Walking into?

Awaken from your dreamy state and smell the ashes... We're already there.

What you describe is exactly how Visa, Mastercard, AMEX and the like operate... literally taking money for doing nothing beyond being a middle man. Yep, they take a cut of every transaction that goes over their networks and they've been working diligently to make sure every single transaction goes over their network. They've been quite aggressive in getting rid of non-card based payment methods (apple/google pay are OK as they're just wrappers for a card), killing direct bank transfers and demonising cash.

If that hasn't blown your tiny mind... wait until you learn about how modern debt is basically modern indenturing. Keeping people using the credit whilst keeping people too scared not to pay.

Except for the construction industry... and the tech industry (which that area of the home counties tends to have a lot of), there's a reason they're not building it out in Bumfuckinghamshire where land is cheap.

Well you did rent a crossover... what were you expecting.

Mazda make or at least used to make quite good cars. I had a Mazda 6 estate as a loan car a few months back and it drove well for a large wagon with a smallish engine, never tried the "infotainment" system. However I harken back to Mazdas of yore, MX-5, RX-7/8, even the venerable Mazda 3 MPS was a very good warm hatch... The problem is that cars have just become whitegoods on wheels, people don't care about how a car drives so they all drive abysmally. Especially when people get SUVs. So naturally they've married the stereo into the car instead of doing what they used to in the olden days and just use an off the shelf unit the end user could replace because the "infotainment" system is the only real selling point.

And you've only got yourselves to blame for this by rejecting drivers cars and going for cheap gimmicks.

Oh, I didn't notice you over there,

Signed,
Coffee Snob.

And I say that as a coffee aficionado myself.

Can you blame them... they have the Boomers telling them not to spend money like they did when they were young so that they might be able to save up for a house deposit by the time they're 45 (to get a 35 year loan on an LTV of 10% for a property the boomers want to keep overpriced).

Out of the other side of their mouths, the Boomers are also complaining that the pubs are shutting down.

But beyond this, it's more the sky high rents that are causing this problem. But no one wants to challenge that (say... with a tax on empty commercial properties).

And the 'Spoons are largely responsible for the death of the local pub.

Pretty much this.

NIMBYs: We want jobs and infrastructure.
Also NIMBYs: Not like that, we don't want you building places to provide jobs and infrastructure.

I read an article on the BBC about a deprived town in County Durham, people complaining that they get no support from the government and quickly read on to see that they overwhelmingly voted Brexit... now are voting Reform... And still don't even have an inkling of an idea that they're the architects of their own misery. Vote for things that make the country poorer, it's the poorest that suffer first.

To be fair, they're also saying "fuck the large enterprise and MSP market" as well.

It's just a lot harder to move several thousand VMs. Especially with the price of RAM.

Overpriced branded shirt?
Skinny jeans?
Rashford style fade haircut?

COMPLETE THE LOOK
/whispers: complete the look

With a pair overpriced Apple AI powered glasses. Let everyone know you're the king of the douchebags with a set of $1000 plastic glasses that require a $1000 phone to work and make Dame Edna Everidge's glasses look positively subtle.

Never seeing past the current quarter.

By the time developing countries start enforcing laws that make companies responsible for the products they sell, the current board will have collected their bonuses and retired away to their private islands protected from anyone who might possibly seek revenge (or government looking for justice).

Admittedly I've no idea what that is until I googled it, not exactly something you'd commonly find in Australia or even the UK...

However it joins a long history of psychedelics and other mild narcotics in being quite effective in treating depression. However drugs like marijuana, LSD and likely this one are outright banned in favour of harder drugs to treat depression and other illnesses because drugs are baaaaad MKaaaay.

Hopefully with American power waning, the war on drugs well and truly lost, other countries will start to implement more sensible narcotics policies.

Microsoft has been there, done that.

The original Xbox was an incredibly cheap general purpose PC and DVD player back when both were still a bit pricey (especially in Oz). I bought a used Xbox for A$250 (full price was A$400) and chipped it, then ran XBMC on it and used it as a cheap media centre PC (also could run pirated games, but as I had a gaming PC there was no point). Back in those days there was no way to get a decent PC for A$250 and A$400 would have been pushing it for a decent used one.

MS are likely to go the other way if they can, get cheap commodity HW and lock it down. What MS want is for someone else to take the hit on manufacturing and selling the hardware for a loss whilst they rake the cream off the top with licensing fees, ancilary services, et al. that make all the actual profit. Lets see if they find someone dumb enough to do it, I doubt it in this climate though. So no new consoles for a while.

pwn the means of production, c0m12ad3.

And remember kiddo's... He wasn't fined for doing it, he was fined for getting caught.

And most of them will as it's less about pollution and more about cutting fuel usage... Which lets them get that MPG (or L/100KM) figure down in sales brochures. Also most other countries are going to keep the requirement and the US will adopt it when the current government finally collapses.

The bigger the engine, the more you notice the fuel consumption dropping, I had a BMW M240i and it was easy to keep the system from kicking in (just hold down the clutch... most steering wheel attendants will need to ask a real driver what that is) and the difference was a good couple of (British) MPGs over a 30 minute in town commute (a lot of stop-start). The fact was back in 2017 the system was good enough that I never bothered disabling it permanently as it was practically instant (and if I wanted to start the engine earlier, I could just use the clutch). This was a German 3L turbo, I imagine the difference it makes on an American engine would be even greater.