The premise is that all energy use increases entropy over time, and eventually a planetary civilization will use so much energy that the planet itself will get cooked. As a thermodynamic inevitability.

But if it's a super advanced civilization with advanced technology, Why can't the civilization cool the planet by dumping waste heat into stuff that they then launch into space?

And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

Anakin Skywalker was able to build this in a desert with scraps!

They've got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola's fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder's indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They've had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors' cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn't actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They've gone after India's Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn't led to anything actually uncovered. India's security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani's founder is close to India's Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn't enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn't really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don't have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

Enshittification isn't always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn't because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

At this price point, he can hit.

one that eats sulfur and excretes iron, and one that eats iron and excretes sulfur

Thermodynamically, how could these two cycles sustain metabolism? Were there other processes/species in the mix to introduce chemical compounds that had more energy contained within?

I think a big part of the problem is that quality of life is correlated with longevity. Some people start having health issues in their 40s and die in their 60s. Others start having health issues in their 70s and die in their 80s.

And so the question becomes whether maximizing high quality years adds to the low quality years, or not. And so the question might not be about extending life itself, but about extending healthy years.

The ifunny watermark really tips this over the edge, comedically.

Leave home with spices on a shopping list, come home with syphilis instead.

Enshittification of services is real, but the linked greentext complains about something cultural: that internet humor isn't as funny as it was in 2011.

Which I'd say is a matter of taste, and probably wrong. There are still new greentexts being written that make me laugh. Plenty of tweets/toots/other microblog posts still make me laugh out loud. There are video memes that are pretty funny, and that format wasn't really feasible until Vine in 2012, and more recently has been made more accessible through simpler editing apps for splicing videos.

For mainstream culture, there's still great standup comedy out there, good TV comedies, podcasts, etc.

Yes, I love the old stuff. But I like the new stuff, too.

He's 12 and can go on for hours about them, rattling off their armor thickness (in mm), caliber of their guns, horsepower of their engines, declination and traverse speeds of their turrets, etc.

On first skim of this comment I thought these were details about trains and I was very concerned about how weaponized trains had become.

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.

Hobosexual

This whole thread has way too many people who see the price as some kind of made up number that dictates how people behave, rather than recognizing that the price is a signal about the availability of useful real-world resources.

Even if the prices were strictly mandated by a centrally planned tariff that kept the same price throughout the day, every day, we'd still have the engineering challenge of how to match the energy fed into the grid versus taken out of the grid.

The prices are just a reflection of that technical issue, so solving it still needs to be done.

I don't see rental bikes on a daily rate as a primary mode of transportation. Plenty of people only come into the city on certain days, or visit cities they don't live in, or otherwise just need to get around a single place they would've walked. They need the ability to start and stop in arbitrary places, and not bring something with them.

There's also really tight coordination between sight and proprioception, as our visual processing seamlessly stitches together visual information into a three dimensional model of reality, even if we're moving while taking in that visual information, through stereoscopic signals from two eyes.

why don't they just charge enough

Because who would pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour when there's someone else who will pay someone to take that energy off their hands?

The problem is caused when the market clearing price is lower than the cost it took to produce it, and some of those costs are in the past.

It's like getting a boat and going fishing. If you pay $10,000 for the cost of the trip, and bring back $8,000 worth of fish, you can't just force people buy them from you for a 25% markup.

Pin it to a carbon atom.

Where's the carbon going to come from? If it's anywhere but the CO2 in the atmosphere (or at least sequestered on its way to the atmosphere), your energy solution isn't carbon neutral anymore. And if it is from the atmosphere, then there are efficiency challenges there at concentrating CO2 to be useful for synthetic processes.

Most syngas today comes from biological and fossil feedstocks, so it's not really a solution to atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

I have doubts that hydrogen will ever work in any industry, but it definitely won't work for cars. The storage and distribution challenges are never going to make it cost competitive with just regular lithium batteries on a marginal per-joule basis. Even if the energy itself is free, the other stuff will still be more expensive than just charging car batteries off the existing grid.