Transhumanity would be exciting if they had cool visions. I’d be all over raising a creche of draconic children.

But no, it’s just rich people gluing a Palm Pilot to their cerebrllum or doing a dance to shoo away the reaper.

The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.

Culver’s is… interesting.

I find I don’t like the paper-thin style burgers much (though the fish sandwich is probably the best fast-food fish sandwich on the market) but it always gives the impression they’re trying a little harder. The restaurant always seems clean and a bit of effort was done on the appearance, like they’re still in 1978 and taking the family for a sit-down meal there might be an option.

OTOH, the customer base seems to be people who have been going there since 1978, but that could be my location.

They’re opening a new one 3km from my house, next to a McDonalds that hasn’t made a single order correctly since it opened in ~2015, so it will be interesting to see how the market shakes out.

I think the choice of automatic-only may be less conspiratorial and more streamlining the product to broad tastes.

If only 10% of buyers choose the manual, it probably adds a fair amount of manufacturing and supply chain complexity to service them, which might drive up the cost for all models.

It’s like how most US carmakers don’t offer many diesel models.

Now, the ratchet of interior features… Plenty of people don’t want a huge monolith of an infotainment system with 14 speakers, but it’s standard and you can then be upsold the premium one with 25 speakers.

I’m pretty sure it’s actually those shoulder pads.

I will say there was a period around the turn of the century where everything got very “My This, My That, My Everything” branded. I think after e-Everything but before iEverything. It felt like living in a world designed by a three-year-old in the “My” phase.

The complete silence of the powwrs that be abput the whereabouts of the lost weapon “Pluton”?

Giant isopods. Thry’re the big, ocean dwelling version of the little segmented crustaceans you find under rotten wood who ball up for defence.

They look like the press kit for one of those Million Dollar Skank-off romance-game-shows. I assume Thursdays at 9, next day on Paramount Plus?

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Thwn I’d expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.