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.

It's become just another form of wealth transfer from the poor to the upper classes in the economy. Perks and incentives to earn "points" and cash-back by spending on credit cards are financed by those merchant fees, so the entire country is subsidizing them by paying hidden fees in the form of higher prices of goods and services. People who buy a lot with credit and can easily pay off their credit card bill every month come out ahead. People who can't or don't purchase much or who cannot always pay their bill in full get screwed. And card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) are leeches in the middle sucking blood from everyone.

Once you understand how the system is rigged, it's actually pretty disgusting.

Which is an argument for e-mails, really. It's sitting there waiting for them to need the information, and they can just refer to it at that point if they need to. I have little sympathy for the position of "But I don't want to do my job...".

And their inability or unwillingness to do their job is my problem... how again?

I found it saves a lot of time for everyone if I refuse to indulge the person who didn't read the e-mail and proceed with everyone else's questions, or if it's wide-spread enough just reschedule the meeting to give everyone more time and call it there.

I've been meaning to move to Home Assistant for years, but most examples are like yours and I'm not sure if my seemingly simple use case is covered. Would you mind providing some additional insight?

My use case is to get off of my Alexa devices. The main feature I want is voice control of the lights. As far as which smart bulbs are supported, I'm comfortable dealing with that (I know half of mine are unsupported by Home Assistant and will need replaced). So my biggest question is, what's the easiest way to add voice support for basic control of lighting groups (ex. "Turn off the living room lights", "Turn on the bedroom", "Set the kitchen lights to 50%", etc..)? Might be nice if I could convert my existing Alexa devices into remote speaker+mics for Home Assistant, but I'm hoping there are better solutions (and hope they're affordable).

Most of the features I use are very basic Alexa features, but my normal use of them is via voice, so that has to be integrated:
* Time (What time is it? What is the today's date?)
* Timers (Set a timer for 3 minutes. Remind me in 40 minutes to get the laundry.)
* Weather (What's the weather? What's the weather tomorrow? What's the (current) temperature?)
* Music (Play White Stripes on Pandora. Pause. Resume. Set volume to 5. Raise volume. Lower volume.)

All the cool home automation features you listed are things I don't own yet. I could see adding some of those and growing my system once it's going, but I don't have any immediate need for them (apartment life plays a part there). I can't foresee myself building this out just for those sort of automations (ex. I can hear my smoke detectors from anywhere in the apartment, just look at my thermometers, have no thermostat (steam heat), etc..). But I also loathe these Alexa devices cause I can't get them to just do their job without butting in and suggesting bullshit in follow ups and ads, and I don't need all my dumb timer requests sent to the cloud just for speech-to-text.

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.

Exactly this, I met a girlfriend after she studied in IT and I hate to speak against her but she wasn't that good although I tried to upgrade her knowledge back then. She never found a job in IT ever as far as I know. Sure she got jobs where her IT formation helped her get the job but those weren't real IT jobs like the programming jobs she was looking for initially.

The first thing to do is ask "Does this need to be a meeting?". If all you're doing is disseminating information, it doesn't. Send the information in an email instead. If you expect questions, send it in an email and have people ask their questions via an email thread. If you start getting debate on a question, then you need to schedule a meeting or take it to real-time chat. If you want feedback and expect debate on changes, send it in an email and schedule a meeting later to give people enough time to understand the information and get their feedback ready.

TBH I think any meeting that has a detailed agenda doesn't need to start as a meeting. My experience is that the productive meetings always involve a starting point so nebulous that the whole point will be to throw ideas at each other and work out what we're actually doing.

They're still making DVD drives. They're just mostly USB now. Ripping is pushbutton easy these days. No messing around with getting a copy of DeCSS and such.

seriously, slashdot? It's 2025 and you still can't do the Euro sign?

Even so the prices are excessive. If I want to upgrade the SSD in the current MBP from 512 GB to 2 TB that's +750 â

Meanwhile, a Western Digital Red SN700 with 2 TB I can get for a bit over 200 â.
A Samsung 990 PRO 2 - 245 â (was just rated the best M.2 SSD on the market by Tom's Hardware).

Whatever exact chips Apple is using, they're not 3x as expensive as other high-quality SSDs.