I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.

I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less consistently good than Kroger (which sucks at everything else).

That said, I can't imagine Walmart dropping credit cards. Too many people have abandoned every other way to pay these days.

Does this mean they will finally enable contactless credit cards on their POS terminals? They've refused to do it for years, requiring people to insert the chip into the reader, as an attempt to push people into using the Walmart app for payments.

Drives me fucking insane. Half the terminals have screwed up chip contacts in them requiring gymnastics to get it to read the chip and it's so much slower than contactless processing. I've started intentionally failing the chip read twice so I can just swipe my card instead. Pretty sure it costs Walmart extra processing fees and is actually faster.

While 100 Mbps is enough for probably the majority of users, it doesn't mean we shouldn't set goals to make things better in the future. Honestly, this feels like the US in microcosm for the last 15-20 years -- "good enough" has become the national motto. Fuel efficiency, electrification, wages, housing, and yes, Internet speeds. It is the fundamental reason that China has positioned itself to eclipse the US in almost every technological measure (though at least we still have our free speech, god, and guns [but this same Brendan Carr asshat is working hard on eliminating that first one too]).

Plus, I'd wager that more than half of the people out there with gigabit speeds are still using some equipment that's limited to megabit speeds somewhere in the chain - a router, switch, cable, ethernet card, or shitty wifi. I've seen that plenty of times (including to myself when Comcast bumped speeds up a few years ago and I was still using an older modem). Unless they do a speed test, they'll never notice the missing bandwidth.

Maybe it was the same with you, and why you didn't notice a difference with Starlink. Are you sure all your equipment was even capable of gigabit? :)

Why is "vote with your wallet and let the market decide" the Republican screed when people complain about monopolies, price gouging, insatiable greed, the rise of oligarchies, and the overwhelming power disparity between corporations and normal people, except when it's something conservatives like? Then suddenly voting with your wallet suddenly becomes "performative woke partisan politics".

It's almost like both of those are bullshit excuses to avoid dealing with real problems.

Strange New Worlds is a star in the otherwise bleak landscape of nu-Trek.

Jesus. Hard to believe Pixel started out as a cheaper Android option.

I was thinking about trading in my Pixel 7 for an upgrade this November during the typical sale they have, but not at that price. Maybe it's time to go back to Motorola. Anyone have a good experience with recent Moto models?

I'm glad that worked out well for you, but a planned surgery is drastically different from emergency services. You don't have the time or option to make sure that all the dozens of providers are in-network, that your plan covers everything (such as life-flight, which usually is *not* covered), etc.

Not to mention, before Evil Obama signed the ACA into law, most cheapo medical insurance plans (and plenty of less cheap ones as well) had annual or lifetime maximums that could easily be reached for emergency life-saving procedures. Thankfully that's less of a problem now (damn you Obama!).

Nah, in the US we love using "buy now, pay later" for everything, including emergency medical care.

Unfortunately "pay later" often turns into "get fucked later" or "bankruptcy later" for emergency services. Maybe that $2,000 ambulance ride doesn't break the bank, but god help you if your unconscious body goes on a $100,000 life-flight helicopter tour.

And fun medical bonus! There's an extra element of surprise because you have no idea how much you're going to have to pay until months later and you're probably incapable of making an informed decision or agreeing to the services you receive! Whee!

I love it, but Slashdot is more dead than I care to admit. I noticed a while ago that new user sign-ups are effectively disabled, so the current group of users is pretty much all there is ever going to be. I suspect the owners see Slashdot as a charity project, something they let limp along until it slowly atrophies and dies off.

I wish there was a way to turn Slashdot into a community owned-and-operated cooperative of some kind. Make the current codebase public, encourage users to pay for hosting costs, provide support and code improvements, etc. Maybe it would horribly fail, but I can also see it working at least as well as the current model.

So you did exactly what the GP is complaining about - brought politics into a sports subreddit where people didn't want it, then you were a dick to someone else and got kicked out. Sounds like the system is working as intended and everyone else in that subreddit is probably happier for the result.

The mod of a single subreddit cannot ban you from all of Reddit.

They'll ban you for expressing forbidden opinions. Opinions that are extremely fucking common outside of Reddit.

LK

I was auto suspended because I quoted a 30 year old statement supporting the rights of gays and lesbians that made reference to "LGB communities". I was accused of Trans erasure or some other stupid bullshit.

I hope the stock price falls low enough for Elon Musk to buy it for a song.

LK

Don Jr is a paid "strategic advisor" to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and the private investment company he's partner in, 1789 Capital, invested millions into Polymarket. Reportedly the Trump family owns stock in both companies.

The corruption and grift has become so blatant that nobody even bothers reporting on it anymore.

Do you think it's likely that the people who work on memory optimization and the high-performance Javascript JIT compiler are the same people who put together a fun little time-wasting homepage puzzle?

Firefox and Mozilla have definitely suffered from whiplash over the years when it comes to priorities, but when I get annoyed I try to remember that Firefox is still an open-source project that accepts contributions from everyone. Sometimes there will be features added just because it was an itch someone wanted to scratch or a fun idea they wanted to try out. A little puzzle like this that you can easily turn off doesn't harm anything.

One of the side-effects of an open project like this is that you have a variety of different goals. Some will be boring bean-counter stuff, some performance and features, and some just fun. That's okay.

Besides, Chrome has had a dumb game embedded in a browser error page for over 10 years and nobody lost their minds (or if they did, nobody has missed them).

The only thing I've found worth bothering with at Starbucks is their "blonde" roasts (what everyone else would probably call "medium"). A blonde americano or a Veranda batch brew (I think they still technically offer a pour-over, but none of the employees are capable doing it) are the only things I'll get when Starbucks is my only option.

Pike Place is worse than gas station mystery brew that's been on the warmer for 6 hours.

Wrong. Any progressive tax system is a "wealth tax" and the only thing it's a radical departure from is the steaming pile of shit that Rotten Ronnie left for us in the 80's. Go back a little further and you'll see tax brackets as high as 94% during the 1940s.

A wealth cap is simply a progressive tax system where eventually you reach a 100% tax bracket. Frankly I don't see any reason this is inherently a bad thing, especially when you're talking about the top 0.01% hoarders of wealth. Not that it matters much, since none of the people it would possibly apply to actually take a normal salary income. Part of any effective changes like this has to include capturing the real way that these people acquire and store their money, which will never happen.