At every level of speech expression, there's a corporation involved. Nobody exists on the internet without any at some point.

So maybe I leave the 'big' social media and news sites (including youtube) and just host a blog as an ISP on a dedicated domain and VM? Nope, now my hosting provider is liable. So instead I just self-host my publishing on docker containers? Nope, because then my domain name provider and/or dyn-dns could be held liable.

They'll always have some corporation to threaten at some point to take my words off the 'net, by twisting what the word 'publishing' means...and I'm not paying any of these companies enough for them to be willing to defend me.

Yes, that's a slippery slope argument. Of course it is. And we've seen it over and over that conservative overlords will follow the slippery slope. The entire set of ideas in Project 2026 is exactly that - having achieved so much of P2025 they want to slide the slope into the next steps into pure fascism.

note, that was a napkin calculation - i didn't know they started dividends as late as 2011, and I don't know the dividend per share. i just put some numbers in to give the impression, but unlike certain politicians, I'm not trying to prove a point to influence policy decisions. Thought experiment, nothing more. :)

yeah, i just did a check. Adjusting for inflation, the stock price would need to be around $154 to be comparable in value. (Assuming total volume has remained relatively constant in that time).

that is, at $80 now, that means the stock is really worth only $42 in 2000 dollars.

So it is a number that's the same, but the value of $80 if you held onto it this entire time is still far less than you had when you started. Dividends won't quite add up to that gap - if 50c per share per quarter, and you kept the cash, that's $50 per share...but that's been spread out across inflation, so you'd have to curve the value down for what the more recent 50c means vs 50c 25 years ago. I'm not in the mood to run the calculus, but i'm gonna wager it still falls a little short.

Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Yes, this stuff is moving digital as well. At different speeds in different countries.

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 have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Just looking at the technical side, the cost to the end-user of streaming that much data would be exorbitant. Compressed video or even once-per-second snapshots would eat up all the mobile data, and the battery life would be measured in single digit hours.

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.

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.