Free markets are how you get monopolies: there are little to no regulations in a free market, so companies can engage in extremely anti-competitive behaviors which allow them to corner the market.

Didn't you ever play the board game? Since there's no regulation or oversight to stop players from owning too much of the market, the person with the largest combination of luck and greed ends up owning everything while the rest have to resort to giving HJ's under Boardwalk to afford to live in the slums of Baltic Ave.

I cant imagine this designation surviving judicial scrutiny

It's not intended to pass judicial scrutiny. As with every case of Trump not getting what he wants, it's designed to inflict maximum pain, regardless of the outcome, and ultimately make it easier to just capitulate to all of his demands. It's a classic extortion tactic: "all of this would go away if you just give us everything we want".

Points to the doll's wallet

The current state of windows is dominated with stagnance at best and enshittification at worst. At the moment, Windows is plagued by:

• Users on Win10 that can't upgrade due to specious hardware requirements
• Stagnance (what is the last exciting feature that was added to Windows?)
• Buggy updates that break basic functionality
• Required online accounts
• AI features nobody asked for which raise many valid concerns about privacy

And in addition to that, the alternative options have never been better. It's never been easier to buy a device with Linux, such as the SteamDeck, or install a Linux distro customized for great gaming performance and ease-of-use. If you're not a gamer, these new Mac Neos provide a cheap gateway for casual Windows users to wander over to the macOS platform. And all the while Microsoft seems completely uninterested in improving their position against these threats. And even if they did care to change things, they haven't recently shown that they're capable of offering any products or features that will generate excitement for Windows.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that Windows is dead - just that it has a serious disease and I don't see any urgency on Microsoft's part to take it seriously.

I'm not going to comment on the legality of Valve loot boxes, but I don't see how they're significantly different from trading cards, Lebubus, Funko POP! Mystery boxes, or many of other items of chance that have been targeting children for many decades. All I'm going to argue is that the law should be enforced equally across these products and right now that doesn't seem to be happening.

And yet not entirely inappropriate when reacting to attempts of manipulation and coercion.

It doesn't bother some women, but I don't want to offend the ones that it does. Being offensive is just not what I'm about.

Agreed, and since I'm in a male-dominated industry, I want women to feel comfortable at their jobs.

But I imagine that is much different between Canadians and Americans. Americans seem to take pride in being offensive, almost like the right to offend people is in the Constitution and any violation is a threat to their freedom.

As an American, I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. While some Americans are just straight-up assholes (pretty much every country has those, even Canada), most Americans really hate when certain language and behaviors are attempted to be forced. It's amazing that after 250 years, Americans still have an extremely rebellious spirit and hate being told what to do or say. If you want an American to do something, the last thing you should do is say that they have to do it.

I got myself into the habit of saying "everyone" when addressing all participants in a meeting. Oddly enough, many of the women still say "guys", even when there's one or more other women in the meeting.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a filing on Friday that it currently cannot process billions in tariff refunds because its import-processing system is "not well suited to a task of this scale."

That's the same reason I'm not able to calculate my 2025 federal income taxes! I guess we'll just call it even.

Despite decades of trying to make it not so, it seems that intelligence remains primarily inherited from parents/ancestors.

Stupid is as stupid does. Intelligence is a biological ceiling but it needs to be applied to be of any use. I've seen plenty of very intelligent people do insanely stupid things and I've seen some really limited people make the absolute most of what they've been given. Much of the foolishness I see in the world today is avoidable based on the limits of the person's intelligence, but that person was just too preoccupied with inane nonsense to use the intelligence they were given before taking action.

I'm not sure about South Korea, but if it's anything like the US, the government could just delay the lawsuits until the cryptocurrency achieves its rightful value of approximately zero and then pretend that opportunity cost isn't a thing.

Even more notable is the way they learned to teabag after a sick frag.

Our tariff dollars at work.

How did anybody confuse this thin-skinned crybaby with a strong man? Donald, you're almost an octogenarian - time to put on your big boy pants and grow up. A big part of life is dealing with the fact that you can't always get what you want.

Error: Failed to launch nuclear defense missiles (0xbaaad101)