Where do you think cars are going? You already have to wait for permission to use your car as it boots up. And then there's the data tracking built into the vehicle which is relayed to third parties. This will only be the next step in people being given permission to use something they thought they purchased.

The eventual goal is to have people rent their PC or phone and all the software they use.

Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Yes, this stuff is moving digital as well. At different speeds in different countries.

Except part of the reason for the cold is because the warming atmosphere is messing with the air currents which normally keep the cold air north.

If you have a 5 gallon bucet of cold water and pour in a quart of hot water, that hot water will mix with the cold water causing currents until everything equalizes.

Same with the atmosphere.

Pallets of returned items from Amazon and others stacked in pallets in warehouses. The refuse remains until someone decides to buy the pallet (approximately $700), have it delivered (which costs extra), and possibly resell whatever is inside.

This is in the U.S. It is guaranteed in China and India the vast majority gets thrown into a hole or piled high at a dump.

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

If you're that stupid/lacking willpower/whatever that you immediately go off and buy something because you saw it online, you deserve what you get.

You're an adult, supposedly with something approaching intelligence and self-control. If you're $50K in debt because you're continually buying junk, the problem is not with the influencers.*

* They're called shills. Call them what they are.

either you need something random you know your dollar store has,

Years ago I was with my parents in a Dollar Store. We weren't looking for anything in particular, just seeing what's there. We went through the condiment aisle and they had these tiny bottles of ketchup and mustard from name brand companies.

My dad wondered about why they would do this and I told him to think of it this way. You're on vacation or a business trip or whatever. You need ketchup or mustard, but you don't want to buy an entire bottle. This fits the bill. You could probably get three or four servings out of the jar, enough for one or two hamburgers or maybe four hotdogs. Where else could you get something like this?

Whatever, dude.

Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.