I would doubt they would have encrypted anything on the probe back in 1977 when it launched.

100 years ago there were more things that just happened to us that we couldn't do anything about. It's hard to eradicate a virus when you don't even know what a virus is.

Nowadays we are plagued with completely solvable problems. We could eliminate measles, but dumbasses are afraid of vaccines. We could feed everyone, but we got billionaires to maintain. We could stop destroying the earth, but then who will burn all this oil? We could cooperate on a global scale, but then we might have to talk to brown people, ew. We could stop bombing each other, but then how would we prove to our gods that we're good people?

So yeah "things" are shittier, because nowadays we have the ability to live in a nearly post-scarcity society but we just don't wanna.

The developers plan to upgrade the AI so that it can predict appropriate assignments of jobs for new employees

"The AI says you're probably going to quit so we're going to start you out on a really boring, mundane, low-risk task."

"Fuck this sucks. I quit."

"Wow this AI is so good at predicting things!!"

The concept of surge pricing for something that was supposed to be a side job for drivers makes sense. During a blizzard, if driving Uber is my side hustle, there's no way I'm getting in the car to pick up some schmuck after he drank too much at Applebee's. But if I can charge more for that ride, I will start to consider it.

But then the "gig" job became people's full time job and everything, as it must, went to shit.

But for Wendy's? The meat is there. The employee is there. Everything is already there, ready and waiting to make burgers. So surge pricing isn't correcting a supply/demand imbalance - it's just on-demand price gouging.

Rocksteady took the game entirely offline to fix a devastating bug that would lead to new players receiving 100% completion of the entire game without having done anything.

LOL

Goddamn this is way funnier than it has any right being

This will somehow result in increased bag fees.

"unfortunately"?

I don’t mind in-game ads printed on in-map billboards and stuff

Not ten years ago people were complaining about this very thing.

It's fascinating to watch the boiling frog in basically real time. Give it another 10 years and ads that interrupt gameplay will be seen as normal too.

"We wanted more money."

This is wild. My family and I just had vaccines done at Walgreens on Friday. The lady who did the vaccination quite nearly fucked up and gave my son an adult dose. She caught herself and pulled it out before injecting, but it was a near thing. It was quite obvious that she was completely rushing everything and was completely overwhelmed.

If Americans would stop fetishizing guns to the point of sacrificing children to the altar of their bang-bang toys, we could actually have a respectable society.