One uses a feather, the other beats you with a frozen chicken, but both are the same because they’re using poultry products.

Or AI to rank and filter out the things you need based on public indexing. Preferably there’d be several AI assistants to choose from. Things seem to be moving in that direction anyway.

Meta tried to do the same. The EU response was to ask when they’d leave to plan the going away party. Meta was a lot less confrontational after that.

Fight a few wars over oil and nobody bats an eye. Mine cobalt in less than perfect conditions and everybody loses their mind.

There has to be a hard limit on the amount of CO2 that can be extracted, and let that limit go down each year. Then use permit auctions or carbon coins or whatever to determine who can extract, or import. It’ll automatically make plastic and gasoline more expensive and alternatives cheaper in comparison.

Of course there’ll be lot of “but the economy” and “our competiveness”. If the last half century is anything to go by, economy wins. So that means fundamental chances to the economy. To the way money works, how loans use interests and drives growth before anything changes. For a lot of people that’s almost physically impossible to even contemplate. Usually this changes as the current system deteriorates, but that can take a while.

Ah yes, the everything-falling-apart-app

telling us what it thinks we’d want

that’s “it thinks we’d want to buy”

They’ve gone for the money and are now finding out that cannabalizing search stops customers coming to their site.

Even in 80s movies there were parodies in this. Grannies sitting in a call center, knitting while answering phones with “Hello, I’m Bambi. My cup size is …”

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers”

Indeed. They started pushing things that make them profit before the things that you’re searching for. They love the revenue stream but are realizing now that it’s also killing their main product: googling.

But if they’re moving to AI it will probably be the same, trying to guide you into selling something instead of giving what you want. Microsoft too is trying to paper over their os with ads so you know what direction they’re going.

Office politics with plausible deniability is also so much harder to do when leaving behind an electronic trail.

Another one that sees “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a manual to follow.

To be eventually bought up by a private equity firm that gives it the last squeeze before throwing the withered husk on the final Google Graveyard.

Yes, the suits have taken over and switched the money squeeze to max.

And they protest in Germany, the economy that’s built on producing cars and who would happily keep producing more ICE BMWs. The same country that sees speed limits on the Autobahn as sacrilege.