"You have to think of Google as an benign version of an extremely oppressive government."

That's preposterous. Google is a business - they are letting you view content in exchange for viewing ads. This is how TV worked for decades.

I don't think there is anything wrong with using ad blockers, but similarly, there is nothing wrong with Google using ad blocker blockers. I HATE YT ads - I've been spoiled and have used ad blockers for a long time. Unfortunately as ad blockers have become more & more popular, it eats into Google's bottom line. It also affects content creators who want to be paid for the content they create.

Nobody has to *like* any of this, but to compare Google to an oppressive government because they won't give you what you want, for free, is a bit silly.

When I read of cases like these, I always wonder how many cases go undetected, where the perpetrators are smart enough to keep the volumes low enough to avoid detection.
I had a friend who was a regional manager for a gas station chain, and one of his biggest issues was employee theft. The typical case involved fraudulent returns - the employee would claim somebody returned an item worth (let's say) $30, then just take $30 out of the register.

The thing is, if they'd kept the fraud minimal, they'd never have gotten caught. But, they'd get greedy and my buddy would run reports each week to look at return frequencies. If somebody's return frequencies exceeded a certain threshold, he investigated.
His surveillance system allowed him to enter a particular transaction (like a return), and bring up footage from all the cameras in the store during the time of the transaction.
I wondered there too if there were a lot of employees who engaged in return fraud, but knew well enough to do it infrequently so as not to get caught.

Interesting coda - he could take ironclad evidence of theft to the prosecutor but they usually wouldn't do anything with it. However, he would interrogate the employees and get them to sign statements admitting guilt. If he brought *that* to the prosecutor, then the case was such a slam dunk that they'd actually pursue it. Unbelievably, most employees were dumb enough to sign these.

I see a lot of comments that show people are really misinformed when it comes to poker, and don't understand the specific play that resulted in Garrett calling his opponent a cheater.

Let me start by observing I don't know whether or not Robbi cheated. I don't think the evidence is that strong, but it isn't exactly weak either.

Robbi's call made no sense at all. When Garrett shoved all in with low equity (a bluff), the play makes sense because of what is called 'fold equity'. If you think your opponent's hand is weak, it makes sense to bluff because they'll be forced to fold. Plus you have to bluff at reasonable frequencies, or nobody will call you when you go all-in.

Robbi on the other hand was not bluffing, she was calling an 'all-in'. The problem Robbi has is that as soon as she calls, it goes to showdown. There is no fold equity available to her. Not only was her hand terrible, it had almost no prospects of improvement.

Further, even IF she somehow KNEW that Garrett was bluffing, she can STILL lose the hand a million different ways, even to his bluffs. She had Jack-high!

So the folks suggesting that what she did was reasonable are insane. There is no world in which anyone who knows anything about poker calls that hand - absolutely none. The only real possibilities here are that she made a mistake and got lucky, or she was cheating.

The other thing to know is that the evidence consists of more than the fact that Garrett lost the hand in a strange way. Robbi's explanations after the hand made no sense either, and there was activity at the table that was suspicious. Her buy-in was suspicious as well. It's also extremely weird that somebody with such limited poker experience would be playing at these stakes, and somebody else posted her buy-in. The person that posted the buy-in was another player at the table, adding to the suspicions.

Garrett has a well-deserved reputation (at least, had) for being a gentleman at the table, and never losing his temper or reacting poorly, even when his opponents did shitty things to him. For him to go as far as to lodge a cheating allegation was pretty crazy.

To emphasize, I don't know that Robbi was cheating, but if you aren't at least fairly suspicious, you haven't been paying attention.

You have to love the red herring from the app's defender:

"some people think it's a good idea, some people think that it turns us into a surveillance state. "I can see both sides of that, but I think that if you're going to have speed limits, then it's the law that you obey them, and you should enforce the law."

Classic. Nobody is arguing over whether speed limits should be enforced or not, they're arguing about the enforcement *mechanism*. Retreating to a defense of having laws, and enforcing them is just a coward's way out of the argument, and demonstrates that he likely doesn't have a very good defense.

I see a lot of confusion here. First, I am in no way defending the current state of medicine in the US. It is broken in 47 different ways. However, the issues with medicine have nothing to do with this article. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Cost+ pricing is very common in lots of industries. You take your cost, multiply it by some constant, and that gives you the price you actually charge. There is nothing remotely nefarious about this.
2. The percentages seem ridiculous and in fact some of them might be. However I think a lot of commenters are missing the important distinction between marginal and average cost. Your marginal cost might be the cost of the thing you're providing, like sutures. However you have a lot of other fixed costs (like rent, utilities, insurance, etc.) that have to be paid for too.

So yeah medicine is a mess but not for any of the reasons offered here.

A few points in response:
1. I think the typical model is of misinformation driving vaccine hesitancy, but I think a large part the causality runs in the order direction. People who are nervous about vaccines search out information to make them feel better about the decision. I doubt whether restricting misinformation is going to help with these folks.
2. The folks who share made-up concerns about vaccines often promote conspiracy theories. These types of blanket video bans feed directly into those conspiracies. The people who share them will simply switch channels.

I strongly support vaccines and I understand the desire to restrict misinformation. I also am not questioning YouTube's *right* to do this, I simply think it is a bad idea.

These types of 'proposals' aren't actually. It's just performing for your base.

More likely what is happening is income is a proxy for conscientiousness and IQ. I see some posters suggesting that the result is driven by high-income people not needing to leave the house. That undoubtedly is driving some of the result, but in my experience there is a world of difference in behavior between even middle-class and poor neighborhoods. When I'm in a wealthier area, people socially distance at the store and wear masks. In poorer areas, they're less likely to wear masks, and when they do, they often don't cover their nose.

• The market for portable devices has changed a lot in the last few years. People increasingly have multiple devices, each for increasingly specialized tasks.
• If you want a laptop that doubles as your desktop, the market has you covered. These laptops are more easily modified.
• If however you want a laptop that only goes on the road with you, well, the market has you covered too. Often these devices don't have the same power as a desktop replacement, and the parts within are difficult/impossible to replace. BUT, you get a very light-weight device in return.
• Is it worth it for a device with a battery that you cannot easily replace? Hard to say - it really depends on the specifics of your use case. One thing is clear though - the market has spoken, and people often care more about the aesthetics of a device, and its portability than they do the ease with which a device can be serviced.
• The computing marketplace has never seen so much variety. These companies are insanely responsive to consumer demand - most folks that want an ultra portable device simply don't care that much about a battery that might need to be replaced years down the road. It's easier to simply move on to a new device.
• Mandating that companies shift their operating model to respond to only *one* type of consumer - the consumer that wants to be able to replace things like a battery - is quite selfish.