It was awful and I don't miss it at all.

Being able to read any book without going to the library, let alone getting off the toilet, is a fucking miracle and anyone who makes that more difficult should be viewed with contempt by every intellectual.

Nothing peaceful about spending 2 hours finding a book, finding a citation about a fact you were interested in, thinking, 'did so and so really write that?!' and then having to wait 3 weeks for an interlibrary loan only to discover that the author did, in fact, make it up in the first place and add a citation to make it appear that it was fact.

Books are peaceful, reading is great, I prefer reading on paper, I don't miss the part of the process the card catalog was involved in.

This game is the early access version of path of neo.

Look, it's the ban the Internet guy calling into letterman in the 90s.

Yeah, people were saying the same thing about internet use in the aughts and we're all here still and doing fine.

Things have come along quickly and are speeding up rather than slowing down.

At least people aren't parroting that tired old, 'This exact thing must already exist in the training data' argument which has been fallacious from the start but is wearing excessively thin since new models use almost exclusively synthetic training data to begin with.

People who haven't had the opportunity to see it don't realize that wealth distribution is fractal, and the more money you have, the more obvious this is.

I like to think of it in terms of stack of 300X (I could buy your year in a day's interest) and work your way up.

$1

$300

$90000 < if you're reading this post, you are probably around here.

$27000000 < This is the rich person in the post above, notably still in the middle.

$8100000000 < Private jets, billionaires, there are a few thousand of these.

$2.43E12 < Musks, Bezoses, etc.

It's only a problem for people who always do what they're told.

There is a lot to unpack here, finance is interesting.

Investors spend money to build companies on the expectation that those companies will be worth more money than they spent in the future.

One way they spend that money is on the acquisition of bonds, which are firm guarantees against future debts. Bonds are often part of other financial structures (you'll see them a lot in a hedge, which is a way to limit liability on an investment in exchange for some upside).

If I'm reading the article correctly, those bonds had a condition where they could be converted to shares at a certain price, so the investment and the hedge were part of the same instrument.

It's not accurate to say that the money could have been deployed otherwise, one way to think about this is that large banks have very large, often self-issued, credit limits. Companies also have self-issued credit limits, related to the banks.

In this case specifically, some amount of this money is going to come out of the IPO, the 80 billion doesn't exist in any other way.

tl;dr The 80 billion that 'vanished' here wasn't actually spent on anything, it's valuation against those bonds. It's also an exciting headline.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful, these companies are definitely getting a lot of investment (running up their credit cards) in the hopes of a big payout, but this doesn't have anything to do with private equities current running speculation on data center construction or power consumption, or any of those big problems.

Compare the resources used to the alternatives.

Unfortunately, we will never enjoy the fruits of prosperity, because our system is designed to squeeze first, ask questions later.

Instead of being reduced, human misery will be redirected, and little will change.

Like all fanfic, there is no canon! There are different canons (assembled by the various councils throughout the ages) but no clear and uncontroversial total authority.

If anyone reading this is looking to do some edits to their own head canon, I strongly recommend Jesus, Son of Man by Kahlil Gibrain.