The longest portion of the offering, a 40-year bond, is expected to yield 0.95 percentage points over US Treasuries, down from 1.2 percentage points during initial talks, the people said.

Gotta be really bearish on treasuries to consider this a good idea.

Traditionally, you need to find someone to loan you money with the bond as collateral. Then you promise that person the bond as repayment of the debt + interest, with the expectation that you can re-buy the bond at a future date for much less than you could today.

Easy enough when they’re not selling

I wish these were proper failures. They’re such an entrenched monopoly, a whole lot would have to change before a $3.2T company sees any kind of tangible penalties.

I’ve had more luck with Mint, thanks to its Windows-adjacent GUI and user-friendly on ramp. Still encountered a few issues (a couple of peripherals that didn’t support Linux drivers). But on the whole, it’s improved system performance over Win10 and synced smoothly with my workstation.

Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to “Vibes Coding” for increasingly delicate systems development. They’ll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They’ll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they’ll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.

This isn’t the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.

despite

Misspelled “Because”

It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.

We’ve further mechanized the process of sales and marketing in an industry that we’ve been at the forefront of since the turn of the 20th century.

Modern anti-AI guys would have been eating up Adbusters 'zines 30 years ago.

So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.

Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.

Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.

I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.

Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.

But that won’t stop society from imploding.

Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.

You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.

Sure, the majority aren’t seeing a payoff. But we only really care about the Magnificent Seven and their increased revenue from government contracts (particularly Pentagon weapons platforms and public-private surveillance deals).

Don’t hold your breath on either one. The attempted phase out of Chinese electronics is its own self-imposed economic drag, especially as China’s semiconductor industry takes off while the western manufacturers are hobbled by their fixation on AI.

When CPU and RAM prices get high enough, you’re going to see some very lucrative black markets for sanctions evasion.

Australia’s economy has been in a tailspin precisely because China hasn’t been buying enough coal.

Fortunately, India, Maylasia, and Indonesia have picked up the slack at the prodding of fossil fuel interests.

Bribery is how the US political system has operated for the bulk of the country’s history

But, for the most part, the bribery was intended to increase private profits. Rarely have we seen industry bribe the feds in an act of self-sabotage.

Lots of accounts probing the system for weakness, to be sure. But there’s just not much of an audience to manipulate. And you’ll virtually never find a Lemmy thread indexed in Google results with the high profile of a comparable Reddit thread.

Accelerationists have never been more bullish.