It's weird mental gymnastics to call a union a "labor monopoly" to support drawing a false equivalence. Monopolies are generally disliked, not just by D people, because they prevent free competition, which is a staple of US economic and social policy. It's about protecting consumers and entrepreneurs. A union is about protecting workers. Both anti-monopoly laws and labour unions are about protecting people from nefarious effects of a completely unregulated market. The fact that the same people who want to have a monopoly also hate unions should tell you something.

This will not happen. Apple and Android do not want to abandon whole markets to competitors, they want to dominate these markets. This is a weird fantasy that keeps popping up, usually from people who are proud of being from the US and champion a weird understanding of freedom of expression and freedom of choice. Apple and Android are not interested in freedom; they want your money, brain bandwidth, and everybody else's. Give it to them in a totalitarian society and they will happily take it.

America is not a country.

Let's put the motivation aside for a minute. Have you asked yourself "at what cost"?

I don't know about you, personally I have never voted for someone I fully agreed with on every issue. Voting is more of a "lesser of two evils" situation. Are you really fine with the whole descent into fascism, rampant corruption, degradation of public health, nepotism, degradations of cost of living, etc? Is it all a fair price to pay for whatever you perceive the benefit to be?

Competing for what's a harder issue to deal with is fucking stupid when all need help. The people in your family clearly have a very hard life. But I don't understand why you leap from that to somewhat attaching trans folks. If it were so easy to be trans, they wouldn't have record suicide rates and a whole assortment of mental health issues. There is no need to belittle other people's needs, and there is no merit to it either.

Is it premature to call it unnecessary and with no clear stated goal or benefit for the US?

Is it premature to remind you that Trump campaigned on "no more wars"?

In case that helps: I'm not part of the "same people" you mention, I have not done what you describe.

Why does everybody seem to be fine with the fact that they are allowed to lie to you? Are we allowed to lie to them? Do these people not have to take an oath before they can start assuming their duties?

I mean, kids used to learn how to extract a square root with pen and paper, then calculators came, now we wouldn't ask in a test how to extract a square root any more. New tools mean we learn different things and the content of tests and exams changes. To be very clear, I'm not saying "this is fine". But I don't think that the general argument that students lose certain knowledge due to a new tool is necessarily cause for alarm, as long as it also creates opportunities to learn new things.

This is beside the point. You should rather ask about what we would think if selling cigarettes to kids was allowed.

If the outcome is some flavour of "cost of doing business" then it's a win for Meta: they can keep on preying and profiting. What society needs is for them to stop doing that.

If by "has gotten" you imply "in the past thirty years". In that whole time it has been about controlling rather than empowering the customers. Things like overwriting the MBR without asking, the existence of the registry, changing the control panel, generally ruining things that work and that people are used to, fostering monopoly of other Microsoft products, *checks notes* upgrading Windows to the next version without asking for consent. Maybe these things didn't affect you, but they are all real and not new.

Have we read the same article?

I disagree. The accused's computer was searched and nothing was found. A person owning the account from which the messages were sent is not enough evidence to send that person to jail, not in any sensible justice system. What even is the point of the search, if the outcome of the search does not matter? What difference would it have made if they had found evidence on that computer? This is not a rhetorical question.

Also, the accused shouldn't have to prove that he got hacked, especially not in the absence of any evidence on his computer. The burden of proof is on the accusation.

More generally, a judge needs to know that identity theft is a thing, because it is very much a thing. A judge who doesn't know that is incompetent. Incompetence is not a valid excuse for ruining someone's life. If your argument is that we should accept that judges are ignorant and tech-illiterate, and not expect that they fulfill their mission, then it is a bad argument. The judge decides which evidence is admissible, and bears the responsibility for that decision. I am not arguing that judges cannot make mistakes, they are humans and so they make mistakes all the time, it is inevitable. I am however arguing that this mistake is so gross, and with such consequences, that it warrants punishment.

Society does not say to convict without evidence, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Also, you have not answered my question.

Ad hominem is unnecessary by the way, using it to attack me only says something about you, and what it says isn't great.

Are you saying that judges should have great power but without great responsibility, that they should not be accountable? If yes, how do you justify that they, unlike most of us, shouldn't be accountable for their grave mistakes? Otherwise, what are you actually saying?