> Respectfully, that's not what banning "tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner" means.

Respectfully, you need to read a little more carefully. Those items are generally, but not strictly, prohibited. The criteria is "reasonable" and "significant amount of time." Words like "reasonable" and "significant" need to be legislated over between AirBNB and the hosts on a per-case basis.

Case in point:

> And basic cleaning has been a pretty standard clause right from the beginning

So what constitutes "basic cleaning" and at what point does it become a "significant effort?" Is cleaning the dishes you used really that big a deal? Collecting your trash and putting it in the can outside when you're done? These are not property maintenance tasks like you implied in your original post either (" literally-condemnable shack").

What is explicitly prohibited: "Hosts may not communicate new house rules or requests in other sections of their listing page or after booking, including by message, signs in the home, or in person." There is no room for debate here; hosts must be upfront with all of their requirements. That's the real meat here and the real underlying problem; it's less about doing your own dishes and more about penalizing you for not doing them despite never having been told to.

> AirBNB / VRBO / whatever gets a cut of every dollar. They benefit from junk fees,

Apparently not as much as they benefit from cracking down on them, apparently, because that's what they're doing when they say "Hosts are generally not allows to.... Impose fines or other penalties on guests."
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> This has nothing to do with taking out the garbage, and everything to do with making it impossible to be an "absentee landlord" (or at least hiring a cleaning service)

This is about not being able to stick extra requirements into the agreement after the space is booked, which prevents property owners from sticking guests with extra fees for not doing things they were not told they had to do.

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> Communism is a classless form of socialism.

No need to engage with you any further. Thanks for saving me the time.

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That has nothing to do with socialism.

That has everything to do with authoritarianism.

"Ooga booga Socialism" is authoritarian propaganda. Unfortunately it's very effective against people who don't actually know what Socialism is, such as yourself... for example, you seem to be describing something closer to Communism (but still wrong).
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> AM radios in cars only cover the small intersection of people who don't already have an emergency kit containing an AM radio, but do happen to be in a working vehicle during a disaster.

I feel like the number of people with a working vehicle is much, MUCH larger than the number of people with "an emergency kit containing an AM radio."

The main point being that, if you happen to be traveling at the time in a potential emergency situation (either because bad luck or actively trying to evacuate), you can use the AM radio in the car to receive news and important information.

Just put the radio in the car where it's most likely to be used when needed.
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> The electronics that drive such powerful motors produce HUGE quantities of RFI

The electronics that drive such powerful motors are inside thick, cast aluminum housings, as are the motors themselves, and those two things are usually bolted directly to each other to form one massive lump. I don't think you appreciate how much RF shielding goes into all that already because, y'know, there are a lot of other electronics in the vehicle that might get fucked up by it. The $5 worth of metal" would be the shielding can around the radio itself, not the HV inverter circuitry that is already encased.

The "Electric vehicle electronics interfere with the AM radio signals" argument is complete horseshit. The AM radio in my 2020 Kona EV often works better than the FM radio for some reason. It's not an especially expensive vehicle so the cost of making it work certainly isn't a reason to not do it.
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I don't see this as performative bullshit, and I'm not sure anyone with a lick of sense would.

Let's say I'm a public official. I want to take bribes but I'll go to jail for that. Instead, I can mint myself a cryptocoin and people who want to bribe me can buy them, effectively giving me money in exchange for nothing. I mean that's exactly what Trump did, and there's no reason to think others won't try it if it goes unchallenged.

Whether or not it will be *effectual* as a law will come down to how it's enforced.
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> They already run a large web store and they could have done this anytime but it's clear they have not.

I mean, they have but whatever. The part you're not considering is the immediacy of buying at a physical location.

Browsing online has a different set of tools the merchant can use to FOMO you into buying it. If you see something online you can easily come back to it hours or days later and reconsider; if you're there in the store you're probably not very likely to come back tomorrow. If you're going to buy something at the store you're most likely going to buy it during that visit, which makes you more vulnerable to surge pricing.

> They'd be caught very quickly if they did this in a retail store.

And the consequences would be... what, exactly?

Personally I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop; sign up for WalMart Customer Plus for $19.99/mo and skip the surge pricing!
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There have already been improvements. The practice was banned outright, by everyone, 30 years ago.

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Why would that be *critical* information?

Would the problem be worse or lessened if it was from the US? Britain? France? Japan? It is more or less a disaster if it's military weapons waste or civilian power waste?

Or are you just upset you don't get to point fingers?
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> whereas normally you'd have to wait for the harm to happen to sue

False. You can file a suit for any reason at any time. You do not have to wait until any harm is done. This does not, of course, mean the judge has to accept your filing.

But in this case, the 'harm' is that they are slowing down development/improvement of a product you are paying for. If you buy into a service on the promise or reasonable expectation that the vendor of that service will continue to improve it, and then they declare that they will drag their feet, that's a type of harm because you're not getting what you reasonably expected to be getting for your money.

Ultimately it's up to the judge to decide if there's enough meat on that bone to proceed to the next phase, but it's enough to get the paperwork started.
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So stalking is constitutional, then?

'cause it's not just "recording in public" it's full tracking and profiling. Who you are, where you are, when you're there. A full record of your daily activities from the moment you walk out your front door to the moment you get home again.

If the government was doing this directly in the same manner as these corporations do (e.g. without a warrant) it would 100% be a violation of your constitutional rights. The fact that the government does it by proxy, letting a private corporation do all the dirty work for them, really does not change the fundamental complaint here.

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There are methods to add noise patterns to audio that are imperceptible to humans but cause AI to go apeshit, such as misidentifying rock music as classical or transcribing speech as something completely different from what is said.

I wonder what the practicalities might be to deploy this form of attack in an area around you when having a conversation you with to keep private. Probably would not be inaudible when played through a speaker (unlike data implanted in audio recordings) but maybe masked? Listen to some music on your phone's loudspeaker at a modest volume and broadcast invisible noise that fills any eavesdropping AI's buffer with junk or even malicious payloads.
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There was a plan to put a solar farm + batteries on that site but they were scrapped for reasons I'm sure you could guess.

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> I mean, it cannot be that wind and solar plus a few batteries are actually more expensive, could it?

Nope. The TL;DR version: It would actually be cheaper to build wind/solar and batteries, if not for the fact that the cost of building the plant was covered fifty years ago and they're getting another $1.9B in free money for it.

But of course this was never about you "missing something" - this is about you having an agenda. At least I hope it's about having an agenda, because the economics of the situation are so plainly evident you'd have to be an incredible moron to genuinely be "missing something."

For one, the plant is not owned or operated by Google. It's owned by NextEra Energy - a multibillion dollar, multinational energy company. Google's name only appears on this story in so far as they want to build data centers and that gives NextEra Energy a reason to get the plant going again. NextEra also does wind and solar power and if they had local projects that were on hold instead of a mothballed nuclear plant the story would probably be about them resuming those projects instead.

For two, the lion's share of the capital costs for the plant have already been spent long ago. The Duane Arnold Energy Center started operating in 1975. It makes a lot more sense to revive the plant that is actively losing money every day it's not operating (because NextEra still has expenses to pay on it) than to keep paying the upkeep and spend even more money building new infrastructure elsewhere.

For three, there's a lot more federal money available for NON-wind/solar power under the current administration, which is openly hostile to those technologies. $1.9B worth in this case. For the equivalent ~615MW the existing nuclear plant is expected to produce, that would be about $700M in new wind construction even if you triple it to add 24 hours worth of battery storage at 615MW (an absurd amount) you're still comparable at about $2.1B. That versus, $1.9B in basically free taxpayer loans, is not a hard decision to make.

So basically the only time it financially makes sense to go with nuclear power is when you already have the nuclear power plant and you can get a bunch of free money to put a fresh coat of paint on it.
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