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Comment Re:I remember when the phone companies (Score 1) 37

That's the neat thing - they haven't stopped doing this! The subsidized phone price the carriers give you when signing up is priced into the service plan. If you don't upgrade again when you're eligible (perhaps because you're elderly and don't follow the promotions), that's now all gravy for the carrier.

Do any carriers still do that? I haven't checked AT&T or Verizon, but with T-Mobile you can buy a phone from them and they just add the price to your bill over 24 months.

I think T-Mobile has only done it that way for at least a decade. I know that when I bought my Nokia N900 15+ years ago, I switched to T-Mobile because they were already giving a $20/month discount if you already owned a phone.

Comment Re:Hard to see Meta Losing (Score 1) 81

This is a civil case, not a criminal case, so the burden of proof is only preponderance of the evidence (A very oversimplified explanation: in a criminal case, if the jury says "I don't know", the defendant wins, but in a civil case, the jury can't say "I don't know", they must pick a winner). If Meta tells the judge and jury that they have no idea how the decision of who to lay off was made, it's going to be very easy for the plaintiffs to find one bit of evidence or explanation that will tip the jury in their favor.

Comment Re:Hard to see Meta Losing (Score 5, Informative) 81

The employees have to prove that their protected status was targeted to win, and that is a pretty tough sell IMO. It seems like the protected status was more of a side effect of "performance."

Not at all. If they use a metric of "Worked at least X hours in the past 12 months", and a person worked fewer than X hours because they were on parental leave, firing them would not be a "side effect of performance", it would be a direct violation of their legal protection.

Comment Re:debit card rewards (Score 2) 52

Many businesses offer discounts for paying in cash (if their agreements with credit/debit card companies allow it).

If I remember correctly, merchants could always give a discount for paying in cash, but they couldn't charge extra for paying with a card. They may be effectively the same thing, but what the credit card companies didn't want was people being unhappy that they were being charged more than the advertised price. Obviously the credit card companies did it for their own benefit, but it was also good for the customers.

Comment Re:debit card rewards (Score 2) 52

The rewards program for my credit union's credit card has a bunch of that random reward crap, but they also have a nice "Just give me 1% in cash" option. Whenever I've skimmed the list of random crap, the cost in reward points was almost always higher than if I took the 1% cash and just bought the item in a store.

Comment Re:alito barrett and thomas dissent (Score 1) 97

Even though I'm a liberal, I actually disagree with the court's decision in the birthright case. Just imagine a French couple go to Hawaii for vacation and she happens to have her baby early. Technically, that kid, when grown up, has to file taxes with the IRS annually and may even have to pay taxes while working in France. Worse yet, he may find that he's arrested when he comes to vacation to the U.S. because he's wanted by the IRS. I know it's a stretch, but that's no the only downside of the birthright citizenship.

From what I've read, that baby is not a US citizen. There are long-established exceptions to birthright citizenship. The most obvious is a baby of a diplomat, since they are generally not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. I believe that a baby born to parents on a temporary visa is also not granted birthright citizenship, since there is an explicit intention for the child to not be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States when they return home.

Comment Re:Expesnive controller (Score 1) 92

The controller is separate and is $80????

Yes, controllers generally cost $80 now. They used to cost $50, but there's this thing called inflation.

That was my immediate reaction too. $80 now would have been about $35 in the early 1990s, which is probably pretty close to what good third-party controllers cost back then.

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