Meanwhile southern Germany is reeling under record snowfall (18" at one go), as are parts of Russia (not to mention -68F already in parts of Siberia, about 30F degrees below normal).

Good point.

One might observe that those who most hate clergy are the most likely to be seeing a therapist.

How about instead California stops letting most of their rainwater and snowmelt run into the ocean? Snowpack on the Sierras alone averages 150% of the state's water needs (and some years much more than that). The past couple years have been mondo rainy, to the point of flooding, but 95% of the rainwater was allowed to simply run off. (Farmers wanted to pump some of it back into the aquifer, and were denied.) Money was allocated for more reservoirs 40-some years ago but none have been built. And so on. California's water crisis is not reality, it's politically created.

That's true. You just don't know. Let's play Treatment Roulette!

My point is the term "homeopathic" has spread to stuff that is actual concentrates and extracts, and is no longer constrained to mean "homeopathic by the dilute until absent ritual magic".

Bullshit terms tend to have that sort of mission creep.

"Organic" has suffered a similar creep. A while back I saw shoes labeled "organic". (Well, I suppose they contained petroleum, being mostly plastic...)

A dishonest person is committing fraud, or some other outright crime.

That is a legal problem, not a regulatory problem.

Except nowadays, anything that's not actually Rx might be labeled "homeopathic" -- frex, I've seen the term used for tea tree oil (which is somewhat toxic) and wolfsbane (which is mondo toxic). So in the market, it no longer necessarily means "diluted into oblivion" but rather "new agers come hither".

Probably also explains my numerous battles with reCAPTCHA, because I have the majority of the Googleplex blocked in HOSTS.

Pipewire came to my attention because on my Fedora box, it suddenly failed to update, and whined about it. (Didn't know it was there until then.)

This is probably not the ideal introduction to the baffled user, who wonders WTF it's doing now....

The day I was served a 30 minute unskippable crapomercial before I could view 5 minutes of fluff was the day I installed an adblocker. That was my proportional response.

I'd also run into LOUD ads that could not be muted by the YT player. And ads that would play continuously if I forgot a tab open after the video was done (the ads started playing after half an hour or so, not immediately).

[Apparently I am not tired of bitching about it, either. Made their own bed, they did.]

So long as someone paid for the ad campaign, they do not care. You are not the target customer; people who buy ad campaigns are the target customer.

"...because that's what sells stuff."

No. It doesn't "sell stuff". It sells marketing campaigns to CEOs, who are wowed by "numbers of eyeballs exposed". The marketing department does not give two hoots if any product is sold, so long as someone pays their salaries to produce ad campaigns, and CEOs continue to buy them.

Which is probably why most ads now are complete shite. They're not about product. They're about wowing the CEO. (Speaking generally.)

It's a variant on "if you're offered a valuable service for free, you're not the customer, you're the product."

"...instead we get reports of users uninstalled adblockers."

Reported by whom?
By Google, that's who.

I very much doubt anyone who knew how to install one actually uninstalled it. Tried another browser, maybe.

Far more likely Google is trying to create a herd effect: "All those smart people uninstalled their ad blocker. Don't you want to be a smart person too??"

I remember seeing a video on teaching-level arithmetic for budding accountants, with practice tablets (be ever so glad we use Base 10), but hadn't heard of the delinquent story. Got a link?

Agreed that ultimately the self-willed economy beats the central planners. But I think the USSR was more a case of "there comes a point where corruption eats itself".

China is doing "gov't half gets all the control, private half takes all the risk" (there are no private businesses in China, all have half gov't ownership) -- it's not that they aren't hardline commies, it's that they've figured out how to make hardline commie be profitable at everyone else's expense. At least for a while. Until the pyramid scheme collapses.

My sister's business (senior partner, big architecture firm) had major offices in China. Saw the writing on the wall a few years back. They pulled out of China and gave the Chinese business to their people there. Two years ago the senior Chinese owner jumped out a 30 story window.