"Being valued" is another meaningless speculative bubble. What income did that company produce?

It took my mom less than 4 years to go from crying in horror when Trump was elected in 2016, to crying in horror when he wasn't elected in 2020, and lamenting her inability to join Jan 6 due to her cancer that was mysteriously worsening in spite of all the 5g blockers and expensive heal-all herbal teas she bought.

They probably are not broadly lying about AI replacement being the main factor. Turns out... Amazon runs AWS for businesses... and also Amazon.com the online retail megastore and logistics service. Every other business is laying people off? Less B2B AWS demand. Everyone is now unemployed? Less consumer demand, downsize all aspects of Amazon.com storefront and logistics. ... I'd actually argue that any serious modern economist should be paying attention to AWS and other enterprise level, scalable server solutions... ... That's a leading indicator of at this point, of broad economic conditions. If AWS and similar departments at similar companies... stop expanding so much, when the rest of the economy seems to be doing ok? Yeah, that means growth in demand for basically core business software infrastructure is stalling, and it'll take 6 to 18 months to filter through to the rest of the economy and become apparent in other metrics.

If a for profit firm does something illogical the answer for why is always that it pleased shareholders.

The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

It really isn't. Optimization of any business usually yields promising benefits. But there are always those that lose to the optimization. Sports, films, music, even other businesses always cut people out that don't pull their weight or make it pain in the ass to match the new focus.

I keep thinking about some of RPs I've done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if their will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn't just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn't work anymore. Reddit will always know. And if the law asks for suspects for something fictional they will be able to point to all the users of those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn't matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.