FTFY

Pity us Americans. Apparently two telescope rescue missions have failed just during the past few days.

This is woke nonsense. These people should be happy with the lungs they've got. What's next, outlawing cars and mandating bicycles? Free healthcare for all?

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Since obviously at least a few people have bought into that retcon, it's obvious Apple's PR team is doing an effective job!

Our local Winco - where we buy the majority of our groceries - recently (finally!) installed new POS terminals that allow tap to pay, Apple Pay, etc. It's still debit-only, but that's fine.

NFC payments, like Apple Pay and Google Pay, have been available in many US stores for well over a decade as well. The reported issue was indeed due to a specific decision made by Walmart.

Your subject line, "American issue, not Walmart specific", is completely wrong.

I've been able to use Apple Pay / NFC payments here in America for a long time at a lot of stores - my local hardware store, my pharmacy, both of my local grocery stores. But some specific stores - Walmart and Home Depot come to mind - made a deliberate choice (in the U.S. at least) to try and push their own payment "app" rather than adopt the standard NFC payment system. The main driver for this appears to have been they did not like how they couldn't collect as much monetisable personal data from customers using Apple Pay (or Google or Samsung).

The fact that, with Walmart at least, this appears to be an America-only issue makes me wonder if it's due to the different regulatory environment in Canada - perhaps they legally couldn't do it there.

Yeah, I still totally don't grok why so many of the tech elite, who knew about Ginger long before it was publicly announced, were absolutely convinced it was going to revolutionize cities and/or society. Perhaps that should've been an early warning on just how disconnected that group is from the reality we common people face.

One of the few times I actually wanted to submit a report on an issue, I basically threw away Claude's long prose and wrote the text myself... except I did lift a table of data from Claude's report and included it more or less verbatim.

Data tables are another thing Claude seems to like to generate.

"I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit.

I've been using Claude a bit lately, and I have noticed sometimes, if you're hashing through a task and having to iterate, it can get into a mode where it more or less tells you it's probably not worth spending more time on it. Also it does seem to love volunteering to write reports for some reason (without my having asked for one).

Yup, in other words... just another day with the Trump administration, using terms that mean the exact opposite or what they're actually doing (see also "radical transparency").

And if you were in a position to point this out to them, they wouldn't provide a counter-argument - they'd pivot to personal attacks on you and/or your family.

... or would be, under any other presidential administration.

Still, the rest of the world can certainly benefit from it.

The main reason I use my own equipment is the cost - purchasing my own cable modem paid for itself in only about 6 months.

Admittedly, the security benefits are a nice serendipity too.

They could probably also have gotten relief on the cheap by donating some smaller amount - maybe 10%-20% of the fine total - directly to Trump or a Trump family member.

That's not actually how it works - you don't have to unlock your phone, and you don't hand the device over to the cop.