yborg

It's been dying for at least a decade, and I'll put up my entire NFT stash and bet you it will be here long after Arc has been forgotten.

Remember RockMelt? Yeah, nobody else does, either.

The vivaldi.social instance also has a large Japanese contingent.

The word "air" in "airline" implies that the main purpose of the business is to move passengers and freight via aircraft. If the main purpose of the business is to generate credit card swipe fees it will probably not do a good job at moving passengers and freight through the air since that part of what it does doesn't generate most of the profits. And we've seen this already with the onerous fees and packed planes that are the standard model now ... because each airline has a captive population that flies it because that is where their points are.

Of course, the physical book will soon be a thing of the past at the public library (-_-) so I suppose these considerations will soon be moot.

Never confuse the textbook economics with the reality of individual incentives. Company management used the low interest rate environment of the recent past to borrow money that was then used in buybacks. Executive management generally is in a no-lose situation with regard to compensation, there may be long-term incentives, but the CEO generally can exit within the term of their employment contract with a sizable payout even if they blow up the company. The board is supposed to prevent such tactics, but US corporate governance is largely about cross-pollinating memberships so that CEOs can all vote 'yes' on each other's pay packages.

IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.

I always enjoy the handwaving by nuclear enthusiasts. These are some of the most difficult engineering systems routinely built and operated by mankind, where a coolant loss accident doesn't just destroy the reactor but can turn the facility into a multi-billion dollar cleanup effort in minutes.

>The mechanisms by which algae are able to infect hosts and cause disease are currently unknown.

If we ever found and wanted to colonize a near-Earthlike world with a native biosphere the undertaking would seem to be highly hazardous since we don't even understand how some of our native pathogens work.