And at its worst it prices residents out of their own city while destroying the local hospitality industry. For every "common person with an unused spare room showing tourists cool local things" there are at least ten faceless investment firms treating them as de-facto hotel rooms you get the honor of cleaning yourself.

Seriously, AirBnB is your shining example of why we shouldn't view tech bros with extreme skepticism?

Want to talk about the rest of the gig economy which only exists by evading decades of hard won labor rights/regulations?

In Soviet Russia, correlation causes YOU!

The EU does capitalism better than the US does. What we have in the US is not capitalism. The correct term is crony capitalism.

Gulfstream.

You didn't think they flew commercial with the dirty plebs, did you?

Those products all paid licensing fees to whomever owns the underlying IP. You can find examples where the IP owner decides to be a dick. I'll call out everyone's least favorite, EA, and point out that you can't legally get the SNES version of Sim City on modern hardware via any sales channel that I'm aware of. Of course, there are "gray" options to play it, but you won't find it in the Wii store and there's no (legal) packaged emulator for it on Amazon.

Meme: After years of working in tech the only "smart" device in my house is an inkjet printer. I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a sound I don't recognize.

It's pretty trivial to install your own certificate authority and perform MITM attacks against all encrypted traffic coming from a particular endpoint over which you have control. It's less trivial but still doable to decompile a program and look through the source for hidden processes like you describe. All of which is to say I doubt Google could keep something like you describe a secret for very long, if they were inclined to try it, which seems unlikely. Why risk the bad PR and inevitable lawsuits when the majority of the unwashed masses happily consent to being spied on?

It absolutely is. What Google is doing here is no different than how most endpoint protection suites work. They all submit visited websites to a real time authority to check for known pfishing/malware sites. They will block in the moment where possible and retroactively alert the IT team when a visited site is later determined to be bad. I'm assuming Chrome will at least do the first. The second would be trickier while maintaining privacy but would still be doable locally, if the browser can download the database and compare it against its own history.

You're not wrong to call out the nonsensical equation to slavery as being silly at best and highly offensive at worst....

But where do you see a choice to go to work or not? Did you mistake Amazon's home country for one with a meaningful social safety net? Did I sleep through humanity waking up in the Star Trek utopia where we only work doing the things we love and not to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, healthcare, etc.?

They used to. Boeing is a case study in what happens when you let Next Quarter MBA assholes run an enterprise. The story of the last few decades of American capitalism has been such assholes hijacking virtually every company of note. It's not enough to be profitable, you have to be MORE profitable than you were last quarter, where you were MORE profitable than the quarter preceding it. That appeases the Wall Street beast, which boosts the stock price, which is all you really care about in the C-Suite since stock options make up the majority of your compensation.

Now, it's obvious to those of us who don't have MBAs that you will eventually reach a point of maximal efficiency/profit where further gains can only come at the expense of safety, worker's rights, product quality, customer satisfaction, or most likely, all of the above and then some. And here we are. To quote John Oliver, "We went to business school. Get on our plane!"

Some additional backstory if you're interested.

Everywhere I've worked where I had involvement with the CCTV systems aimed to keep at least 90 days. I've never heard of 10 days, that seems awfully low, might have made sense in the analog/tape era but digital storage is cheap.

One of my locations is on an accident prone intersection. We get a lot of requests from insurance companies and drivers for footage of accidents. When the requests come from the insurance carriers it's pretty damned rare they make it to us within 30 days. I guess the bureaucracy slows them down. Requests from the drivers involved usually make it to us a lot faster.

Southwest's boarding process (more specifically, the people who abuse it: looking at you seat savers), lack of codesharing agreements to book you on another airline when things go wrong, point-to-point model, and lack of first/business class create their own problems you don't have to endure with other airlines.

At the end of the day pick your poison. I don't hate Southwest but I prefer Alaska.

Reserve your real pity for the chumps flying Spirit, lol. I have an image in my head of a decompression event on Spirit and credit card readers falling out of the ceiling instead of O2 masks. "In the event of a cabin decompression, please pay for your oxygen before paying for your seat mate's."

Being fat isn't a protected class no matter how much the obese wish it was.

You must be the single unluckiest traveler ever my friend. :)

I fly at least as often as you, judging by your other posts, and even on coach/low cost seats/airlines, it's pretty damned rare to wait 30 minutes for bag-drop. It's usually less than 10 minutes. Even at SEA.

If you fly internationally as often as you say, why don't you invest $100 into Global Entry? I used to go through JFK all the time, I promise you that customs queue is worse than SEA, but who cares if you have Global Entry? The $100 pays for itself the first time you bypass that queue.

Why wouldn't you go buy new stuff in that scenario? The airline has an allowance for exactly this contingency. I've flown hundreds of times over the course of my life and exactly ONE time my checked bag went missing. Why would I load up my carry-on for a scenario that has happened to me less than 1% of the time?

I fly into SEA at least as often and I cannot recall ever waiting more than 30 minutes. It's usually closer to 15. Exit the aircraft, find a bathroom, refill my water bottle, walk to baggage claim, and more often than not bags are already coming out. That is my default experience at nearly all airports. The only bad time I ever had was at PIT, on an Alaska Airlines flight, 90+ minute wait. My supposition there is it's such an infrequent destination for Alaska they outsource the baggage job to someone else. There was no on-site Alaska representative to speak to and the 800 number was clueless. *shrug*