as long as the manufacturer is fine with that sort of return policy I see no issue. At the carrier level I have manufacturers constantly offering to send me high priced shit all the time for a 30-day evaluation. I usually refuse to accept the eval because i rarely have enough time to give something a 30 day honest evaluation and even less time to dedicate to rolling it into limited production in the first place. I think they count on this to boost their sales. Its like a sick high-end version of the Columbia Music Club crap from the 80s where they kept sending you the tape and you had to keep mailing it back every month otherwise you just bought some crap album you never wanted.
My wife does this and it drives me absolutely insane. She is constantly ordering shit from catalogs and then having to return them. Sometimes the damn return packaging sits around for weeks upon weeks because she forgets to return them. To further add to my frustration, she pays the return shipping and the restock fee's amount to, when combined, nearly 50% of the original cost. She might as well have a habit of buying scratch-off tickets if she's going to throw her money away like that. With all the textiles sourced in other countries, there is no chance that the same marked size is going to fit the same, ever. Ive seen cases where the exact same shirt in the exact same marked size was actually two different sizes. Most likely the cheap labor has poor quality assurance and the wrong tag got sewn in. With shoes and clothing, you almost have to try it on first. With shoes I have had luck only if I were ordering a replacement of the exact same shoe, such as a Vans mid-top. Even when the style changed slightly the Vans will fit exactly alike. But thats the hold-out and certainly not the default rule.
For a while Lands End was less annoying because you could order it online and if it didn't fit you could return it to Sears for a full refund and not deal with shipping etc. Most Sears have closed their doors so its back to dealing with shipping again.
this shit happens in brick and mortar stores all the time. I can't tell you the number of times I have had to go back to a store because an item was in the wrong box, or returned previously and obviously broken, or a consumable used and returned as new. Examples:
HP inkjet printer ink - bought some overpriced hp brand ink jet ink only to have to drive back to the store because someone returned it with their empty, used, cartridge and then used rubber cement to re-seal the container flap to appear unopened. Rubber cement is similar but definitely not identical to the box glue used in packaging so the evidence, once reopened was telling.
toilet seat - yes, apparently at a lowes, someone decided they didnt want to pay the extra cash for a nicer toilet seat so they took a box for a low end cheap seat and swapped seats so they paid the lower cost, leaving the next consumer to deal with the wrong item when arriving home.
upright carpet shampoo machine - purchased an upright shampoo machine at a big box store that was in the weekly ad for 30% off. Took it home and unboxed it to discover the tell-tale signs of repackaging such as: torn open instruction manual, missing plastic cover over the electrical prongs, less than perfect bundling of the power cord with twist tie, obvious dirt and wet hair on the cleaning brushes, missing sample cleaning solutions, etc.
table top reciprocating saw - purchased a table top reciprocating saw to cut laminate wood flooring only to unbox and discover it was full of saw dust and worn blades were it was used and then returned prior.
its to the point now where any time I buy anything, I am always checking the box for any sort of tampering. I wont even buy it if I see two layers of that circular plastic tape that goes over the edge to indicate that its been opened if the underneath one even appears slightly torn.
Back to amazon; I have returned my fair share of things that were either DOA or died within a week. Only once have I had an item arrive defective and the packaging inside was torn, proving that it was sold as new when it was clearly returned. Returned items must be sold as open-box, not new. I suspect the reason I am not on any sort of ban is likely either A) the number of returns to trigger a ban must be excessively large enough that no reasonable person to trigger a ban or B) It is based on a ratio of purchases to returns and because I purchase so much stuff from their site, it falls within a metric of reasonable. If its the latter then less than 1 percent of my purchases get returned. I should also mention I almost always return them for the exact same item because I actually want the item to work as advertised. I have only ever returned 2 items for refund simply because they were nothing like advertised.
Next thing you'll tell me is that the FBI lied to multiple FISA judges in order to spy on a political candidate by failing to disclose the source of a salacious steele dossier that was funded by a political opposition research firm who was paid by a lawfirm retained by another political party. Oh wait, they do that too.
Its time that the FBI stop being the 'untouchables' that Hoover created and start being more transparent with a _whole_ lot more oversight. As a libertarian, its my belief that its better to have more freedom, with a fewer, smarter, criminals getting caught, than having an agency with the power to ignore every principle of due process, privacy, and extortion in order to put a known criminal behind bars.
I would upvote you if i could. Its like that meme I saw the other day that said "I would like to try some of that trickle down economics. I didn't care too much for 8 years of trickle-up poverty" People are just sick of business as usual. Maybe we keep throwing these wrenches until congress does what 90%of americans want, term limits for congressman and senators.
read 1984 again. Then look at the headlines. Everyone says the other news source is fake news. One day a newspaper says one thing, then contradicts it. Your correct that its intentional mind fucking. I literally caught the NY Post running a fake headline last friday. A few minutes after the shooting in TX happened, I went to the live stream of ABC13, the local news on the scene. I watched for hours as students were interviewed. They all said they either saw a kid with a shotgun or heard a shotgun. Four hours later the NY Post had to throw in AR15 assault rifle because hey, thats what everyone uses right? Turns out it was a stockless shotgun that holds 5 rounds and a.38 revolver that holds 5 or 6 rounds. But that does not push the narrative that if we had limits on high capacity magazines and banned assault-weapon look-alikes that we wouldnt have school shootings. Because nobody would ever be able to kill a bunch of kids with shotguns, and revolvers, and pipe bombs, and pressure cooker bombs. In the history of gun control debate not once has anyone ever suggested restrictions on shotguns or revolvers. So yes, you are correct. There is a coordinated effort at mass manipulation and we are all pawns in a game, though it does not feel like chess.
the CEO takes direction from the Board of Directors. He serves at their discretion. The CEO is the person who handles the day-to-day operations but the Board votes to determine long term policy and direction. Its really the Board who should be most concerned by the shareholders, much like congress should be most concerned by the citizens. However with a whopping 11% approval rating, congress really does not give a shit and we keep electing the same assholes the entire time because they convince us its really the other guys fault. Fire anyone in their third term or later, put the rest on notice. Its never going to happen though. Too many people, as evidence by this thread, believe the problems lie 100% with the other party.
damn near all of them. This actually is a very old problem. Remember Spaceballs? Both King Vespa AND the president used the super secret access code of 1-2-3-4-5
this problem has existed since 2009. They said the same things about Obummer when he first entered office. He was addicted to his blackberry (remember those guys?) This wasn't really a thing before then. George W wasn't a smartphone junkie.
as a former member of the military who has had to be a UN troop on more than one occasion, I welcome this reality. The REALITY is that 99% of ALL UN FORCES really means US sons and daughters dying so your piece of shit countries dont have to. Fuck that. Its time everyone else anted up 1 for 1. We give 1 soldier, france gives one soldier, england gives one soldier, etc. When some UN member gives a whole 250 troops while the US commits 40,000; it should be insulting enough that they get kicked out of the UN. At the very least the country that donated 250 troops should have to give up 250 sons and daughters of the political class. Im not pro-trump but enough is enough of this horse shit. Personally I hope he wrecks our credibility across the whole fucking planet. Maybe you fucks will stop asking us to intervene so you can pretend like you were neutral all the time.
sociopaths with anti-social personality disorder do not 'hang out'. they constantly scheme and retaliate when things dont go their way. Too bad we can't elect prince harry. Been following him since he got caught 'hanging out' at a pub as a teen. He would definitely be someone I'd hang out with.
umm second shot???? this WAS her second shot... did you forget her failure of a campaign in 2008?
She is so un-electable that she couldn't win an election that the media and the DNC helped rig. This isnt a false statement. The DNC has never once denied any of the content of the hacked email released to wikileaks. She literally got caught trying to steal an election and all anyone wants to do is target the hacker that exposed this crime. Thats like robbing a bank but going after china for making the surveillance camera that caught the criminal in the act. If she tries for a third time she would be condemning the party to failure. There are 350 million people in this country, half of them women. Surely there is at least ONE other female that isn't HER that is qualified to run for president. That concept alone, that shes the only female qualified, does more harm to women equality than just about anything else. Her ego is as big or worse than trumps. She just cant accept the idea that she wont be president. She constantly blames everyone else for her failures, she has a laundry list of over 50 items now. None of them include anything that she has done. She deliberately insults 50% of the nation, a 50% she needs to win over at SOME point to govern, and in the process some of her own party feel she speeks to them too when she throws out these insults. She wears a winter coat in 90F weather with 3 scarfs to hide some massive back brace as if people cant tell shes got one foot in the grave. Her health alone, as once cited as a defense for her mistakes (ie stroke), is enough alone to make her a risk without even having to factor in her snake-like personality.
somehow though, she is probably going to take another run at it, and will probably blackmail and extort her way past the normal filters that normally weed out wasting votes on the un-electable.
The system has been in favor of employers for an extremely long time. Even our healthcare is a form of bondage. It doesnt matter how you come down on the healthcare debate, the fact that my healthcare is tied to my employer is a deliberate move to give employers more leverage to mistreat the employee. In any other healthcare system, whether it is socialized or otherwise, the ability to pick and choose your doctor is not tied to your employer. Once you have a decent healthcare plan and dependents, well, depending on it, you're a slave and you aren't even aware of it yet. Regardless of how bad your workplace is, or how mistreated or overworked, or underpaid you are, this one facet can often put you in a situation where you accept certain treatment, or mistreatment, or underpayment, etc. Because only here does telling someone to take this job and shove it, come with a crisis of healthcare to boot. In many cases, finding a new job comes with the uncertainty of new health insurance and its comparability to what you had before. Maybe the benefits are less, or maybe its a different carrier who allows/dissalows different medications and/or doctors. I am legally required to have car insurance in the US. At no point in time does leaving my job or having a job put me in a situation where my policy changes or I am without coverage. The same design could have easily been applied to healthcare. You pay the premiums, and your policy had nothing, whatsoever, to do with your employer.
But it wasnt. Instead its 'employer provided' which is horseshit because often a large chunk still comes out of your paycheck. And its leverage of the most unethical kind used psychologically against you to tolerate work conditions that would have never required a class-action lawsuit in the first place had this injustice not been served. Without the healthcare tied to employment, this class-action shit would be self correcting. They merely would be without a workforce a lot faster than before.
im not exactly a big fan of unions, as I've seen them collect dues and do nothing in the interest of their members for years (such as a teachers union in the face of firing teachers who get paid more due to education level should they reach their _required_ masters degree before having first attained tenure). But on principle your theory works fine even without unions. If the workplace is enough to warrant a class-action, direct lawsuit, or a strike, then even a worker organized call-in-sick strike can be effective. Esp if the time is used to find another job. Nothing can be more devastating than a high turnover with an extremely low level of information handed down to the replacements. A couple 'generations' of that and very important information gets lost.
the crypto currency problem is a global one.. the USA households are not 'wasting the most energy'. Burning even a single clock cycle on crypto currency on its face is wasting energy and yet the energy it devours is enormous and grows exponentially. In 4yrs the energy cryptocurency draws, globally, will exceed the energy non-crypto sources draw.
teslas storage system in australia seems to be doing a good job. Though IMO the best storage method should be hydrogen gas. Its portable, distributable, and burns clean.
I cant speak for him, but I have a huge understanding of this, as a former navy nuclear engineer. However, anyone talking about these issues without demanding the abolition of crypto currency and the energy crisis it is creating either does not understand, or is motivated by pure greed. Telling people to replace lightbulbs with CFL to save the planet is crap in the era of crypto currency. The amount of power cryptocurrency mining is drawing in a single day exceeds small third world countries over a year of usage. The most despicable part is that it is pure design that it requires all this power and resources to mine. It could have easily been based on something productive but instead it burns power and energy for the sake of wasting power. IMO anyone who is a fan of crypto currency yet claim to be a crusader for global warming has a special place in hell reserved for them.
New strategy, embed CP into all archive binaries of CIA folders using stenography. This way anyone stealing CIA documents are immediately guilty of distributing CP. It makes a convenient cover to keep the security content redacted while prosecuting a crime with evidence less compromising to security.
If I just thought of this, surely its been dreamed up at peast 100 times by people eay more devious than me.
Next there is the philosophical reason: technology isn't bad, it is merely a tool. The tool can be used for great public good, or great public harm.
I tend to adhere to the idea that "Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have". Unless government positions were appointed like jury duty, with constant turnover, I will never believe the government will behave altruisticly, or that its officials will not behave badly in order to gain more power. The power that location tracking represents is too significant for any organization to be trusted. The potential abuse is so significant I really doubt anyone truly has a real understanding just how far this rabbit-hole can go. Tracking movement, spending habits, search queries, all combined will eventually be used in very effective behavior predictions. Eventually the idea that someone could change their minds before acting on an impulse is discarded and people will be judged based on predictions alone. For now concepts like pre-crime are still fiction, but no longer far fetched. I find being judged for things I have not done beyond offensive and in pure and flagrant violation of the belief of free-will. I would rather see the data polluted so badly that its unusable, before I would see it misused.
i have a strong suspicion that the future of autonomous driving is going to be dependent on the evolution of something similar to the solar roadway project since that not only converts energy but also creates a communication network and very specific location markers. The cars will likely be required to be able to communicate with each-other in order to streamline traffic and avoid accidents. Removing network communication and gps would render the car inert. I am more in favor of a company developing the technology and expecting me to pay for it (as a customer I can vote with my wallet as to how they operate), rather than a company that gives it to me for free and sells my soul to someone else (as merely a user of their service and not their customer they wont give 2 shits about how they screw me over).
For the record I never whined about MS being sued, and as a libertarian, I never voted for bush. MS was the first, and should not to be forgotten, evil empire. since then many more evil empires have arisen to dwarf MS. MS' biggest revenue stream is that of being a patent troll over bullshit patent infringement claims toward Android, to which are merely paid only because Samsung found it a cheaper alternative than proving MS was full of shit. However MS has re-emerged with their new Pro-AI campaign. Given their history of 'features first, security last' approach (see letting Notepad execute arbitrary code with administrator privileges), this is likely going to result in some truly horrible shit. IF any company messing with AI results in bringing about SkyNet, my bet is on MS given their history of wondering if they CAN do something instead of if they SHOULD. Facebook, on the other hand, will probably be the first to discover SkyNet formed, and instead of alerting the public, will probably sell us all up the river in shackles.
That being said, since 2000 there has been a massive invasion of privacy and spying on citizens. From the patriot act, the NDA, project Carnivore, to project PRISM and beyond. Its so much that the american people are so numb from the articles and discoveries that they don't even care anymore. It goes back before 2000, but that was really the tipping point where it went from a slow creep to a downright avalanche. I would venture to guess that the Y2K scare was merely a smokescreen to cover the sort of spending it took to scale up this level of spying.
Trump certainly has his shortcomings. But it is very clear that he is not respected by any self described elitist group, secret society, shadow government, or deep-state organization. That puts him on the outside of the very groups that work for and with those that want to spy on you and sell your information. When those groups insult him or he perceived them as insulting him, he lashes out and hopefully in ways that reduce the amount of selling out our government has been doing. I do not harbor any belief that any one president will ever be able to put this damn genie back in the bottle; but hopefully, for his 4 year term, their progress will be slower than otherwise allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
as long as the manufacturer is fine with that sort of return policy I see no issue. At the carrier level I have manufacturers constantly offering to send me high priced shit all the time for a 30-day evaluation. I usually refuse to accept the eval because i rarely have enough time to give something a 30 day honest evaluation and even less time to dedicate to rolling it into limited production in the first place. I think they count on this to boost their sales. Its like a sick high-end version of the Columbia Music Club crap from the 80s where they kept sending you the tape and you had to keep mailing it back every month otherwise you just bought some crap album you never wanted.
My wife does this and it drives me absolutely insane. She is constantly ordering shit from catalogs and then having to return them. Sometimes the damn return packaging sits around for weeks upon weeks because she forgets to return them. To further add to my frustration, she pays the return shipping and the restock fee's amount to, when combined, nearly 50% of the original cost. She might as well have a habit of buying scratch-off tickets if she's going to throw her money away like that. With all the textiles sourced in other countries, there is no chance that the same marked size is going to fit the same, ever. Ive seen cases where the exact same shirt in the exact same marked size was actually two different sizes. Most likely the cheap labor has poor quality assurance and the wrong tag got sewn in. With shoes and clothing, you almost have to try it on first. With shoes I have had luck only if I were ordering a replacement of the exact same shoe, such as a Vans mid-top. Even when the style changed slightly the Vans will fit exactly alike. But thats the hold-out and certainly not the default rule.
For a while Lands End was less annoying because you could order it online and if it didn't fit you could return it to Sears for a full refund and not deal with shipping etc. Most Sears have closed their doors so its back to dealing with shipping again.
as long as 'spite' is not your reason for returning an item, then clearly they wont take the return then.
this shit happens in brick and mortar stores all the time. I can't tell you the number of times I have had to go back to a store because an item was in the wrong box, or returned previously and obviously broken, or a consumable used and returned as new. Examples:
HP inkjet printer ink - bought some overpriced hp brand ink jet ink only to have to drive back to the store because someone returned it with their empty, used, cartridge and then used rubber cement to re-seal the container flap to appear unopened. Rubber cement is similar but definitely not identical to the box glue used in packaging so the evidence, once reopened was telling.
toilet seat - yes, apparently at a lowes, someone decided they didnt want to pay the extra cash for a nicer toilet seat so they took a box for a low end cheap seat and swapped seats so they paid the lower cost, leaving the next consumer to deal with the wrong item when arriving home.
upright carpet shampoo machine - purchased an upright shampoo machine at a big box store that was in the weekly ad for 30% off. Took it home and unboxed it to discover the tell-tale signs of repackaging such as: torn open instruction manual, missing plastic cover over the electrical prongs, less than perfect bundling of the power cord with twist tie, obvious dirt and wet hair on the cleaning brushes, missing sample cleaning solutions, etc.
table top reciprocating saw - purchased a table top reciprocating saw to cut laminate wood flooring only to unbox and discover it was full of saw dust and worn blades were it was used and then returned prior.
its to the point now where any time I buy anything, I am always checking the box for any sort of tampering. I wont even buy it if I see two layers of that circular plastic tape that goes over the edge to indicate that its been opened if the underneath one even appears slightly torn.
Back to amazon; I have returned my fair share of things that were either DOA or died within a week. Only once have I had an item arrive defective and the packaging inside was torn, proving that it was sold as new when it was clearly returned. Returned items must be sold as open-box, not new. I suspect the reason I am not on any sort of ban is likely either A) the number of returns to trigger a ban must be excessively large enough that no reasonable person to trigger a ban or B) It is based on a ratio of purchases to returns and because I purchase so much stuff from their site, it falls within a metric of reasonable. If its the latter then less than 1 percent of my purchases get returned. I should also mention I almost always return them for the exact same item because I actually want the item to work as advertised. I have only ever returned 2 items for refund simply because they were nothing like advertised.
Next thing you'll tell me is that the FBI lied to multiple FISA judges in order to spy on a political candidate by failing to disclose the source of a salacious steele dossier that was funded by a political opposition research firm who was paid by a lawfirm retained by another political party. Oh wait, they do that too.
Its time that the FBI stop being the 'untouchables' that Hoover created and start being more transparent with a _whole_ lot more oversight. As a libertarian, its my belief that its better to have more freedom, with a fewer, smarter, criminals getting caught, than having an agency with the power to ignore every principle of due process, privacy, and extortion in order to put a known criminal behind bars.
I would upvote you if i could. Its like that meme I saw the other day that said "I would like to try some of that trickle down economics. I didn't care too much for 8 years of trickle-up poverty" People are just sick of business as usual. Maybe we keep throwing these wrenches until congress does what 90%of americans want, term limits for congressman and senators.
read 1984 again. Then look at the headlines. Everyone says the other news source is fake news. One day a newspaper says one thing, then contradicts it. Your correct that its intentional mind fucking. I literally caught the NY Post running a fake headline last friday. A few minutes after the shooting in TX happened, I went to the live stream of ABC13, the local news on the scene. I watched for hours as students were interviewed. They all said they either saw a kid with a shotgun or heard a shotgun. Four hours later the NY Post had to throw in AR15 assault rifle because hey, thats what everyone uses right? Turns out it was a stockless shotgun that holds 5 rounds and a .38 revolver that holds 5 or 6 rounds. But that does not push the narrative that if we had limits on high capacity magazines and banned assault-weapon look-alikes that we wouldnt have school shootings. Because nobody would ever be able to kill a bunch of kids with shotguns, and revolvers, and pipe bombs, and pressure cooker bombs. In the history of gun control debate not once has anyone ever suggested restrictions on shotguns or revolvers. So yes, you are correct. There is a coordinated effort at mass manipulation and we are all pawns in a game, though it does not feel like chess.
MS13 is not Mexican.
the CEO takes direction from the Board of Directors. He serves at their discretion. The CEO is the person who handles the day-to-day operations but the Board votes to determine long term policy and direction. Its really the Board who should be most concerned by the shareholders, much like congress should be most concerned by the citizens. However with a whopping 11% approval rating, congress really does not give a shit and we keep electing the same assholes the entire time because they convince us its really the other guys fault. Fire anyone in their third term or later, put the rest on notice. Its never going to happen though. Too many people, as evidence by this thread, believe the problems lie 100% with the other party.
damn near all of them. This actually is a very old problem. Remember Spaceballs? Both King Vespa AND the president used the super secret access code of 1-2-3-4-5
this problem has existed since 2009. They said the same things about Obummer when he first entered office. He was addicted to his blackberry (remember those guys?) This wasn't really a thing before then. George W wasn't a smartphone junkie.
as a former member of the military who has had to be a UN troop on more than one occasion, I welcome this reality. The REALITY is that 99% of ALL UN FORCES really means US sons and daughters dying so your piece of shit countries dont have to. Fuck that. Its time everyone else anted up 1 for 1. We give 1 soldier, france gives one soldier, england gives one soldier, etc. When some UN member gives a whole 250 troops while the US commits 40,000; it should be insulting enough that they get kicked out of the UN. At the very least the country that donated 250 troops should have to give up 250 sons and daughters of the political class. Im not pro-trump but enough is enough of this horse shit. Personally I hope he wrecks our credibility across the whole fucking planet. Maybe you fucks will stop asking us to intervene so you can pretend like you were neutral all the time.
sociopaths with anti-social personality disorder do not 'hang out'. they constantly scheme and retaliate when things dont go their way. Too bad we can't elect prince harry. Been following him since he got caught 'hanging out' at a pub as a teen. He would definitely be someone I'd hang out with.
umm second shot???? this WAS her second shot... did you forget her failure of a campaign in 2008?
She is so un-electable that she couldn't win an election that the media and the DNC helped rig. This isnt a false statement. The DNC has never once denied any of the content of the hacked email released to wikileaks. She literally got caught trying to steal an election and all anyone wants to do is target the hacker that exposed this crime. Thats like robbing a bank but going after china for making the surveillance camera that caught the criminal in the act. If she tries for a third time she would be condemning the party to failure. There are 350 million people in this country, half of them women. Surely there is at least ONE other female that isn't HER that is qualified to run for president. That concept alone, that shes the only female qualified, does more harm to women equality than just about anything else. Her ego is as big or worse than trumps. She just cant accept the idea that she wont be president. She constantly blames everyone else for her failures, she has a laundry list of over 50 items now. None of them include anything that she has done. She deliberately insults 50% of the nation, a 50% she needs to win over at SOME point to govern, and in the process some of her own party feel she speeks to them too when she throws out these insults. She wears a winter coat in 90F weather with 3 scarfs to hide some massive back brace as if people cant tell shes got one foot in the grave. Her health alone, as once cited as a defense for her mistakes (ie stroke), is enough alone to make her a risk without even having to factor in her snake-like personality.
somehow though, she is probably going to take another run at it, and will probably blackmail and extort her way past the normal filters that normally weed out wasting votes on the un-electable.
The system has been in favor of employers for an extremely long time. Even our healthcare is a form of bondage. It doesnt matter how you come down on the healthcare debate, the fact that my healthcare is tied to my employer is a deliberate move to give employers more leverage to mistreat the employee. In any other healthcare system, whether it is socialized or otherwise, the ability to pick and choose your doctor is not tied to your employer. Once you have a decent healthcare plan and dependents, well, depending on it, you're a slave and you aren't even aware of it yet. Regardless of how bad your workplace is, or how mistreated or overworked, or underpaid you are, this one facet can often put you in a situation where you accept certain treatment, or mistreatment, or underpayment, etc. Because only here does telling someone to take this job and shove it, come with a crisis of healthcare to boot. In many cases, finding a new job comes with the uncertainty of new health insurance and its comparability to what you had before. Maybe the benefits are less, or maybe its a different carrier who allows/dissalows different medications and/or doctors. I am legally required to have car insurance in the US. At no point in time does leaving my job or having a job put me in a situation where my policy changes or I am without coverage. The same design could have easily been applied to healthcare. You pay the premiums, and your policy had nothing, whatsoever, to do with your employer.
But it wasnt. Instead its 'employer provided' which is horseshit because often a large chunk still comes out of your paycheck. And its leverage of the most unethical kind used psychologically against you to tolerate work conditions that would have never required a class-action lawsuit in the first place had this injustice not been served. Without the healthcare tied to employment, this class-action shit would be self correcting. They merely would be without a workforce a lot faster than before.
Stockholm syndrome?
though an interesting name since stockholm isnt in America
im not exactly a big fan of unions, as I've seen them collect dues and do nothing in the interest of their members for years (such as a teachers union in the face of firing teachers who get paid more due to education level should they reach their _required_ masters degree before having first attained tenure). But on principle your theory works fine even without unions. If the workplace is enough to warrant a class-action, direct lawsuit, or a strike, then even a worker organized call-in-sick strike can be effective. Esp if the time is used to find another job. Nothing can be more devastating than a high turnover with an extremely low level of information handed down to the replacements. A couple 'generations' of that and very important information gets lost.
the crypto currency problem is a global one.. the USA households are not 'wasting the most energy'. Burning even a single clock cycle on crypto currency on its face is wasting energy and yet the energy it devours is enormous and grows exponentially. In 4yrs the energy cryptocurency draws, globally, will exceed the energy non-crypto sources draw.
teslas storage system in australia seems to be doing a good job. Though IMO the best storage method should be hydrogen gas. Its portable, distributable, and burns clean.
i think fossil fuel is a name being used as a placeholder for hydrocarbons.
I cant speak for him, but I have a huge understanding of this, as a former navy nuclear engineer. However, anyone talking about these issues without demanding the abolition of crypto currency and the energy crisis it is creating either does not understand, or is motivated by pure greed. Telling people to replace lightbulbs with CFL to save the planet is crap in the era of crypto currency. The amount of power cryptocurrency mining is drawing in a single day exceeds small third world countries over a year of usage. The most despicable part is that it is pure design that it requires all this power and resources to mine. It could have easily been based on something productive but instead it burns power and energy for the sake of wasting power. IMO anyone who is a fan of crypto currency yet claim to be a crusader for global warming has a special place in hell reserved for them.
New strategy, embed CP into all archive binaries of CIA folders using stenography. This way anyone stealing CIA documents are immediately guilty of distributing CP. It makes a convenient cover to keep the security content redacted while prosecuting a crime with evidence less compromising to security.
If I just thought of this, surely its been dreamed up at peast 100 times by people eay more devious than me.
Next there is the philosophical reason: technology isn't bad, it is merely a tool. The tool can be used for great public good, or great public harm.
I tend to adhere to the idea that "Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have". Unless government positions were appointed like jury duty, with constant turnover, I will never believe the government will behave altruisticly, or that its officials will not behave badly in order to gain more power. The power that location tracking represents is too significant for any organization to be trusted. The potential abuse is so significant I really doubt anyone truly has a real understanding just how far this rabbit-hole can go. Tracking movement, spending habits, search queries, all combined will eventually be used in very effective behavior predictions. Eventually the idea that someone could change their minds before acting on an impulse is discarded and people will be judged based on predictions alone. For now concepts like pre-crime are still fiction, but no longer far fetched. I find being judged for things I have not done beyond offensive and in pure and flagrant violation of the belief of free-will. I would rather see the data polluted so badly that its unusable, before I would see it misused.
i have a strong suspicion that the future of autonomous driving is going to be dependent on the evolution of something similar to the solar roadway project since that not only converts energy but also creates a communication network and very specific location markers. The cars will likely be required to be able to communicate with each-other in order to streamline traffic and avoid accidents. Removing network communication and gps would render the car inert. I am more in favor of a company developing the technology and expecting me to pay for it (as a customer I can vote with my wallet as to how they operate), rather than a company that gives it to me for free and sells my soul to someone else (as merely a user of their service and not their customer they wont give 2 shits about how they screw me over).
For the record I never whined about MS being sued, and as a libertarian, I never voted for bush. MS was the first, and should not to be forgotten, evil empire. since then many more evil empires have arisen to dwarf MS. MS' biggest revenue stream is that of being a patent troll over bullshit patent infringement claims toward Android, to which are merely paid only because Samsung found it a cheaper alternative than proving MS was full of shit. However MS has re-emerged with their new Pro-AI campaign. Given their history of 'features first, security last' approach (see letting Notepad execute arbitrary code with administrator privileges), this is likely going to result in some truly horrible shit. IF any company messing with AI results in bringing about SkyNet, my bet is on MS given their history of wondering if they CAN do something instead of if they SHOULD. Facebook, on the other hand, will probably be the first to discover SkyNet formed, and instead of alerting the public, will probably sell us all up the river in shackles.
That being said, since 2000 there has been a massive invasion of privacy and spying on citizens. From the patriot act, the NDA, project Carnivore, to project PRISM and beyond. Its so much that the american people are so numb from the articles and discoveries that they don't even care anymore. It goes back before 2000, but that was really the tipping point where it went from a slow creep to a downright avalanche. I would venture to guess that the Y2K scare was merely a smokescreen to cover the sort of spending it took to scale up this level of spying.
Trump certainly has his shortcomings. But it is very clear that he is not respected by any self described elitist group, secret society, shadow government, or deep-state organization. That puts him on the outside of the very groups that work for and with those that want to spy on you and sell your information. When those groups insult him or he perceived them as insulting him, he lashes out and hopefully in ways that reduce the amount of selling out our government has been doing. I do not harbor any belief that any one president will ever be able to put this damn genie back in the bottle; but hopefully, for his 4 year term, their progress will be slower than otherwise allowed.