that. But hopefully if you know the history of it and how it works in theory, it should help.

There seems to be a neverending supply of complaints about the size and reach of the Fediverse and I'm just sitting here thinking this is about all the attention I'd like it to ever get. This is fucking nice. Doesn't monopolize your whole day, always has at least some fresh content, users are free with the upvotes and discourse is downright civil most of the time. Does anybody really want this place to be like Reddit or Instagram?

What did Rockstar mean by this?

That people download games now?

Now they just need a Factory to create more Factories and they...

I apologize, this is Factorio, not Java.

OK so I understand the Dutch have a reputation, but if you are making your ride wait on you because you aren't ready at the appointed time - nevermind the fact that your ride isn't charging you for gas (one hopes, since OP is going anyway and offered to pick him up, to do so would be just as rude as the coffee) - it would just be too unbelievably outrageous to bill them half a Euro. I have to conclude that this is ragebait.

"I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do." — J.P. Morgan

Exactly this. If you don't want me to quit without notice, do you also vote against politicians who vote for "right-to-work" legislation?

Yeah, you don't get to write a fucking law that says you can fire me on the spot for any reason at all and then insist that I give you two weeks.

Besides, these days it's a different world - there's a labor shortage. A serious one. Warm body? You're hired. Nobody gives a fuck. They can't afford to. Especially in minimum wage.

I'm not autistic, nor have I ever gravely injured someone through my own action (or inaction) that I know of, but I will tell you this: I don't understand how these attention-starved children driving these rice burners with their goddamn POW POW UNF POW exhaust systems (and you fuckers know what I'm talking about) are allowed to exist.

I am not a violent person, but I would read their obituaries with great satisfaction.

A conservative Republican misogynist climate-denying creationist Jew was a client of Jeffery Epstein???

It boggles the mind.