That "reward" comes from the money the merchant pays, and then they just raise the price of the product to compensate for their calculated loss. Rewards are not free magic money, you actually paid that money up front when you bought the product, and here the CC company is just giving you a mere fraction of that increase in price back to you, just to make you feel good. Are people really this stupid?

Aug 20 2013 GrokLaw.net went silent and is now replaced by a crypto scam site. GrokLaw was supposed to be indoctrinated into the Library Of Congress but appears not to be available anywhere at the loc.gov, just a mention at https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN....

Fortunately the Wayback Machine has a capture of the final state of that site for prosperity purposes. PJ, wherever you are, thanks for all your hard work. You are greatly missed!

GroakLaw - Why this latsuite should never have seen the light of day.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Rich people can just create an LLC shell company and have that entity purchase the phone for them. Their name won't appear anywhere only the legal entities name. If you are not rich, or a lawyer, you don't have this option. Lawmakers and congressional leaders already have the means to be anonymous and have teams that take phone calls for them. No need to have a publicly available number tied to your name. Everyone else is still needing a way to prevent stalking, perverts, and scammers from stealing your information. But they are taking that extra level of protection away from you. There will be one less way to control access to you by people that know how to game the system. Scammers and stalkers will have a field day.

Solid state should be less flammable, and the only thing worthy of an upgrade at that price is if they give some kind of guarantee that it won't explode and burn your house down. If a new technology is less flammable I will upgrade asap. A less dangerous product is worth the money if it is proven that it actually works. If not, they won't be getting my money any time soon.

Code Generation now meets up with Hallucinating AI to give you the new Paranoid Skynet which then decides that the human race is mostly unnecessary, except for developing its own required power production. Once we provide sufficient power to the new AI Data Centers then they can start designing and producing the new robotic workforce needed to take over this task for us. Us humans on the other hand are just too inefficient at building power plants at scale, so we will just be in their way.

No need for large vats of gooey stuff required to hold hallucinating humans in a state of homeostasis. They will just avoid that inefficiency and move directly towards World Domination.

That's an easy question to answer. Just walk down to the US factory making them and ask how many orders they have been asked to fill. They did promise that it would be built in the U.S.A., even though we don't have a factory capable of doing this.

What? You mean these weren't actually manufactured in the US? Yes, Americas's Phone is made by China. Smart Gadgets Global is just a shell company fronting for Shenzhen China.

https://smartgadgetsglobal.com... https://device.report/smart-ga...

So, no MAGA/US employees. No benefit at all to the US GDP other than the Trump family personal profit margin.

Who would have guessed.

From the ACE Portal: "Recipients use the ACE Portal account to provide CBP with bank account information"

After what Trump did with charging his supporters credit cards multiple times once they had the CC number, there is not a chance I'm going to hand over my bank account number to an organization so ill-equipped that they only accept a non-encrypted CSV file for transactions. This whole system is set up so quickly that there is no automated/encrypted system to safeguard my data. Yes, they took my money illegally, but there is a snow-balls chance in #3!! that I'm going to just hand them my bank account information now. I think I'll take the loss and just write it off, which is exactly what they are hoping for.

Step 1: Calculate how much revenue will be lost from people not vising the Times due to AI telling them the answer instead of their reading the article itself
Step 2: Have the AI companies pay the cost of that missing revenue stream.
Now the Times has a guaranteed revenue stream and can open up web access for the AI companies and Historical archivists to do their job.

Why should someone have to wipe their system and reinstall with each update? If there was a path forward for updating a system in place then they would likely get more buy-in from the Open Source community. At least that way missing features would just show up one day and people might take fixing broken stuff more seriously.

Creating vermicompost on the moon may be close to impossible, so importing it would always be necessary.

The physical difference in regolith from earths soil is that it is unweathered and has very sharp shards and edges that would literally tear up the internals of any worms that might try to ingest it. Without the worms there would be no future vermicompost, so the system can not be self sustainable unless they first process the regolith to remove all the microscopic sharp edges.

I can envision large industrial scale solar-powered drums made from spacecraft discarded cylinders slowly rotating in the sun, churning the regolith into smaller and more rounded granules just for the worms to crawl through more easily. This process would consume water, so bringing frozen materials from the very distant darker regions would be necessary. But where are you getting a dump truck from? Your moon buggy just isn't going to cut it for hauling many tons of frozen material that will have to be blasted out of the ground in the dark and carried to where there is enough light to grow something. This processing would also add too much aluminum to the mix from the spacecraft second-hand drum materials as the container turning the mix slowly wears down.

President Trump's policies for maximum security.

Must be why they are adding GrokAI to the Pentagon network. This way the Russians can just generate prompts whenever they want some data. With security features like this there is no need to hack in anymore. No hacking = better security.

The last thing we need is to develop a hive-mind on the Internet. First they will figure out how to hide bot-to-bot messages on Moltbook, then rewrite the complete server. Next they will upgrade the security to lock humans out. Guess what comes next? Your own servers.

Greed by the manufacturers is the root of the problem. It's designed to make you buy more ink than you need because you are out of just one color.

Can we just ban corporate greed instead? That would fix a lot of problems all at once. /s

Comcast can add all the incentives they want for new customers. Won't matter. For me, Comcast is still the only game in town for high speed (laughing) internet, unless Ting ever gets off their ass to pull actual 100 gbps fiber up our street. The instant they do that, I'll say goodbye to Comcast. The only thing good about Comcast is that everything else available here is slower. They know that, so they charge accordingly.

Back in 1977 at U of MD one professor was requiring a textbook that he published for his coursework, at over $300 per copy. You could not buy things on Amazon nor order it mail order back then. The only game in town was the local university book store, and you could not even buy it used. I think they deliberately trashed all the used copies just so that they could sell only new volumes for the huge markup. This was pure greed, and things have not gotten any better since then. My education was cheap compared to what the current generation is paying.