Jesus people, the book came out 18 years ago and opens with the line "I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez High and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world." None of this is new and we will continue to make Franklin spin wildly in his grave as we surrender liberty in pursuit of imaginary safety.

Meh, we have a system like that right now. In many states there's a redemption for recyclable cans and bottles that is built into the cost of the product. You pay an additional $.60 for the six-pack and get $.10 back when you return each bottle. That may not be worth it to most, but some (i.e., poor) people are happy to pick up returnables and redeem them for the cash. The whole point of this system (which started in the 1960s or 1970s) was to encourage people to return their bottles rather than throwing them out. It's had some effect, but not a ton because of a number of flaws: - It's not nationwide because 'states rights' so that bottle I can return in NY is trash in IA - The amount is minimal and most can't be bothered for such a trivial amount - The systems available for redemption are convoluted, difficult and time-intensive meaning that even people who DO want to recycle don't have the time People will recycle if it's made easy enough and worth their while. In my state there is a redemption system, but returning containers is so time consuming and so prone to errors (some machines won't take some containers) that's it's not worth the time or effort. I'm lucky enough that there's a little old Asian lady who goes down my street early on recycling days and who will take all my returnables for the $3-$6 she'll be able to get for them. Hell, I'd pay her that much to take them away for me. At the same time, my municipality (but not my state or county) have a single-stream recycling program where anything recyclable (including those redeemable containers) can be thrown into one big bin to be picked up twice a week. The city literally saved millions the first year they implemented this because the amount of crap people threw out that the city had to pay to be carted away to the landfill plummeted. Now about 30% of the city's waste ends up in the recycle bins which a company pays the city to cart away. There's an open question about how much of this actually gets properly sorted and recycled and another even bigger question of how much this makes a difference to our blatantly unsustainable first-world lifestyle, but at least we get better participation than the next city over where residents have to sort their recycling before putting it out on the curb. Most just don't bother.

Of course I'm depressed at seeing humans waste their time on drudgery jobs that could easily be automated! Hell, the dehumanization of modern jobs has always been a societal concern - just look at Chaplin's Modern Times. There's a certain class of jobs that have become 'entry level' and traditional for high-schoolers or part-timers or others who are completely unskilled and most of them are retail or service jobs. Rarely are any of these GOOD jobs with decent pay, benefits, a chance of upward mobility, etc. They're considered 'entry-level' because the expectation is that the second you can find something better, you're out of there. These jobs are all dehumanizing and depressing and no one should be required to work them. The more they can be automated out of existence, the better. The only value these jobs may have is teaching employees that their employers can and would pay them less and work them harder if they were legally allowed to do so. And that they are completely replaceable and therefore effectively worthless from a corporate perspective. Oh, and that the vast majority of customers are shitty, shitty people who enjoy feeling superior to someone else who is forced to put up with them.

I'm often depressed at these news stories that bemoan the loss of jobs in the face of technological improvement. Yes, some grocery store cashiers will no longer be needed - although some will still have to be around to manage the automated checkouts. You're still going to need people stocking shelves, cleaning, doing administrative tasks, etc. And right now with the proliferation of automated checkouts, we're already seeing fewer of those jobs needed. Which is fine, because for the most part these are pretty shitty jobs with fairly low pay. Yes, it's too bad for those cashiers who are let go, but what are you going to do about it? Cashiers are already staffed at the absolute minimum and most retail stores try to walk a very fine line between having just enough cashiers to checkout customers without making them wait in lines too long. Most stores have the cash-trained staff doing other stuff until there's a need to open another lane anyway, so this is just another reduction. Frankly, I already use a scan gun at Stop & Shop when I go there. I scan everything, bag it in my cart the way I want and then scan the gun on my way out at the self-checkout. It's FAR faster than waiting in line and I don't have to interact with anyone I don't want to. Frankly, this hand-wringing over the loss of obsolete jobs reminds me of all the whining and moaning about the poor coal miners who are being put out of work thanks to alternative fuels. Yeah, that sucks if you lose your job, but who the hell wants to be a coal miner in the first place? It's a legendarily shitty, dangerous, underpaid job that's so prone to exploitation that they pretty much birthed the labor union. Cashier is better, but not by THAT much. And what's the alternative? Force employers to pay obsolete workers just so they don't lose their jobs? I'm a hardcore lefty and that's just ridiculous even to me!

You answered your own question: Amazon was slapped on the wrist for this over a decade ago, so Apple's had at least that long to get away with it. When you're a megaconglomerate the size of Apple, this is just the cost of doing business. Fuck your workers until someone finally sues you to stop. Fight it for as long as you can, then appeal the judgement. In the meantime, you're still making a ton of money off your underpaid wage slaves. If/when you finally lose, exert political pressure to have those fines reduced or waived. If, eventually, you finally have to pay, then that's not a problem: now you have a loss imposed by an outside entity that's no fault of your own and a massive tax write-off. Oh, and if you have to pay out back wages from 10 years ago that were incurred in 2010 dollars, you get the bonus that 2020 dollars are worth less due to inflation. And then you keep doing it, because what are they gonna do - sue you again? Go ahead, we'll pay out in 10 years. Maybe. Note that last year the government levied it's largest fine ever against Facebook, who literally laughed in their face. The record-breaking fine was equal to about what Facebook made in a week and, because they'd been warning their stockholders to expect an even bigger fine, their stock shot up in value. They literally made more money in one day than that fine was ever going to cost them. And that's assuming they didn't have an avenue to appeal or reduce the fine. At the moment, regulatory fines are effectively toothless if they don't actually impact a businesses bottom line in a significant way. This sort of lawsuit might have crippled a mom & pop store, but Apple will barely notice. It is not at all impossible that a giant healthcare conglomerate may crunch the numbers and decide the the $10K fine for a HIPAA violation is worth the profit gained by selling PHI and thus just a cost of doing business. Then what's the value of that regulation anyway? Only a fine base upon the revenue of the company has a chance of actually changing the behavior of deep-pocketed companies. GDPR is one example, but we will never see that in North America because the government is firmly in those same deep pockets.