And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Just looking at the technical side, the cost to the end-user of streaming that much data would be exorbitant. Compressed video or even once-per-second snapshots would eat up all the mobile data, and the battery life would be measured in single digit hours.

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

seriously, slashdot? It's 2025 and you still can't do the Euro sign?

Even so the prices are excessive. If I want to upgrade the SSD in the current MBP from 512 GB to 2 TB that's +750 â

Meanwhile, a Western Digital Red SN700 with 2 TB I can get for a bit over 200 â.
A Samsung 990 PRO 2 - 245 â (was just rated the best M.2 SSD on the market by Tom's Hardware).

Whatever exact chips Apple is using, they're not 3x as expensive as other high-quality SSDs.

Even if "locked in place" is your underlying assumption, anyone who's even heard of the real world from their mom who has a friend whose father once visited it should know that there is no rule without exceptions and even if that is perfectly true, a small number of those particles will not be locked in perfectly.

The irony of the NYTimes complaining on copyrights given their history of reporters found guilt of or complicit in plagiarism is not lost to me.

Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.