Or they're like me in their late 40s and early 50s with a bit of money behind them, mortgage almost paid off or paid off and just said "fuck it I can't be arsed anymore." I'm a lorry driver here in the UK, a "trucker" in American. I've spent the last 15 years aggressively saving and investing, I've got enough "fuck you money" that I no longer have to work if I don't want to. I'd already cut my days down last year to four. This year I'm down to 2 to 3 days - I've actually only worked one this week - and will be taking the entirety of August off in addition to the 33 days pro-rata paid annual leave I also get. I did toy with just stopping altogether.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Bitcoin used to have a strong correlation with the stock market, but not over the past year. While the stock market continued to go up, Bitcoin tanked by 50%.

Bitcoin seems to have its own weird 4 year price cycle, and we're in the middle of the "price crash" part of that cycle right now. It will be interesting to see if it recovers this time.

The market is saturated with cryptocurrencies. I think it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that anyone can create one. Bitcoin was novel at one point, but the novelty has worn off.

It also doesn't help that no one has come up with any useful application for BTC beyond paying blackmailers and criminals, or laundering money. BTC will keep on peaking and dipping, but I think enough people have lost their shirts for the party to be over.

Having a video record someone could check after the fact is fine. Checking against a database of criminals sounds fine. But what you get really quick is a database of everyone using public transport, when, and where they went.

If a transit system requires electronic payment, then a database of who rode the bus already exists from passengers' card scans. Combine that with the comprehensive video recordings made on modern mass transit, and it is trivially easy to pull that video and correlate with those scans to see where you got on and got off.

In other words, that surveillance network is already in place. And whether you are stopped immediately upon getting off the bus, or the next day once the authorities have analyzed the previous day's video footage, it makes no difference.

No safeguards. As soon as the Nazis in the alleged administration can manage it, they'll force the city to turn over all the scans and have an agreement to be sent all future scans.

My city's mass transit system has a contract with March Networks to provide audio and video surveillance of all riders. There are 14 (yes, I've counted them) cameras installed on the interior and exterior of each bus. Audio and video are recorded for each passenger. The stops where each passenger gets on or off are recorded. Every passengers' face, what they wore, who they traveled with, what they were carrying, and what they said - all recorded by March Networks. Where I live, there is absolutely no place outside of a government building or a military facility where you'll be more comprehensively surveilled than when you are on a public bus.

If the powers-that-be wanted to identify and track every passenger, they need only obtain that video footage from March Networks, and do all the post-processing they desired. Banning real-time facial recognition would barely slow them down.

If you are truly - truly - committed to the privacy of passengers in mass transit systems, you should go to your next city council meeting and demand the immediate removal of all cameras and surveillance equipment in all mass transit facilities. Do that, and you might find the response of your local politicians illuminating.

I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.

On the other hand, any city resident who has ridden a city bus and been robbed or assaulted would probably vote for it in an instant. For that matter, any KC official who had been similarly victimized would probably do the same.

It is very easy to take the moral high ground in situations where you will not be affected by those policies. It is a different matter when you are one of rank and file who ride the bus every day.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

I think it's more that people have figured out that they don't need to buy new phones every year or even every couple of years and that the improvements are so minute now that people struggle to notice the difference. Marques Brownlee recently did a Youtube video taking the same photo on every generation of iPhone from the original iPhone to the iPhone 17 and once you got to the iPhone 12 and later there was little difference with many people actually saying that 2-3 year older generations of iPhone took better photos than the current iPhone 17.

Britain actually has very good libel laws you actually have to prove you experienced harm as a claimant and if you lose you pay the costs of the winning side. You can't just file frivolous libel lawsuits like the USA. It's why Trump isn't suing the BBC in the UK.

Speech is still freer in the UK than that supposed bastion of Free Speech the USA.

The UK government held an online consultation. Tens of thousands of people under 21 responded to it and 84% of those respondents wanted it.

Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says.

The best comparison to Bitcoin that I've heard is the game of roulette. No one wins a dollar from a roulette game that wasn't lost by another player, with the house (the miners) taking its cut for runnng the wheel. Bitcoin is just one giant game of roulette. The money passes from one player to another. If you get rich, it's only because other people walk away from the game poorer.

And of course, more roulette games can be started by other casinos at any time, just as anyone can create a new cryptocurrency. Some of those games gain their own audience; other die out for lack of players. The parallel to cryptocurrency is exact.

But at some point, people have to realize that sitting at a roulette table isn't investing - it's gambling. You're hoping that you'll be luckier than the other players, and that more suckers will keep walking up to play. And fundamentally, I think that's part of what's happening to Bitcoin - with so many cryptocurrencies out there, it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that Bitcoin isn't money, and it isn't an investment - it's just gambling, except that it isn't as honest as a roulette table at Vegas. The Bitcoin whales manipulate the market to fleece the suckers, and will keep doing it as long as more suckers show up.

Hell no. Just hell no to everything about this. What's to stop the AI agent just going off on a hallucination and just maxing out your card with shit? And if that happens then who gets to pay the resulting bill because it sure as fuck won't be ChatGPT or whatever AI platform you're using who will take responsibility.

Those regulations also apply to US companies operating in the EU.

Android phones are only cheaper because they're subsidised by the makers getting paid for installing applications you can't remove like Facebook and for selling your data to data brokers. If android phones came with stock Android and no data sharing the manufacturers would have to increase their cost.