"Governor Kathy Hochul said charging different prices depending on what people were willing to pay was "opaque," and prevented comparison-shopping."

Price haggling and negotiating deals *is* "charging different prices depending on what people were willing to pay", so I was strictly addressing the Gov.'s comment.

No haggling because I'm unwilling to pay more?

Or are they exempt from negotiated prices ("charging different prices depending on what people were willing to pay")?

And if so, should Soundgarden get some credit?

I wonder if the drones and force deployments and the big fines are used for other firework-prone holidays, like Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown district? I somehow doubt it.

It doesn't just apply to online platforms.

Wikipedia: Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

One memory I have from childhood was the local theater ran all 5 (at the time) Planet of the Apes movies back-to-back (POA, Beneath, Escape, Conquest, Battle). This was probably in '78 so I was maybe 12. Mom dropped me and friends off at theater with something like $10, hot-dogs and cokes for 25 cents each. I zonked out during that last movie...

The DVD/BluRay service had so many more titles available than the streaming service side provides. Was really sorry to see it go, and cancelled Netflix as a result. The only streaming service I use now is Amazon Prime, and that's pretty much only be default.

That movie producers keep excreting dreck that few people want to pay an arm and a leg see in a sticky-floored, over-priced venue that is likely to also have idiots yakking on their cellphones during the movie?

Horde, hoard, whored...a homophone triple.

"v-Fluence, which also had the former agrochemical firm Monsanto as a client, secured some funding from the US government as part of a contract with a third party. Public spending records show the US Agency for International Development (USAid) contracted with a separate non-governmental organization that manages a government initiative to promote GM crops in African and Asian countries."

A lot of them require them to be rolled. Both of my banks require bulk change to be rolled, one requires my account# to be written on the roll. I'm willing to forgo ~10% to NOT have to roll them.

Most grocery stores near me have a CoinStar machine that you can dump jars of loose change into. Sure, they charge a fee of 7.5% or 10% or 12% or whatever, but when dumping a jar of pennies do I really care if I'm getting $11 or $10 back? I'm still "ahead". Sometimes the fee is waived or reduced if you take a store credit instead of cash, so that works for me too. So once a year or so I try to remember to take my pennies to the store when I'm already going there. The 2 minutes spent dumping them and getting the ticket from the machine is barely an inconvenience.

Why is gasoline the only consumer product in the US that is sold in tenths of a cent (albeit always $0.009 tacked on per gallon?). I always want to buy exactly 1.0000 gallon and pay with exact change and demand the $0.001 in return.

"increasing the price of every item by 2.49999 cents on average"

Assumes prices are uniformly distributed over the 5 cent interval. Experience shows that most prices end with 9 ($1.89, $1.49, $2.99...). So rounding up 1 cent.

Or, rounding will only happen after totaling the entire purchase, and even a bunch of items ending in 9 will tend to cause the sum to be more uniformly distributed in the last digit, the *transaction* might tend to be 2.5 cents higher every time, (0-4 cents) unless stores round more properly. In which case totals ending in $.x1, $.x2 will be rounded down and totals ending in $.x3, $.x4 round up.

If you don't tithe, no one from the Church will seize you house and garnish your wages or put you in prison. It may be expected from church members to remain in good standing, but it's voluntary.