I mostly agree with you. But the devil is in the details.

Equating "opt-in" with "just don't use these UI elements" is too coarse-grained to be a useful rule of thumb. At the top of that slippery slope is stuff like freemium applications - until you give them a credit card, various buttons/features just show you an ad and a buy button. I think this is perfectly acceptable, even if it feels a bit tacky to me. But once you accept getting a little more adversarial with your UX design, it isn't all that far from arranging buttons such that you can count on a predictable percentage of misclicks, Zuckerbook-style privacy-settings, and other shitty behavior like that.

I'm not some gnu-eyed idealist, but I do expect software I run on my machine to behave in ways that align (or can be made to align) with my slightly idiosyncratic interests. Software that behaves like a tireless nagging 3 year-old or tries to trick me in to doing what the developer wants is garbage that doesn't belong in my house.

It is harder to express, but I really think the bar for an application like Firefox needs to be, good-faith accommodation of a very wide range of people, in basically every relevant dimension, which is a lot, because browsers touch nearly everything. "I don't want to (I don't want my kids/people at this kiosk/whoever to) interact with your robots" is a perfectly reasonable accommodation to make. None of this is new - discussion about (un)ethical patterns of human-computer interaction goes back decades.

Now think about having this same argument over a feature that inserts free clipart into documents or saves the current page to a clipping service. The fact that this sort of discussion about UI is even controversial is a testament to how much the money people are desperate to shovel this stuff at you are.

In the vast majority of military careers pols matter little. Careers outlast multiple POTUS and mostly take place far away from them. When you're chilling at a NATO base, Japan or South Korea what happens in DC is of nil interest unless you have or want orders there.

Why would anyone care what the President of the US thinks of their job so long as their pay shows up? I don't value the respect of those I hold in contempt nor grudge their indifference to me. We owe each other nothing not spelt out in law.

From a .mil perspective the HMFIC is doing his thing and you do yours. Your co-workers and assignments are far more relevant to your life than distant politicians you'll likely never interact with. Every few years there will be a different hack in the Oval Office. They're just another transient boss and don't follow you out the gate when you retire.

Vesting a reliable recession-resistant retirement is absolutely worth killing for, especially after a mere twenty years which leaves time to enjoy the second half of your life. Retiring in your forties frees you to pursue a second career or whatever steams your Speedos. The armed forces need younger, deployable troops capable of expeditionary warfare. When those troops age out and retire their accumulated experience remains valuable to support the same hardware and missions differently.

The point of all those Stanford degrees was to get money. Lack of jobs suggests using those credentials elsewhere, preferably in careers resistant to economic downturns and inconvenient to outsource.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the last of those who lived through WWII are about gone. People don't have a grandpa talking about killing Nazis or a grandma talking about when she made tanks.

It isn't just US Americans, Europe has forgotten, too. Which is why Russia is walking all over them and they can't seem to respond.

And I fear we are going to refresh the antibodies, or to say it in a more American way, water the tree of liberty.

I'm amused by those who imagine that the laws of physics can be defied merely by looking the other way. It makes me ponder how unbelievably moronic humanity is, how pathetic, and how deserving of what it is come.

American rewards with money what it truly values, and it truly values war.

A stint in the Space Force, Air Force etc can open DoD and many other doors via the human network officers naturally acquire. It's an instant career or a useful stepping stone. The security clearance won't hurt either.

The Guard and Reserve are options for those wanting to hold civilian employment but active duty retires much sooner. An officer makes enough to fully retire at twenty years and never need to work again.

They have been selling a Google API that Google itself refuses to sell for years.

I've wondered how they hadn't been sued before.

Games are mere toys freely adopted and freely abandoned. There is no "prison" and such hyperbole is absurd.

Of course your comment on Palladium is correct, but games are mere trifling amusement with no involuntary physical constraints like a prison cell.

That's exactly what everyone needs - Oracle's avarice buoyed by the UAE's psychotic oppression game, refined by China's carefully engineered oppression.

That's the GOP's vision for the country - From each according to their ability, to each according to my whim, and shut your fucking yap if you don't want to be dismembered, serf.

I'm pretty sure someone was expecting that we were addicted to that $100B trade, and by throwing a 15-999% tariff on it, 15B-1.5T of fresh taxes were going to be generated. With a 40% drop in purchasing, that's going to translate to a lot lower tax intake than expected. The price for that will probably be more inflation, but the powers that be have shown very little concern over using other, more nuclear options (possibly even literal nuclear options), for handling budget shortfalls.

Exciting times!

Oh, that explains why I didn't read it.

Amateur. It's more like:
*drops to knees* KHAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!

And that is the assumption you made. The article specifically mentions "affiliates, parents, or subsidiaries” accounts. The way I read it, if you owe Apple money, Apple is not asking Epic Game Store for the money. If you have multiple accounts, Apple is not limiting withdrawing from the main account. Banks have done this where overdrafts on checking gets pulled from savings or other accounts. I would assume if the amount owed exceeds money in all accounts, then Apple would use a third party debt collector.

Where in the world did you read that Apple "can arbitrarily make up a number"? The article says that IF a developer owes Apple money, Apple can pull the funds not from the developer's primary account but other accounts the developer might have. For example if a developer has a separate account for two apps and one of them is in the red, Apple can withdraw money from the other account.

If I read the article correctly, Apple will go after debt that a developer owes them by withdrawing from other accounts that developer might have. If the developer has "affiliates, parents, or subsidiaries" accounts, then Apple will get the money from them. How is that a debt collector again which is normally someone recovering debts for a third party?

It is right there on the label. Their sympathy is always on the side of capital.

They're up-front about it, and if you're aware of the bias, they're probably the best national paper in terms of factual business reporting. Just skip the editorial page, it consists of almost entirely of indulging the resentments of the geriatric rich.