Yea, not so much. I can still buy a "dumb" cellphone, that won't do much besides voice and SMS, and they are easy to find and significantly less expensive, despite the fact that "most" people buy smart phones. I can also find solid keyboards without "Windows" keys, wood-burning stoves, stove-top percolating coffee makers, and while everyone makes fun of buggy-whip manufacturers losing jobs, the producers of buggy whips and horse-drawn carriages are still meeting the demand for those products, even though it is rather small. I think you would be surprised at the music available in vinyl formats.

Your premise is correct, the market provides what is profitable. But one way businesses can be profitable is finding a "niche" market that no one else is adequately serving. And a crockpot with an analog switch will always be cheaper to produce than one with a networked, embedded controller chip, so it will always be profitable to produce them, even for a tiny market.

Note that this dynamic will never be true in a government-led command economy. Consumers lose choice when government bureaucrats decide they don't need something, or, just as bad, decide to ban companies from being allowed to sell them.

Soylent Green is people!

Actually, most Android phones have sealed non-user replaceable batteries. Samsung has been the exception to that, always having replaceable batteries, and LG's latest G3 has one, too, but their previous generation, the G2, and a sealed, welded-in battery. HTC's previous "Vivid" generation had a replaceable battery, but their latest popular HTC One (M7 and M8) line of phones do not. So pretty much everybody except Samsung and (recently) LG are producing Android phones with embedded batteries, including Motorola (and Google), HTC, Nokia and Amazon.

Because Newegg claimed the charge was legitimate, even though the name used was not the name on the card, and they shipped it to a different address in another state, AND they told me on the phone it was fraudulent, and cancelled "Steven Tieng's" account with them. So they made a BIG mistake - when the fraud report came in, they told MasterCard, "oh, no, looks legit to me!"

I didn't use my debit card over the Internet, the fraudster did. I don't know how they got the information on the card, maybe from Target or something. Maybe a gas pump skimmer, who knows? I saw the charge and disputed it within 2 or 3 days. The bank issued a credit (they called it provisional) and I filled out the fraud form. There were actually 3 fraudulent charges - Nordstrom's, The Gap, and Newegg. The first 2 were no problem, but after about 5 weeks, I got a letter from the bank saying the credit had been reversed because the merchant claimed the charge was authorized. It included a lot of details about the charge. The name used was Steven Tieng (never heard of him). He used a billing address that I had moved out of a few weeks earlier. The package was shipped to a different address in a different state, to another person. And yet despite all these inconsistencies (WRONG NAME even), they claimed it was legit and kept the money.

The bank gave me 10 days to file a "rebuttal", which I did the very next day. The girl at the bank told me it was "the most thorough rebuttal she had ever seen". Nevertheless, it appears MasterCard simply threw it in the trash. There has been no response from them in just over 6 months. I ask at the bank, they call, and just get "nothing". Newegg simply responds with "Oh, gee, too bad. Call your bank.".

I doubt I'll ever see a dime of that money again.

I really don't WANT credit. My solution to this is another bank account that only gets funds when I know I'm going to use a card for an on-line purchase or something.

According to that site:

If someone makes unauthorized transactions with your debit card number, but your card is not lost, you are not liable for those transactions if you report them within 60 days of your statement being sent to you.

Well I reported it within 2 days of the charge itself, but I'm still out $120. So it doesn't really work very well. Should I file a complaint with the FTC? Do you think I would actually get a response?

Because you need credit for those.

Maybe. Sometimes. I'm currently out $120 from a fraudulent charge that was approved anyway (it was a debit card on my bank account). The bank credited me when the fraud report was submitted, but then the merchant came back and said "Well it looks legit to us, even though a completely different name than the one on the card was used, and we shipped the stuff to a different state." MasterCard went along with that, and took my $120 and handed it over to Newegg. Since April, numerous letters, calls, and emails have yielded no response at all.

So if MasterCard decides they're not going to cover it, that's it. You pretty much have no recourse. And they do that, even when the charges are clearly fraudulent.

Mod parent up. While the poster's solution may not be the right idea, he's absolutely identified the problem: profit-driven central authority.

You can't take a picture of the Pentagon, even from non-military property with a view of the building. The MPs will jump on you quick and you'll be under military detention.

That was the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), not the US Forest Service. Totally different agencies. The BLM is under the Department of the Interior, while the US Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture.

But the US keeps pretending just that, even though most people know the media is completely compromised.

My keyboards don't have those (used to be) OS-specific keys on them.

Yes, they're still around and yes, they are still very popular.