Let's check commodity prices over the past 5 years:

Corn: down
Oats: down
Rice: down
Wheat: down

Milk: down
Cheese: down

Coffee: up, significantly
Sugar: down
Cocoa: up

So the staple commodities prices over the past 5 years have dropped, and that's in light of 20% inflation in that time period. Coffee prices have surged (as have cocoa, though they're down as of late), but land buyers for data centers aren't surveying land in the tropics.

You may be spending more on food, but I don't think it's because of North American farmers. Processed food, food away from home, and imported food would have other contributing factors to their increase in price.

Shoulder surfing. It's a thing.

Huh? The tax burden of those with the least is very low or negative.

The solo 401k may be a "quirk" but isn't a loophole. Self-employed people are required to pay both the employee and employer portion of OASDI tax and medicare tax, so why wouldn't they be allowed to contribute the employee and employer portion for a 401k? And a solo 401k is available to any self-employed person; it's not exclusive to the already rich.

USPS delivers to every mailing address, but not to every physical address. USPS has been using cluster mailboxes as a cost-saving mechanism for some time. There are also "Group E" PO Boxes, which the USPS provides (without charge) to those physical addresses to which it will not deliver.

In other words, the Universal Service Obligation is satisfied by having a "drive here and pickup your mail" policy. I expect a private company would offer the same.

According to the article, the offer is $4000 for a new or used EV for drivers in CA, CO, MA, or NYC. In MA there are decent used Model 3 LRs going for $22k. Additionally, MA has an EV rebate program for rideshare drivers. So: $23k-$4k-$2.5k = $15.5k. That's an attractive price, especially if you're a driver in need of replacing your ride soon. It's less than a used Kia K4 of the same age.

People working to keep the value of the money they earned is, in fact, good.

As for paying an "unknown" person in an "unknown" country as an intermediary... isn't that how international transactions work? Do you know the people at Western Union? Do you know which country the SWIFT servers are located in? Or which routers you use to connect to a bank's website?

The fact is, workers abroad found a solution to remit their earnings back home, cheaply and effectively. That's good.

The company may have foreign owners, but the company operating in your state is still under the jurisdiction of the state regulator.

If your state is "deregulated," then the power company provides transmission, but not generation, to its customers. In that case they bill you the supply cost based on what the market is offering.

If your state is not "deregulated," then the power company is providing both transmission and generation to its customers. In that case the state regulator will define the allowed markup on the generated kilowatt hours they supply.

True for many messaging apps, but not all!

Session and SimpleX don't use phone numbers or email addresses as identifiers, which greatly limits inbound messages from unknown senders.

Echostar's market cap may only be $8B, but its enterprise value is > $30B. Market cap is just the sum total of all the shares outstanding. This is what a buyer could theoretically take over ownership of the company for. But for a heavily-indebted company like Echostar, the debt obligations are significant... $8B may buy you the company, but it also buys the obligation for all the debt.

You just said it: buying reputation. By adding cost to the system, a hurdle has been added to weed out a significant portion of bad actors, because spamming then costs money.

The reason phone scams took off in the 1990s is because the cost to make calls dropped to basically zero. And numbers are easily spoofed, so verification isn't easy.

With an identity that can't be spoofed, and takes time to become valuable, a lot of the low-end spam would disappear. Either because the spammers would need to spend years developing reputation, or because they'd need to pay for stolen identities. There would still be spam, but less of it.

Not sure why the parent is modded "Troll"; it's the most substantive comment so far.

There are good examples of organizations that provide their seal of approval as an aid to consumer purchasing: UL, IIHS, OU.

It would have been nice if the administration proposed a "spinoff" of Energy Star instead of trying to kill it, but that's not their style.

It can certainly matter. For instance:

The sales tax rate isn't the same for all purchasers. Non-profit organizations are often exempt from paying sales tax. The price on the shelf is the price they pay.

Sales tax holidays. States routinely have "sales tax holidays" wherein the sales tax is suspended for a period of time.

Sales tax is an itemizable deduction on federal income taxes. Filers utilizing that deduction need to know how much sales tax they paid throughout the year.

Store coupons almost always exclude the taxable amount ("$5 off $25, excluding taxes").

Backing by the full faith and credit of a government is not a requirement for a currency. That just happens to be how modern fiat currencies are "backed".

Yet even after Bretton Woods, central banks still hold gold. Gold is a reserve asset, but not backed by any government.

Does that happen often, where ultra-high density housing is build amongst low-density housing?

The problem is, NIMBYs block any amount of densification. Allowing duplexes or fourplexes in areas zoned for single-family would measurably increase the housing supply, without the need for skyscrapers. But NIMBYs block those as well. In my town, they even block mother-in-law suites.

"may as well invest in the USD" is not so easy in much of the world. Billions of people live under monetary oppression, forced to use the fiat (and non-convertible) currencies of their own governments. People aren't dumb -- they know when their savings is evaporating -- but actually exchanging for USD is non-trivial for many people. Some can't have bank accounts: women in some parts of the world, or displaced refugees. And those that do have such accounts face restrictions on the amount they can hold in USD, if USD deposits are permitted at all. So people turn to physical cash, which if often brought (or smuggled) into the country by family members working abroad. It's not scalable, reliable, or secure.

So tokenized USD is a solution to that problem. Access to crypto doesn't require an account: anyone with an Internet connection can get a wallet. Someone can relatively easily begin receiving remittances from family members abroad.

As for this stablecoin... well, no, I'm not seeing anything special about it.