Steve Lehto has a good video about this.
In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.
Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.
This pattern keeps re-emerging.
Online payment systems want your bank login details.
Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.
etc.
The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?
If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.
And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.
> So you can drive it but you cannot look at it?
Is there a difference between riding on a rocket and giving Russia the technical knowledge to build a thousand of them?
Personally I think Russia could figure it out if they wanted to but that's not why the rules are in place.
> Was he just being a rocket geek?
90% likely but the 10% difference is why there are rules that cannot be broken.
He signed up for obeying the rules, so it was a dumb move.
> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!"
( "you may be in a psyop when..." )
FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes.
It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.
The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas my entire house is now 1.4KW, typically, but the electricity bill has quadrupled while the usage fell in half so really it's an 8x.
Hence my investment in solar infrastructure. The society is collapsing in slow-mo; the AI datacenters are just exacerbating the problem of not being able to scale. They framed Nixon for impeachment over Project Independence, so this isn't an accident.
If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.
Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.
Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.
Depends on the property value, I suppose. If the value is high enough that people are occupying 6 story apartments next door, it's probably close to being more effective than having 50ksqf of ground level parking, enabling other more fulfilling (profitable) uses.
I'm not suggesting parking decks. Think a modular pallet, perhaps with the charging equipment built in with a 480v bus connection at one end, with a cooling duct loop. Everything being modular makes it easy to maintain, and swap out bad parts for good without impairing operation. A glorified robotic forklift picks the whole thing up, car and all, and slots it into a heavy duty rack. Presto-chargo. It could be designed to fit in with other commercial buildings.
Would it be expensive? Probably, but Everything is relative, and some places real-estate is more valuable than the building that sits on it.
Yeah, and when that bubble pops in a few months customers will look at them side-eyed.
We can't have those because they wanted to sell chicken meat to Germany after WWII.
No, really, Fat Electrician has a good video on it.
(our government is just a loony bin now)
I remember when cars were made from STEEL, had STEEL chrome bumpers. If you bumped into someone, you might
scratch the chrome. Now, bump into someone and it is a multi-thousand dollar repair! Plus, with all the electronic sensors
and what not, makes it even more expensive.
Rivian R1T Fender Bender Turns Into $42,000 Repair Bill
Here’s Why That Rivian R1T Repair Cost $42,000 After Just A Minor Fender-Bender
Trump is transactional. All he cares about is money and ego.
* glances over at the combined fiscal and narcissistic worth of the Pelosis, Clintons, and OBidens *
Maybe if it were only slightly less blatantly fucking obvious..
You can glance at them all you want, but they're not even close to Trump - by an order of magnitude, or two.
This discusses recent presidential net worth before and after and how they made their money: Chart Shows Net Worth of US Presidents Before and After Office (2024) with Obama and Clinton making most of it after leaving office, and Biden from real-estate . Trump lost money after his first term due to the economic downturn during the pandemic and $590M in loan repayments and is currently raking it in via various, putting it politely, avenues (link below).
The net worth as of 2025 (various Google results):
Bidens: $10M - mostly property
Obamas: $70M - mostly books
Clintons: $300M - books, speaking, investments, consulting
Trump: $6.2B (down from $7.3B) - most while *in* office: Presidency Boosts Trump’s Net Worth By $3 Billion In A Year
Pelosis: $280M - investments (big-cap tech stocks) and real estate (most probably during her 40 years in office) and her husband is a venture capitalist.
List of presidents of the United States by net worth: #1: Trump, #4 Clinton, #12: Obama, #25 Biden.
Ya, but once everything is available as cloud-only services, how much RAM and storage will us consumers really need?
This is the difference between a government that cares about consumer rights, and a government who gleefully applies the lube for corporations to fuck you with.
You get lube? Luxury!
I bought a pretty powerful gaming desktop 8 or 10 years ago. Now it still runs all of the games I play
I have a Dell XPS 420, that a friend gave me years ago, that is currently running Windows 10 just fine. Don't know when he got it, but the system came out in 2007. I'm sure it would run Linux (Mint) very well too, though I'll be switching to a system I built already running Mint 22.2 (ASRock Z77 Extreme3, Intel i7-3770, 32GB RAM). Neither system meets the (arbitrary) HW requirements for Windows 11, if I even wanted to use it. I also have several other very old Intel-based systems that run Linux fine as well as one Athlon 64 X2 system running OPNsense. Newer isn't always better - use and needs count for more.
Also users (both regular and corporate) are quite literally exhausted of getting fucked in the ass by Micro$haft repeatedly
Still better that what you'd get from MacroSoft
Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate. -- K.E. Iverson
