Gyre is a more official name for the Pacific Garbage patch, as there are presumably few kids in it

Not really IMO, moderation is broken by design at best

Pallets of returned items from Amazon and others stacked in pallets in warehouses. The refuse remains until someone decides to buy the pallet (approximately $700), have it delivered (which costs extra), and possibly resell whatever is inside.

This is in the U.S. It is guaranteed in China and India the vast majority gets thrown into a hole or piled high at a dump.

It's common in English too. The two OPs might be from a particular society that's allergic to multisyllabic words.

A corporation is a legal concept that lets a group of people own property and act together. Many people are expecting AI to replace corporations, especially in software development because one guy with an idea will be able to do what now requires a bunch of shareholders to pool their resources and hire a bunch of specialists.

And then we invented LLMs.

I don't see a rash of bans, but I do see the same abusers of moderation given all the mod points they can use every day.

You can thank student loans for that. Earlier generations got their schooling subsidized, but now people have to get loans to pay for it themselves instead. Colleges therefore could raise tuition. Then a bipartisan effort in Congress was launched to make sure we couldn't discharge those loans through bankruptcy like you can gambling or other personal debts, which was led by Joseph R Biden. I think we know how that turned out, forgiveness for a few of the worst abused players, and blaming inability to keep his campaign promises related to partial forgiveness for all buyers blamed on Congress while he went around them to fund genocide in Gaza.

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.

Unless a suspect themselves have tested, genetic genealogy can only produce leads for further investigation. You can't be convicted, probably not even accused on your cousins DNA alone... in a state which respects basic civil rights, at least. Which it's an open question how much the US is right now.

Then again, if they don't respect basic civil rights, it's bold to assume they care about evidence at all, genetic or otherwise.

Ancestry is a PE run lobster trap, in a screw of enshittification. They are the sort of company which hikes subscription fees and "forgets" to cancel even though you tell them to. (Very profitable with their elderly customer base). If they're clamping down on police use of their databases, that's because the way they think the wind is blowing, not because of any sort of principle.

People who want to help missing person cases/cases where the police still care about actual evidence, can submit their results to the pretty open GEDmatch instead (ideally testing somewhere which doesn't have subscriptions).

No, you see, it's an emergency. The US is being invaded and the president is using his legally granted emergency powers to shake down, er, regulate the flow of trade to China. And deploy the US military against American citizens in American cities. And conduct extrajudicial murder.