There is way too much danger of collusion and antitrust violations with surveillance pricing. It's been a common workaround for companies looking to collude. Instead of getting in a smoky room and agreeing on price fixing you put all your data on a shared platform and use that to do your pricing decisions. The end result is the equivalent to the aforementioned smokey room but on an app so it's passed off as legal.

Apartment owners did this and it caused rents to shoot up an extra 20 or 30% over what they would have been without it. Several attorney generals pushed back against it but the damage is already done. Also the courts are packed with pro corporate judges so long term it's probably going to die and we're going to go back to having these policies in most places.

That's not really enough. Don't get me wrong it's the best hundred billion we ever spent. We basically kneecapped Russia and took something that could have been a competitor nation and turned them into a laughing stock. If we hadn't put a pedophile lunatic in charge of our country after that it would have been pretty good for us.

But what we needed to do was give them more weapons and give them faster so that they could push Russia back harder. We also needed to give them long-ranged missile systems that could hit Moscow. Not a lot of them but enough to be a threat. Basically we needed to call pooty poot's bluff on the nuclear weapons. In the meantime though we needed to give them a shitload more defensive options and weapons to push Russia back so that Ukraine would be less likely to actually hit Moscow since that wouldn't actually be good for Ukraine but desperate times can make people do foolish things, like vote for an orange pedophile in the hopes that egg prices will go down...

Nonetheless $100 billion to take out a potential competitor Nation by drawing them into a quagmire War was one of the cheapest and most effective things we ever did on the world stage. It's also disgustingly probably why we didn't give Ukraine the weapons they needed to win. We gave them just enough weaponry to bog Russia down because we were trying to take Russia down to third world status and keep them there instead of trying to help a democracy remain a democracy.

That's pretty par for the course for US foreign policy but it doesn't mean I like it.

It's genuinely hilarious that the bot somebody wrote to reply to all of my comments in order to soak up mod points is constantly talking about how Trump fucks kids.

I was wondering if the bot was so simplistic that just repeating Trump fucks kids a few times would make that happen and sure enough it is.

A long time ago we had sophisticated actors manipulating opinion on this website because it was a pretty big part of the internet believe it or not but these days this is the best we get. Meanwhile Trump still fucks kids and he's still president and he still has a 40% approval rating despite Trump fucks kids.

The same people pushing age verification also fight relentlessly against free breakfast and lunch at schools for kids.

They don't care about children. They have never cared about children and they never will.

I think that ship sailed in November 2024...

Sounds like they want privacy for me but not for thee.

> Putting a hardware guy in charge of Apple might help the company return to its roots as a hardware-first company.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the company, but the hardware guy was not in charge. It would be closer to the roots to put a salesperson or designer in charge? And I mean design in the computer science sense, a tool matching a purpose.

While the logic is interesting, no, consumers aren't happy. They were just presented with two horrible candidates, and the Dems were off the rails, confused and officially believing some things that were just wrong.

And while I didn't vote Republican, it looks like that hard left and irrational swing the dems took just made the equally bad Republican choice look like the lesser of two evils.

I question that choice, but here we are.

Unfortunately in this case it's less about earning rights and more "give the rich overlords a steady supply of cannon fodder". The kids of CEOs will be exempt from service one can expect.

I can't even imagine the mechanism they would attempt to use. Have every company who ever sold anything with a tariff connected to it go through all their records, then send the government a comprehensive listing of each sale , then the guvmint issuing checks? Or sending the money directly to the businesses then having the business figure it out?

This version of tariffs was just a really bad, illegal idea, and was for all intents and purposes, just a punitive tax that harmed both businesses and consumers.

The best we could hope for was the declaration of illegality, then returning the money to the businesses. So I'm okay with that.

Disagree - All Republicans are guilty. They made a series of choices.

The Republican Party, which hates taxes, needed to use a different name when they decided that Tariffs are the path forward,

All of that, the good and the bad, exist in every one of us. It's a helluva thing

That's why when Israel bombs an apartment building, everyone in it is automatically enrolled in Hamas/Hezbollah first.

no, which is why I don't think I should be allowed to run on foot in an electric car race.