Ignoring the fact that they immediately raise prices enough to cover the costs.

It's really just a tax that's being collected at the cash register.

Do you honestly think the people who set this policy don't know this? I'll give you a hint- they do, but they did it anyway because it was the only realistic way to actually collect the recycling fees.

Don't misinterpret, I'm not saying there should or shouldn't be fees for future recycling, just that the people who set the fee chose this route on purpose.

Most people with insurance don't pay attention what is actually going on. I'm surprised that insurance companies put up with medical systems that automatically charge 100x the actual price just so they can grab the maximum amount any insurance is willing to pay.

The convention of network-negotiated rates (where base hospital fees drop 20-40% just for a patient being insured in the first place) skews people's cost-benefit curve so far toward "yes, buy insurance" that insurance companies are virtually guaranteed a large number of captive customers. And industry number-crunchers probably calculated long ago that a small number of expensive ER trips per customer is outweighed by the larger number of customers.

And I'm assuming hospitals go along with the network-negotiating system so they can bill the insurance companies in bulk, cutting down on the amount that the hospital has to painfully collect from the patients themselves.

The problems the airlines face is this: The majority of the flying public have made it clear that *nothing* matters to them more than the lowest fare. Not legroom. Not blankets and pillows or meals or free drinks. Not status miles or good service. Nothing.

That's because customers can only comparison-shop using the info they have. I have yet to see an airline's website tell me the seat-pitch size or blankets/pillows or amount of free food included with a given seat.

If price and departure/arrival time are the only info the airline provides, then price and departure/arrival time will be used for comparison shopping.

Trump on the other hand was a parade of bad ideas thwarted by his own incompetence in getting them implemented.

Don't know if you're including this or not, but there's also the intentional slow-walking by his staff to carry out his poorer directives. Which worked well because "distract then change subject" is known to be effective on DT.

The Iraq war was a terrible, terrible decision where they assumed they could just pop in, install a friendly democracy, and pop out. A more coherent and eloquent thinker might have been able to think about the repercussions in a bit more depth.

Cheney and The Rummy are the ones who thought pop-in-pop-out would work. And GWB wasn't one to question his bosses.

ESPECIALLY since the guy doesn't even realize that "Grok" was a word coined by Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land"

Which leads to another question- how long before Musk tries to claim sole ownership of the word "grok", even though the word existed before Musk was even born? Kind of like how Fuckerberg thinks he outright owns the word "book".

It's not my job to force them to start making good decisions.

Lots of things aren't my job. But it's still to my benefit if they happen.

You would know this if you bothered to look at their teeth, small intestine, or just asked someone knowledgable about felines.

I tried to look at my cat's small intestine once, and she damn-near clawed my face off.

Spare aren't that important and haven't been for years.

Yep, not important right up until the moment you need one.

Cruise "blamed cellphone carriers for the problem," according to the article --- arguing that a music festival overloaded the cellphone network they used to communicate with their vehicles.

What I'm hearing is Cruise admitting that Robotaxis aren't suitable for use when there's potentially lots of cellphones nearby. Hope state regulators take this admission into account...

States SHOULD give the two senate votes to the overall winner, but the rest should be allocated on congressional districts.

You're close, but not quite correct my friend. We already have a serious problem with congressional Gerrymandering, imagine how bad it would be if a party could Gerrymander the presidency also.

The right answer (to me) is for each state to assign EC votes proportionally to the candidates' showing. Eg, get 60% of the popular vote in a state with 10 EC votes? You get 6 EC votes. And to handle the "not quite enough" problem on the state's last one or two EC votes, they would go to the candidate or two that was closest to getting another EC vote.

For anyone who remembers the 1992 presidential election, this method would've (correctly) given Ross Perot some EC votes though he didn't win any states or congressional districts outright.

A little off-topic, but this stuck out to me:

but the perfect crime is unfortunately commonplace. There is a frightening amount of unsolved murders, about 25% in developed countries.

Maybe "the perfect crime" is just slang for "a crime who's victim we don't care about". And that's a depressing thought.

Lots of people hate Texas, or see it as nothing more than an oil state. But the reality is that it's also the clear leader in green energy.

And a fair number of Texans are kind of pissed about that:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/n...
https://www.kut.org/energy-env...
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/14...

This is data gained through OS-provided API's, right? Instead of rejecting the apps, Apple should straight-out lie to the offending apps.

Can't explain why you need location data? Then half the time the OS says the device is $RANDOM_CITY, and the other half it reports $RANDOM_COUNTRY. Can't explain why you need a list of installed fonts? Then all the OS ever reports is the list of fonts provided in a basic, clean OS install. Any of course any pseudo-unique identifiers (like ethernet MAC addy) get random numbers.

Besides cutting down on fingerprinting, this would be oddly satisfying.

And it isn't about aliens.

UFO = Unidentified Flying Object. If it's a physical thing and not an optical illusion or whatever, and it can be determined it's not American... it might be a foreign spy craft.

Half the people say "UFO" with the meaning you're using- it's unidentified and it appears to be flying. The other half are specifically referring to spacecraft. It's impossible to talk about either case when the two groups don't have a common language and neither is likely to change their meaning.

I don't have public influence to make this happen, but I wish we'd switch to these two terms: "UAO" for unidentified Airborne object, and "possible spacecraft" for, well, possible spacecraft.

When cars come equipped with full self-parking, they'll drop you off at the front door and then find a parking space to pull into. If the parking space has a time limit, it will re-park itself when the time comes.

For smaller towns that might work, but in areas where most of the parking is ramps and/or lots with a pay-kiosk, there'll just be a swath of person-less cars aimless driving around the the neighborhood until the owner calls the car back. I can't imagine that would go over well.