Feels like a simple thing to audit: snap inspection and see the average ages of currently in use equipment.
If it's what they're claiming, give them a refund.

So the various state attorneys general got huge settlement for these.

As long as we are bitching about harming the poor... Shall we ask what % of those settlement ended up in, say, the actual hands of poor customers?

Just wondering.

Ironically the only streaming service I know of that doesn't interrupt with ads is.... Netflix.

Yes, I believe there are several others that if you pay enough (generally a LOT more) you can avoid them.

I'm not defending the system, because I too think it's broken... But please let me know a society where the rich don't get more of what they want?

And before you reply with something like "but in my country they can't buy their way out of a parking ticket" note that I'm not defining "rich" either. Generally assertions of virtue in this context merely means the price is higher and/or indirect, ie hiring better lawyers, funding the right politician in the next election, or donating to the right thing.

Jesus Christ man, does anything in your day not somehow involve thinking about Trump?

Checks are a last vestige of a higher trust society.

I work for a European firm and they (their auditors) despise checks and can't comprehend how America can be so backward as to still use them.

Ironically we just had a customer involved in seven-digit fraud payments ...which couldn't have happened without electronic payments. Had they been "allowed" to pay us in checks like they used to, it simply couldn't have happened.

I'm not sure listing another random rule that allows the German state to arrest people is a "win".

In a way this is good news.
Seriously.

If Russia expected to win this conflict, it's unlikely even they are dumb enough to cause major nuclear leaks in territory they expect to hold.

It's possible this is a clue that they DON'T expect to do so, and we've advanced to the "well if I can't have it nobody can" scorched earth stage, which is very Russian.

Trump says thanks for letting him live free in there.

... For our elected officials, that is.

"There are serious effects now"
Really?

As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy either wrong or framing-dependent bullshit like:
1) "there's a drought in California" (entirely disregarding that we happen to have settled it in an extremely wet phase, while for the last 1000+ years the US SW has been much drier for *centuries* at a time), or
2) every time it rains in Charleston "global warming is making hurricanes worse" or "...more frequent" or both (both of which have been repeatedly debunked as an artifact of our North-Atlantic-Data focus, in regards to both 'severe' storms and total hurricane energy, EITHER in the NAtl or globally), or
3) the 'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat whether we're talking regionally or global scales).

So please, elaborate these 'serious effects NOW'? What did I miss? The 'sinking islands' that aren't actually sinking?

Not everyone lives in a fantastically rich petrostate.

Would this be the Starlink system Musk rushed to Ukraine and afaik continues to allow UKR to use free if charge? (I believe that some donor nations do pay sub fees for the systems they've purchased for Ukr, to be clear.)

Musk repeatedly said that he won't allow Starlink to be used to support offensive operations. Yes, sometimes free gifts come with strings attached.

Your insistence that because Musk doesn't do everything Ukraine wants without question, "we know where his sympathies lie" is childish.

Yes, I can see the argument that an offensive to retake Ukr territory should be allowed, but I can also see the argument that it is an offensive. Musk, a rather pacifistic person who routinely gets collywobbles when confirmed with violence as pacifists often do, probably sees it that way (and your own linked article mentioned that Biden military & intel people at the time thought Putin 's retaliatory threats were increasingly credible). My guess is that he was confronted with Russian threats to himself or his companies globally.

Would it be better if Starlink just entirely shut down all service to the region? Would that be better for Ukraine?
If that's not what you want, then maybe shut the fuck up?

What is happening to Ukraine is terrible. Ukraine's defense against a sociopathic neighbor has been heroic. That doesn't mean everyone, everywhere, 24/7 makes "what's best for Ukraine" their priority.

And?

And you bet people will be waiting in line on day one to buy it...