the idea was that making electricity and phone service universal would benefit the country as a whole and bring everybody on board with the idea of government doing things for people.
Well, a certain type of folk refuse to rely on the gubmint for anything, but they’ll get mad as hell when the gubmint tries to take away something it was already giving them. That didn’t count, you see.
I think I’m just in a mood recently. If it were possible and the leadership weren’t incompetently failing upward, I feel like big corps would happily band together to subsidize the entire grocery industry if it could keep their own employees poor, dependent, and powerless.
I’m not saying it couldn’t work, even in the US. I’m just saying to make sure your measures are air-fucking-tight and not manipulated by industry when they are being decided.
That’s why they won’t let US citizens have it, and pretend it’s something else when they get old enough for Medicare.
If this were done, I wouldn’t be surprised if every industry did everything in their power to manipulate the specific qualifying items used to generate the measure in order to keep wages as low as possible.
Like if the price of a gallon container of milk were to be the measure, the industry would start selling milk by the liter and limit galon containers to special sales where it cost $0.05, but each store only had a stock of 5 units on January 1st.
Some bullshit like that.
Can you share a source for the hood height regulations? Never heard anything like that before.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of bringing this up.
Meanwhile I ask Gemini “Hey Gemini, can this Google product do X?”
It responds "Here is a list of features for Google’s Product:
…
Does W!
Does X!
Does Y!
…
Me: clicks source for listed feature X… gets sent to post on Product’s support forum: “Can Product do X?” “No, it can’t do X.”
Thanks Gemini!
All smart devices should fail into a safe and functional mode when the smart features inevitably stop working.
I’m horrified that you could possibly advocate for allowing the consumer to have any real control of their own devices. Have you considered the security implications of not requiring devices to be 100% dependent on the manufacturer’s server? Users might be able to use the device without first installing the company’s app! The user might be able to use the device without the company knowing about it and selling that data for additional profit or using it to train it’s AI.
Given that the power to support the game is literally the only power we have, there is no moral issue - I agree. I don’t, however, understand what’s wrong with wishing for a system that gives consumers and workers more options.
will be rewarded by being laid off. Not buying it only punishes the shithead management
While I agree with the sentiment, that’s a gross oversimplification.
Again, I’m not advocating people buy it. I just wish we had the power to fight some other way. I won’t be buying it, but I wouldn’t have bought it anyway. It will also very likely sell like hotcakes, regardless of our posturing.
Not that I personally give a fuck about GTA generally, but it does make me upset that one of the few methods we have to “police” these companies as consumers is to not buy the game. To take a massive project that consumed however many years of work by however many developers and artists just and make it a commercial failure just to… stick it to their bosses? It’s like refusing to buy a musician’s CD because you don’t like the record company they made a deal with. Nobody gets to enjoy the music and the musician makes less money. This system sucks.
I’m in no way blaming the average person. I am lamenting the state of things. I likely blame them less than even you do.
I doubt any of these vendors are living large. They look like they are scraping by only slightly better than the people they are reselling their TEMU trash to. People survive however they can. I can forgive a lot in the name of keeping your family fed and sheltered.
It’s the rich fucks hoarding the wealth and the powerful doing literally whatever they want with little to no consequence. That’s the heart of the problem.
I visited a flea market today - a big one in my region - for the first time in a very long time. To my horror, it was 50% TEMU trash - all sales final. It was selling. It made me really, really sad. People buying cheap shit online, marking it up, and selling it to their neighbors. Maybe there is some not-garbage in there but a huge portion of it is just going to fail and end up in a landfill in a year… and this is becoming normal for these people. Things just wear out rapidly and get thrown away and they buy a replacement.
We’re killing each other and destroying ecosystems and the climate… so that we can make… this. We’re fucked.
The EU laws may not be worded so horrendously. I’m barely familiar with EU law beyond a little of the GDPR.
It was actually forced onto the US by a clever US politician, Bruce Lehman - the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks under Bill Clinton, who pushed it into an international treaty, the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Europe also approved the treaty and I assume the European counterparts still stand.
The WIPO Copyright Treaty is implemented in United States law by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). By Decision 2000/278/EC of 16 March 2000, the Council of the European Union approved the treaty on behalf of the European Community. European Union Directives which largely cover the subject matter of the treaty are: Directive 91/250/EC, creating copyright protection for software; Directive 96/9/EC on copyright protection for databases; and Directive 2001/29/EC, prohibiting devices for circumventing “technical protection measures”, such as digital rights management (also known as DRM).
Maybe it isn’t so thoroughly abused over there though. Poor Europeans lack the highly sought after freedom (to lose all of your rights to mega-corporations) we enjoy in the USA.
…and civil action if you try to reverse engineer or circumvent the app in any way… because the app’s code is copyrighted. If you do it for someone else or make a post explaining how you did it things can get really spicy. Lord help you if you profit commercially from it.
Nobody needs any entertainment, but some people enjoy hobbies like gaming.
no company has ever responded to more sales with lower prices
Prices are going up rapidly thanks to AI data centers exploding demand by orders of magnitude more than retail customers. There is no end in sight to the price increases.
If you want a gaming device, buy it sooner rather than later. That’s all I am saying.
Honestly, the way shit is going, get what you can while you can. Gaming is only going to get worse and more expensive by the week.
They’d also get access to those sweet AI doctors.