While this is an incredibly shitty take on Ubisoft's part, it's not enshittification. Cory Doctorow coined the term, meaning

Since Ubisoft has never been good to their users and they don't really have any business customers, there is no market so the term doesn't apply.

This is just Ubisoft being the same old greedy and shitty Ubisoft. One of their clowns just said the quiet part a little too loudly.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Apple (out of historical curiosity - I was about 15 when it was written in 1997) and the "the engineers who make all the decisions" was one of the real problems that Apple had after Jobs was ousted. It works for startups, but it absolutely does not work for a company with a larger product line who needs to make strategic decisions and investments, or who has unpleasant baggage to deal with. Engineers tend to like shiny new problems to solve and not every product is a brand new Macintosh computer.

But you're not wrong either about sales driving decisions being a problem (for similar reasons). A favorite phrase I got from Raymond Chen (long-time Microsoft developer, ironically) is "Somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature":

Maybe, but _who_ do you think lobbies for the convoluted tax laws? Who benefits from citizens feeling like taxes are "too complicated" to do without some expensive software holding their hand?

But even with the absurd deductions, credits, loopholes, and other tax nonsense, it's the IRS that is responsible for navigating, implementing, and enforcing all of these rules. They have thousands of pages of detailed explanations for how to calculate taxes already available. If anyone was in a good position to build a tax computation system free for citizens to use, it would be them (assuming of course, they were actually sufficiently funded).

Could it turn into a boondoggle like the FBI's infamous Virtual Case File system? Sure, but it might also be great for ~90% of American taxpayers, who currently pay around $3-4 billion dollars every year to prepare their taxes. So if we spent a whopping 3 billion dollars to build a tax preparation system free for everyone to use, it would pay for itself in one year. After that, the yearly maintenance costs should be pretty trivial.

*shrug*

You made a claim without evidence to back it up; I refuted it with the same amount.

But in short, in most US jurisdictions, an ambulance ride will be billed to the patient the same as any other medical expense. Failure to pay your portion as dictated by your health insurance policy will result in the ambulance company sending the bill to collections with all the associated penalties and burdens. In many places, you can even get hit by surprise "out of network" fees, if the ambulance company isn't contracted with your health insurance provider, though some states have finally started passing laws to limit this. And if you're lucky enough to get a helicopter ambulance ride - look forward to something like a $30,000 bill.

One of the only distinctions I'm aware of for ambulances is that you're usually only billed if you're taken to a hospital. If they show up and you reject transport, you're not liable for any costs.

As for

that's just nonsense. Insurance companies don't "cover" any government deficit - if anything the government _subsidizes_ them and has had to _force_ them to limit overhead and profits on premiums to 20%. And the negotiated rates the government uses for programs like Medicare easily cover the "true cost" of the care - even if they don't give private health companies the same amount of absurd profit that other payers do.

Everything in these two sentences is incorrect.

Ya know, this is a small thing, but I'm very happy to see it. Ever since the trend of "make hyperlinks invisible" became the vogue of modern web design, I've found myself needing to create userstyles for a bunch of sites to make links easier to visually identify because seeing the difference between #888 text and #88a undecorated links is pretty much impossible. Especially when doing some quick browsing on a HTPC connected to a TV or when Flux's blue-light reduction is in effect, even Wikipedia's relatively blue links are hard to distinguish. Have people forgotten that hyperlinks form the backbone of the goddamned web?

Other browsers can chase shit nobody cares about, like adding support for in-browser NFC-enabled webcams but it's nice to see Firefox still sometimes focusing on user needs and accessibility. Kudos.

Bingo.

I'm sure there are some people in Microsoft who really are working on ways for this kind of prediction system to be genuinely useful. And maybe someday those five people will produce something. But the urgency behind this for all the big companies - Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc - and their literal army of developers tasked with it, has nothing to do with that. It's 100% about taking advantage of the possibly fleeting moment when they've discovered a way to get people to volunteer and eagerly agree to have their personal data harvested and sent away for arbitrary use instead of recoiling in revulsion the way most have in the past at the very idea.

Ostensibly this is to provide the prediction service, but it's painfully clear that (1) this data will be kept - forever and (2) in addition to being incorporated into secret and commercial data models, much of the raw data will probably be stored as well, no doubt "for continuing improvement and research purposes".

These companies have all seen a golden opportunity and are jumping on it literally as fast as they possibly can and from every angle they can conceive of. Whether you buy into the AI fearmongering or not, everyone should be worried about the privacy implications of this.

You really need to stop and ask yourself why exactly do you believe that the Israel / Palestine issue is in any way associated with political ideology?

At best, you might be able to show that a majority of religious people with a Judaeo-Christian persuasion will tend to favor Israel in any context, and that a majority of those people also tend to be on the political right, but that's incidental and says nothing about the political leaning of people who favor Palestine.

When you insist on looking at the world through zero-sum, partisan-colored glasses, you'll never see things how they objectively are and holding a rational view will be impossible. Take off the glasses.

(I'm just going to ignore "fascists" since using it here does nothing but remind everyone that the word, just like "woke", has become a meaningless placeholder for "thing I don't like").

Of course! I won't rest until every American can freely exercise their god-given right to purchase hydrogen bombs at their local convention center!

You're adorable.

I wish that were true, and far be it from me to suggest that Apple users are shallow and cliquish, but: Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble.

What's extra pathetic is that Apple itself is partially to blame for the continued absurd sectarianism of "herp derp I use Z brand phone!"

A slightly outdated (from 2012) visualization that I really liked is this short video: Wealth Inequality in America .

I'd love to see an updated version, because it's only gotten worse.

Hard disagree. Money for education comes from public taxes, and I'm firmly against those dollars going to "charter schools" which are often under-scrutinized to ensure they are actually teaching anything, let alone in a proper manner or with qualified outcomes. Oh, and many of them are just fronts for religious indoctrination camps, something closer to child mental abuse than education.

If parents want to send their kids to private schools, that's their prerogative, but it should not be funded by the public. At most they should be given a tax deduction in line with what they'd personally be paying in taxes that go towards schools (which varies by state).

Hah! I've actually tried to enter a negative value into the mandatory tip screens at places that use a full iOS keyboard, just to see if it works. No luck so far, sadly.

Except that the open secret is that advertising doesn't work.

There were a couple of Freakonomics episodes about it that I found pretty interesting. Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1: TV) and Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 2: Digital).

Basically, advertising has never been especially effective, and digital advertising is little more than a scam borderline on protection racket run by Google and Facebook (who combined make up almost 60% of all digital ads). It's a house of cards that's just waiting to collapse. Google knows it, and that's probably partially fueling this current adblock-block push to get people to sign up for Youtube Premium.