It's lives over money, this MDM charging such an outrageously over inflated price for a part so simple that it can be 3D printed can say goodbye to their patents and their profits. And honestly, they better hope that when this crisis is over, they don't find themselves charged in criminal court for crisis profiteering. It's going to be time to throw some greedy af CEOs in prison this time around.

Other reasons it may be significantly higher in the US:

• The US doesn't have guaranteed paid sick leave and people either can't afford to take time off unpaid or are at risk of losing their jobs if they do so.
• Millions of people don't have health insurance coverage.
• People with health insurance coverage don't go to the doctor because they are afraid of surprise medical bills.

It's all well and good for the Microsofts of the world to announce massive work from home plans for their tech workers, but does anyone honestly think the likes of Amazon Warehouses, Walmart, McDonalds, Burger King, etc are going to close their doors and tell their service workers to stay home unless they're forced to by massive quarantines and even if they do, how are the employees going to afford it? Temporary unemployment benefits don't kick in until a couple weeks after people are laid off and half the country can't afford a $400 emergency and this is especially true of those working in the service industry.

So you enjoy paying 2x-10x more for health care than you would in any other developed nation on the planet? You'll enjoy going bankrupt if you get diagnosed with cancer?

Just like Blockbuster, the furniture store that doesn't adapt with the times dies with the times.

No one needs a $1000-1500 phone. Unless you are playing the highest end of mobile games on your smartphone these flagships are just overpriced luxury items. You can get perfectly sufficient features (and near top end cameras!) from smartphones at half the price (Pixel 3a $399 - iirc best phone of 2019, most of the OnePlus line).

All that extra money for flagship phones just goes to:

• Edge to edge, foldable, and excessively high ppi screens
• Extra high performance processors over perfectly adequate mid range ones
• (Fallible) Facial recognition and/or in-screen fingerprint readers
• Brand Name (Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy)

All of these are purely in the luxury feature (and bragging rights) camp. You want to justify a $1000-1400 phone? Show me one that can be used to power a full laptop or desktop computer. Once in awhile you'll see a concept for this pop up at CES (ex: Razer Project Linda), but it never comes to market.

Considering that aviation navigation systems have been/are being all converted over to GPS instead of radar, this seems like something that should have had a lot more attention paid to it before now.

If there's enough of a market demand for the materials they'll build a new factory.

These middle men delivery services are full of scams to make more money.

Example: Grubhub et al take the menu prices for a restaurant and jack all of them up $1-3 per item - in additional to whatever delivery charge they add on top. They do this with a number of pizzerias in my area (pizzerias that all provide delivery service on their own). So ordering via Grubhub instead of just calling in a delivery order to the pizzeria directly will result in an order that's $5-15 more expensive than it should be.

Add to that previous stories where Doordash and at least one of two other services were stealing online Tip amounts from the delivery drivers. And now this story.

I think the cloud privacy concerns being mentioned are two fold, and not related to encrypted communication protocols:
1. As long as the emails remain on the provider's email server that provider and any allowed third parties based on the privacy agreements can data mine the emails for marketing research.
2. Unless the law has been changed (which it doesn't seem like it has been since the Email Privacy Act never made it through Congress) the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of '86 declares any data that remains on cloud servers longer than 180 days is considered "abandoned" and can be accessed by Federal Investigators at any time without a warrant.


PC based email clients like Thunderbird are originally built with the design (and still support) downloading your email from the provider's server and then deleting the server copy. This does mean if you lose your local copy then it's gone, but, at the same time no one else should have a copy of it either except for the other correspondent(s). Deleting the email off the server doesn't necessarily solve the first concern, as the provider could mine the email immediately on arrival, but it does limit their window to do so.

The Fed is just pushing a narrative to try and get a backdoor they can use to monitor everyone with a smart phone without getting a judge's permission. Given the chance they'd outlaw any encryption to which they didn't have the keys.

Existing US law explicitly allows a "station" (it was originally written to apply to TV stations, but it can be interpreted to apply to platforms like Twitter and Facebook as well) to refuse to accept any and all political advertisements. It's an all or nothing deal. If they accept paid advertisements from one politician then they must accept paid advertisements from all politicians. But, they have the legal right and option to refuse to accept paid advertisements from any politicians.

*Note: refusing to run paid advertisements does NOT mean that they are refusing to allow political speech on their platform.

Just to comment on the "free college" sidebar.

*Free public college for all. It isn't about tax dollars subsidizing the overpriced ultra elite private colleges like Harvard and Yale. It is simply an expansion of the public education system to grades 13 through 16 in acknowledgement that we need more highly educated, capable, and trained individuals in a variety of fields (though most especially STEM fields) as automation eats through large swathes of the unskilled labor jobs.

As for fact checking political ads, when you have an ad that overlays the word "Socialism" with a pile of bleached skulls and claims that's what Sanders and AOC will do to the country, that's just flat out absurd (and that was an actual ad that a Republican candidate ran and endorsed). When you have an ad that claims politician X fought for position Y but their actual legislative votes were against it, that is also a blatant lie. There are gray areas that are more ambiguous, but, it would be easy enough to kick off the extremes.

Man comes up with get rich quick scheme to defraud foolish investors by reinventing old battery technology that accomplishes none of the goals EVs are intended to accomplish (ie cutting down on CO2 emissions).

Why on earth are political ads exempt from Truth in Advertising laws? Not that the Bidens aren't as systemically corrupt as f, but, that's no different than El Cheeto in Chief and his family.

If they spent the money to sufficiently clear foliage away from their lines they wouldn't have that problem. But they don't seem to have any trouble paying their CEO over $9 million/year and each of their board members at least ~$1.5 million/year.