To quote the Onion themselves:

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Because novelty is all it has. As soon as it stops improving in a way that makes people say “oh that’s neat”, it has to stand on the practical merits of its capabilities, which is, well, not much.

We could have had that. Now, we might not even have an FTC.

This may sound pedantic, but you’re looking for Fairtrade (one word) for the organization with the strictest vetting standards. Fair Trade (two words) isn’t regulated and just means they follow some sort of ethical code. It’s not necessarily bad, but it warrants more product specific research.

Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they’re mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They’re just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it’s not breaking any laws of physics.

Not too long ago, this would be a career-ending display of corruption.

His house, the people’s choice. The information being available just allows people to make an informed decision of whether or not to use it, and in what way.

The main difference is that in equal measure to being a fascist, Trump is an idiot.

I’m not convinced we’ll go even a single decade of this regime without total socioeconomic collapse.

Trains are extremely convenient. You optimize them for convenience by adding more trains.

Only if you’re exactly the right denomination too.

Sure. Let’s just apply that consistently then. Atoms are binary, the vast majority (with fewer than 1% of atoms being exceptions) can be accurately identified as one of two distinct elements, hydrogen or helium.

Yep. Same software, same hardware, just different config files.

How is a gmod shitpost anything but a return to tradition?

The worrying part is the implications of what they’re claiming to sell. They’re selling an imagined future in which there exists a class of sapient beings with no legal rights that corporations can freely enslave. How far that is from the reality of the tech doesn’t matter, it’s absolutely horrifying that this is something the ruling class wants enough to invest billions of dollars just for the chance of fantasizing about it.

Privacy regulations are to the left of the Overton window. The idea that corporations don’t have some divinely ordained ownership of our personal data is unthinkably radical.

Rentals and used games had no such guarantee.

If it turns out that we’re actually truly past the point of no return and nothing we do will save our species, I don’t think the response is going to be as passive as billionaires would like.

The original is still loss.

The worst was if it was a multi disc game and the broken disc was the last one. You’re invested, excited to see how the story ends, ready to smash Sephiroth’s face in, and it all grinds to a halt.