I thought of exactly the same thing!

I just go back to the things that forum admins have done forever: block whole IP continents you don’t see meaningful engagement from but see a ton of bots from. Make new accounts jump through a bunch of hoops. Don’t allow new users to create content for a while, and then make them earn that right over time. Shadow ban the crap you can identify so they waste their strength. Reap inactive accounts periodically. And so on.

I acknowledge your point about alternate use, but we also need to look at a datacenter we may or may not need as a “power consumption plant.” These jackasses just keep loading and loading up the grid, looking to make a private dollar on public infrastructure. It’s wasteful and not necessarily a baseline good thing ^TM even if AI goes flop.

Having really shitty bags is probably the best idea of all.

Because Reddit exists.

Reddit itself didn’t truly take off to massive scale until some other players were out of the way. It was the underdog for a long time.

Some of these are under threat too. There are online lawyer and doctor offerings now. Maybe not plumbers, but there are certainly tech companies trying to own the plumbing referral business (like Thumbtack) and they suck a great deal of the profit margin out of it. Nothing is safe.

Some local retail makes sense, and some does not. For example, my life would really suffer if the hardware store down the street closed up. I like being able to get a paint match home in under 30 minutes. And sometimes I spend half an hour looking for the exact bolt I need, checking it against the other part it’s going to screw into: you just can’t do all that on Amazon and the big box motherfuckers are further away and far less convenient.

Once I messed up and superglued a wrench into my palm. I couldn’t wait for fucking Prime Overnight. I went down to the hardware store and asked if they stocked ca glue debonder. They didn’t, but the store manager got out some acetone and sat there with me, slowly pouring it on as I peeled the wrench out. He wouldn’t even take my money at the end. You just cannot get that kind of service from Lowe’s or Amazon. I now buy every single thing I possibly can there, to help ensure they stay around. I drag my kids anytime I need to go there, and they’re allowed to raid the candy rack at the checkout.

My local hardware store stands apart as an indispensable local retail utility and I buy everything I possibly can there, because I like having a local hardware store and occasionally really need one. I buy all the household cleaning products I can there, for example, because they sell them, I need them, and I’m incredibly happy to pay whatever extra 40 cents they cost over having Amazon pack up a box of dish pods into its own cardboard box and truck it out to my house,

Yeah I actually never expected to have an LCD billboard up inside my home.

I would merely hate this and curse the manufacturer. But I know that if it were in my house, my kids, with their raw, unhardened minds, would find it irresistible. The slogans would worm their way into their everyday speech. They would talk about new ads over breakfast. They just don’t have the filters we adults have. So I’m so fucking glad I don’t have anything like this. It’s beyond mildly infuriating to truly insidious.

Why do you even visit them? I’d say if you use them for product discovery but then give all your sales to online merchants, you are an absolute enemy of small businesses, whatever you think you feel about them.

Not as a rule, no.

I see brown and tan herringbone with paisley patterns blooming through it.

They tried AI the nice way and nobody gives a shit about it but billions have been spent already so they are tightening the screws to make you use it. This is late stage fuckery and hopefully the whole thing will collapse soon.

And the third is broken into two pieces

If you have a good job that’s not too demanding and are still feeling this, then you might think about it as a health issue and look into it with your doctor. You have two paths:

1. look for some treatable malady - perhaps depression

2. focus on wellness and fitness: exercise more, get your electrolytes, fix your diet

Either of those two paths may lead to more energy. I don’t know how old you are but this kind of thing doesn’t get any easier with age so I highly recommend getting ahead of it as soon as you can.

The actual trigger is when someone influential decides “this is far enough - I’m pulling my money out before it all vanishes.” This doesn’t have to be such a dire thing - investors are constantly saying “this is enough, I’ve done well in this, time to take the profits and move my money elsewhere.”

Others see the influential figure doing that and begin to get scared. Many follow. And this becomes a chain reaction when the market at large sees this trend. If it’s enough people, and there’s enough doubt looming out there, it will chain and take the entire market down. If there’s not, it will stabilize. Small corrections happen all the time.

It’s a very basic human thing. If you were in a room and everyone else in it suddenly screamed and ran away you would follow them and figure out why later.

I’m just seconding the consideration of UV curing products because they are cool and have many benefits. I have zero experience with anything to do with nails.

This question is too vague. “Higher beings” is not well defined enough. “Other planes of existence” is not defined well enough. For that matter “the Gods” is not very specific. And in a weird way, what you’re saying seems somewhat circular. Like what do you call it when you believe gods aren’t gods? If you don’t believe they’re gods then who are you even indicating?

Are you asking if there’s a name for someone who believes that humanity’s major religions do worship real living beings, but those beings are simply advanced alien creatures and not metaphysical in any way.

I use UV curing wood finish for my woodworking projects now and it’s amazing. Nothing evaporates so there’s no smell and no respiratory health risk. Every bit of the liquid turns to solid, so you don’t have to use very much. And it’s done and set in 5 minutes instead of hours.