So basically it's just another day in America where the rich screw the poor.

I was going to basically post this but in a less fleshed out way. Unless you control the hardware, which includes updates, etc. then the maker of it can change it at any time. I wouldn't spend $100 on hardware I can't control, let alone thousands of dollars. This issue was easy to see coming down the pike. This is not an "early adopter tax" or anything of the like. An early adopter tax is more that the company making it might fail, or the product itself isn't successful and is discontinued (along with support of the product). This is an ignorance tax... ignorance of the hardware they purchased and who has control over it.

This regulation brought to you by GM, because they can't compete with a 20k vehicle and would rather sell 65k pickup trucks instead anyways.

Re-read his post....

Not interested in buying one until megawatt level charging is as common and frequent as a gas pump.

I hate how they say the plastic bag style isn't reusable. Just because they werent used again for shopping doesn't mean they weren't repurposed. I reused them all the time. For example I'd use them as can liners inside the small cans in my bathrooms. Once they filled up I'd knot the bag by the handles and toss it in the dumpster. After the ban (and running out of my stock of those plastic bags) I just started using full size garbage bags which have way more plastic in them due to size. Once the small bin gets full, the bag is only about 25% full. I still tie it and toss it. Bathroom garbage stinks if it sits too long and those shopping bags were the perfect size to fill but also not reek. Even though I only fill the bigger bags 25% I'm not going to keep them around due to this.

That sounds like a depositor issue. This is similar to insuring a 2 million dollar home for 250k USD and then complaining that insurance won't cover over the 250k max of your policy when your home burns down. You knew the limit and tou chose to go over it and not mitigate your risk through other channels. The rest of us don't get to go crying to daddy government when we make a bad financial decision and have them bail us out. Let the depositors eat the loss. Sometimes lessons are costly, and thai should be one of the cases where it is.

^This right here.

If they didn't have the abusive scam ads and just ran a 5-15 second ad at the very start and very end it would be fine and I wouldn't be bothered by the change. However, the scam junk ads every 3-4 minutes mid-sentence is garbage. Yeah, I'll keep blocking their ads. Ultimately this is a cat and mouse game they cannot win. There is 1 google and billions of us. They already lost; they just don't know it yet.

I don't know what the world may need,
But a V8 engine is a good start for me.
Think I'll drive to find a place to be surly.

I'm not giving up my car while the Kardashians fly across the country for a cappuccino. I'll give up my gas vehicles when you ban private jets. Until then, F off.

I'm sick of these criminals. It's time for some street justice.

You can't get blood from a stone. Though in this case they wouldn't be suing a stone. They would be suing a walking bag of meat. I'm in favor of forcibly taking their kidneys, selling them, and giving the proceeds to the victims. People who do this type of stuff to innocent people are trash and deserve to be treated as such.

It's even worse than that. Chances are good that they may be using your donation as a tax write off. Yeah, really. I'm good friends with the bookkeeper at the grocer and they told me they collect the money and send it to the charity. It's not a direct scam in that your money doesn't go to the charity - it does end up there... but they way they structure it is that you are "giving" the money to the store, and then the store is "giving" the money to the charity. This way it's the business making the donation - not you... and they use "their donation" as a tax write off. Scummy to the max.

Geoloacation restrictions are one reason.

Here are a few others:
-You get to choose who is your endpoint, which means you get to choose who sees the exit point info
-Chained to the above, you can also pick your traffic exit point where protections on personal data are much better than the US. IE. You can use a vpn host without USA ties from Germany and be protected by the GDPR, or even better a vpn provider or server hosted in Iceland by an Icelandic company. Iceland has the strictest data protections of any country. Information can only be collected if people give unambiguous consent and is opt in only, none of this, "we collect but you can opt out" nonsense.

The real issue is - why would I want my dishwasher or refrigerator online? I can't think of one reason I would want it online. If they think I'm going to be motivated to put my home devices in the Internet so they can sell me more things then.... oh boy are they "disconnected"... pun intended... the last thing I want is my dishwasher trying to sell me "sponsored" brand dishwasher detergent. I go out of my way to remove ads from my life, if you think I'm going to opt into bringing your advertising mind pollution into my home then you're in for a very very rude awakening.

Besides, if it was so important to put these devices online they could... you know... put a LTE modem in them and pay for the cellular data on their own. Oh, they don't want to pay for that? Well, then it must not be that important then after all.