We've already established what you are. Now we are just negotiating the price.

The criminals are those that make off with billions in crypto heist, ransomware, or blatant Trump corruptions; not people hiding in the dark to steal your purse at knife point (does that even still happen ?). And a tiny solar LED with a motion detector is enough to get you to find your keys.

I don't see this as performative bullshit, and I'm not sure anyone with a lick of sense would.

Let's say I'm a public official. I want to take bribes but I'll go to jail for that. Instead, I can mint myself a cryptocoin and people who want to bribe me can buy them, effectively giving me money in exchange for nothing. I mean that's exactly what Trump did, and there's no reason to think others won't try it if it goes unchallenged.

Whether or not it will be *effectual* as a law will come down to how it's enforced.
=Smidge=

> They already run a large web store and they could have done this anytime but it's clear they have not.

I mean, they have but whatever. The part you're not considering is the immediacy of buying at a physical location.

Browsing online has a different set of tools the merchant can use to FOMO you into buying it. If you see something online you can easily come back to it hours or days later and reconsider; if you're there in the store you're probably not very likely to come back tomorrow. If you're going to buy something at the store you're most likely going to buy it during that visit, which makes you more vulnerable to surge pricing.

> They'd be caught very quickly if they did this in a retail store.

And the consequences would be... what, exactly?

Personally I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop; sign up for WalMart Customer Plus for $19.99/mo and skip the surge pricing!
=Smidge=

There have already been improvements. The practice was banned outright, by everyone, 30 years ago.

=Smidge=

Why would that be *critical* information?

Would the problem be worse or lessened if it was from the US? Britain? France? Japan? It is more or less a disaster if it's military weapons waste or civilian power waste?

Or are you just upset you don't get to point fingers?
=Smidge=

I'm like you, the reference *is* Windows Explorer, out of Win2K. After that they started adding tons of garbage (the ribbon !!!). Fav function was Ctrl-+ to optimize columns widths. But I digress, the folder view panel of Dolphin, combined with disabled folders in the main panel does pretty much the same things. And things like having the Konsole underneath is fantastically productive. The fact the it is highly customizable is a big plus, for instance you can add your own menus to the right-click with a moderate amount of digging. No, I'm not going back to Windows after 25 years !

I'm typing this on the 2010 laptop I use daily. I just disable all animations in KDE advanced settings. Then it is snappy and always responds instantly. I have no problem doing raw image edition, even video edition.

Dolphin is pretty good. And colleagues are always amazed you can just F4 to get a console in the same dir as the file you are editing. It can even work as a full fledged programming project editor, although that is a beast to configure properly and IMHO not really its purpose.

I started on KDE with gentoo in around 2001 but some things in Gentoo I never understood (USE variables ?). I started using Kubuntu in 2006 on a tower PC, then successfully cloned the disk to a laptop in 2010, then upgraded said laptop to Neon, then a few years later 'downgraded' it back to Kubuntu (because some things [drivers?] in Neon were just too old; that was a beast to do without losing the OS nor the data). I'm still typing this on the 'same' OS I installed in 2006 !
What I like about KDE is the ability to customize.

> whereas normally you'd have to wait for the harm to happen to sue

False. You can file a suit for any reason at any time. You do not have to wait until any harm is done. This does not, of course, mean the judge has to accept your filing.

But in this case, the 'harm' is that they are slowing down development/improvement of a product you are paying for. If you buy into a service on the promise or reasonable expectation that the vendor of that service will continue to improve it, and then they declare that they will drag their feet, that's a type of harm because you're not getting what you reasonably expected to be getting for your money.

Ultimately it's up to the judge to decide if there's enough meat on that bone to proceed to the next phase, but it's enough to get the paperwork started.
=Smidge=

So, if you ask the various chatbots who you should vote for for the midterms, what do they answer ?

So, then when do we vote and elect this high IQ president ?!?

So stalking is constitutional, then?

'cause it's not just "recording in public" it's full tracking and profiling. Who you are, where you are, when you're there. A full record of your daily activities from the moment you walk out your front door to the moment you get home again.

If the government was doing this directly in the same manner as these corporations do (e.g. without a warrant) it would 100% be a violation of your constitutional rights. The fact that the government does it by proxy, letting a private corporation do all the dirty work for them, really does not change the fundamental complaint here.

=Smidge=

Then if oil is flowing so freely, why am I paying 4.50$/gal for gasoline?