> Would you think humans and their error-prone systems had led to this by a series of accidents and greedy investments?

Yes, especially if we don't have (0) enormous productivity gains suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

Next you'll tell me urbit, nock, and hoon never caught on

> Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time

Because this practice was made legal very recently in most places in the US and a concomitant advertising boom has saturated the media. Before the last few years, your average American couldn't bet on sports without visiting a casino sports book in person, or having a bookie (i.e., entering into a risky relationship with organized crime). TV sports coverage now openly refers to how you can use their analysis to make bets.

Also because the NBA is going through a gambling scandal with players being involved with the mafia.

This is the first time I heard of this, I decided to look up some of the news stories behind it. Maybe I'm nieve, but I thought the Sicilian Mafia died out decades a

They never died, they are still going strong.

They never said it was Sicilian Mafia.

Multiple articles and interviews have said it was the Sicilian Mafia / La Cosa Nostra.

"The Five Families - the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese - have ruled the city's Italian American mafia since 1931."

"The Five Families are part of the larger American-Sicilian mafia operation known as La Cosa Nostra"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpv1rkxjyyno

The Sicilian Mafia (La Cosa Nostra) refers exclusively to the mafia on the island of Sicily, not the Mob which traces its lineage back to Sicilian immigrants.

It's being said because the Five Families was erroneously conflated with Cosa Nostra in the original press conference by one of the representatives of law enforcement.

prompt records = mass blackmail generation

Ironic coming from someone named "mead"!

Well. Technically, it's meadhbh (or meabh.)

If I were your boss I would fire you.

past times of stagflation didn't have such a tight housing supply.

If people can't afford the rents then they'll just cram more people in. Currently have a "Joey/Chandler" style apartment form friends with 2 people in for $4k/month? Now you get 4. Or 6. Price increases to $6k/month but it's down on a per-person basis.

In some cities you get time-sharing beds. In 2003 I lived (for 3 weeks) in a house in London, I had my own room - the largest in the house. A smaller room had a couple with a baby, the loft had 3 mattresses in it but 4 people living there, time-sharing with the mattresses like you have in a nuclear submarine.

There's plenty of opportunity for landlords to increases costs even if peoples incomes can't support an increase.

"It's true, we inserted disks into our beige towers and installed desktop software..."

"Let's get you to bed, grandma..."

We have strayed so far from God's light

No, that would be useful, and as such AI is incapable of doing it.

It's not as lucrative. For human produced songs you can usually get the sheet music for them. If not, musicians can listen and do it manually, but it's not common enough to need AI to do it. Just transcribing for one instrument isn't that useful for many cases. Often they need an arrangement for multiple instruments, and depending on which instruments, the key may need to be transcribed. This is mostly referring to classical music and traditional western songs.

LLMs can do this well, though, and there are such. They weren't calling themselves AI when I last looked a couple of years ago, but I'll bet any of them looking for VC money have rebranded since.

Go read about the rates of simony in early modern Europe.