Perhaps you are not aware that VPNs provide perfect anonymity to anybody with a credit card and $9.95/month. It is the perfect way to prevent cybercrime hackers from geolocating your IP and stealing your identity. It protects you from digital larceny at all times, and will allow you to break through firewalls. With a VPN you can break any number of so-called "laws" and "regulations" with impunity, because of their impenetrable defenses and robust "No-Log Promise(TM)".

You call yourself a Slashdotter? Pssh, you're Geocities-tier at best.

Sounds like an effective CO2 mitigation strategy to me.

Hell, I was just guessing. I had no idea they actually did this.

Sells the data to high frequency traders?

"We found a witch, may we burn her?"

And, as we all know, Homo economicus is a real thing--a being created by the gods of Econ 101 which bears neither blemish nor opportunity costs.

Meanwhile, in our poor representation of economic utopia here on Earth 616, there are costs to ramping up the supply of labor. There are costs to importing foreigners who may be here for mercenary reasons. And there are costs to privileging the economy over society.

It doesn't matter if every immigrant added more to the GDP than they subtract from it, if the result is a low-trust society. However, in a low-trust society, autocratic governments and large corporations have quite a lot of power. So maybe that is the real cost, and the real point of all this.

For all the arguing over the differences between electrical standards, there is one thing we can all agree on:

The Brits fucked up with their plug design.

Oh, they'll tell you about all the benefits, but as soon as you step on an upturned plug, you know the truth. Brits are masochists.

They prefer the name "The Resistance" rather than the more apt "Fifth Columnists".

It is funny to watch people, backed by every corporation listed on Wall Street, call themselves a resistance. Juggalos have more claim to the name than these morons swaddled in name brand clothing and latest-gen technology. It will be funny when these chuckleheads have children. The mental gymnastics they will have to perform to explain why their Precious Angel goes to an all white school will rival Cirque de Soliel.

I get where you're coming from, but in reality it can bump up against the facts on the ground.

If you have a limited supply of something, you have to track that at the cart level, or notify the user that their order cannot be completed after the sale. The former is annoying and rife with issues, but the latter means you have to deal with refunds and blowback from the customer. It's far from a solved problem, and why so many developers just give up and put the onus of the work on Magento or whatever.

This issue with Google is pretty annoying, however. If their scraping tool + cart-adder doesn't empty the cart when it's finished, it's broken. I can definitely see a class action suit against Google for this, because they are interfering with the normal operation of the site due to their crappy tool. If sites have to engineer around Google's program acting in bad faith, that's a direct cost imposed by Google ineptitude.

That's so dumb and malicious it's not even wrong. Your position is that white people are annoyed when black people make progress?

Either you need to find better people to pal around with, or you need to stop reading whatever propaganda rag has convinced you this is the case.

Is it clearer when you say that "Dalton Trumbo was then put on the Hollywood denylist"?

If linking that article was supposed to prove something horrible about Kozma, it didn't work.

Page and Brin accumulated $60B by making a really good search engine.

I wish Alphabet would do that. That Google thing people seem to like isn't very good and keeps getting worse.

I won't argue that energy companies will emphatically defend whatever energy they provide and however they provide it. But:

But it will. If you live in the suburbs, you require a car to go places. It's all well and good to say "well, move to where you don't need a car," but now you're down a rabbit hole of property tax bases, public education, social mobility, and employment in infrastructure industries. These are not trivial.

It also doesn't address container ships. These have a pretty impressive carbon footprint, not to mention ocean pollution, but without these monsters you are now down a rabbit hole of local production and the limitations therein. Not to mention taxes and tariffs.

CO2 is the price we currently pay for cheap, reliable energy. I'm very much on board with energy efficiency, and if we could flip a switch and have carbon neutral energy, woo hoo, let's do that. But switching has costs. These costs cannot be handwaved away by talking about the nefarious Big Oil. Money spent on migrating energy infrastructure from one to another are monies not spent on other priorities. It seems like a very basic economic concept--resources are finite, while demand is infinite--but it doesn't seem to be addressed at all. Which of your other pet projects would you kill in order to fund CO2 neutral measures?

I just can't believe the same people went from "masks don't do anything" to "you have to wear a mask all the time" so easily. The first was a straight up lie (even if it had a good purpose), and when a lie is followed by a conflicting edict, it feels like the issue is about control and manipulation, not public health.

I remember the many, many Slashdot commenters who were backing the "masks don't do anything" lie back when that was the official party line. Are they now parroting the new line?

If you treat your citizens like children, don't be surprised when the children rebel.