And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

I mean, sure you can mine some crypto, but the perceived value of those is essentially nothing.

The market cap for all those cited coins together is considered about $7 billion (Monero being the vast majority of that). So mining that won't do them any good to recoup expense unless they suddenly got all the crypto-bros to abandon BTC in favor of Monero (Etherium is at $380 billion, BTC is at $1.8 Trillion).

The question is mine what? Etherium went away from GPU friendly proof of work, and Bitcoin proof of work hasn't been viable on GPUs in ages...

They aren't "video cards", since they generally neither have video ports, nor do they fit in a standard form factor 'slot' form factor.

If the LLM bubble evaporates, the workload appropriate to these devices will be dramatically lower. You *could* perhaps make a go of VDI and maybe someone takes another swing at a cloud gaming service (if someone went all in on Grace, then neither of those use cases would be well served either), but hard to imagine any of those markets sustaining the absurd footprint built out.

No. I got rid of the car about a year later. It didn't bother me because at the time, I thought it was just a snitch, like the any other cell phone. Didn't occur to me they could shut off my car but I feel stupid I didn't think of that. Too trusting.

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.

I suppose my question is if you are going to go on at some length at how Home Assistant is some techbro nonsense, what do you see as the alternative that hits the same use cases:
- Centralized 'smart home' device management
- Does not lock you into a cloud connected dependency
- Does not lock you into a particular device or phone vendor
- Can implement various local automations without the device itself having to support things like schedules and so forth. E.g. turn off all lights still on at midnight, or reduce heating/air conditioning when everyone's phones leave a geofenced area, or start increasing it when I leave work so it's more comfortable by the time I get home.

The OnStar system in my previous vehicle still reported to OnStar (or someone) even though it did not HAVE OnStar installed or activated. I was out west where the nearest cell tower was over 60 miles away and was using an SDR and traced it to the trunk on the drivers side. I was looking for some SCADA signals in the 800-950 Mhz range and said "What the actual hell is THAT!?" when I saw it was always near, and always fairly strong. I assume it was beaconing for a cell tower since it was a repeated signlal with about the same waveform.

"Value Priced" installed alarms do that. I installed and maintained alarms in the 70's. I used two types of systems, for low security, a resistor at the bitter end of the zone. That way a open or short would set off the zone. The other was a oscillating R/C or C/L circuit that was tuned to a unique frequency for that alarm on that zone. Lately, the zones (wired or wireless) use TLS.
As to reporting, most were metallic pair from TelCo (kinda expensive) with line security (variable oscillating), or used dial up every few minutes. A special "OverWatch" mode for dial up was available for an extra charge that stayed connected but that was designed by the company and not something off the shelf. These days, it's done with Internet via cable/phone or wireless. A drop in comms == "Trouble" which is treated as an alarm condition.
Another precaution was a code to repeat in case of alarm. Said code said one style, everything is OK. Said in another style it ment the subscriber was being held hostage. Much fun calling for a SWAT response and very, very expensive when the subscriber got it wrong.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

Alexa and Google are always hooked into Google's stuff, whether there's some at least partial local control still available in an outage or not.

I'd say local-first is *fairly* unique. Yes Homekit/Matter devices *can* be controlled locally in a peer-to-peer manner right from handsets, but Thread radios are fairly rare and I don't know if any non-apple handsets support directly talking to those devices without an intermediary.

If you don't have Apple devices, then HomeKit is a mixed bag, as sometimes the onboarding is only possible with an iPhone.

Now when you want to take it to be internet accessible, Home Assistant is a pretty rare software for easily supporting that *without* going through any cloud provider (get a dynamic dns and let's encrypt going, and Home Assistant plugins exist to automate that including renewal for those that don't want to understand how to do that themselves.