Yeah, but living expenses are fixed costs, so even percentages are tricky. A flat 50% tax on someone hypothetically earning 15000 a month is survivable, on someone who is earning 1500 it isn't.

I don't fly, and the last concert I've been to was before Corona hit, so, no. As for the internet, most of the stores that I've bought stuff from require no login and my browser is relatively well warded so I'm more certain than not that no discriminatory pricing is being offered.

You're mostly right, with one exception - there's no way there could be anything fair about the practice, since it exploits both an information asymmetry (store collecting data about you) and a negotiation asymmetry (store changes offer but you can adhere or get out, there's no counter-proposal from you) to royally screw you over. All this is is rentseeking on crack.

There's multiple differences here - one is that progressive taxation is based on the idea that if you're rich, you're using the commons and the services society provides to a greater extent, thus you should contribute more. On the other hand, there's nothing such that Wal-mart or Kroger is providing for you, they're simply taking a bet that you'll not walk away in disgust at seeing the price they toss at you.
Furthermore, you're overly optimistic in that financial dispositions are the only factor entering this - you could pull off tricks like noticing a customer really seems to like one brand of say, mayo and start cranking up the price, or even more atrociously, identify things which look like a necessity and amp up their price... or ,for instance, amp up the prices for people with full baskets because they're less likely to leave if they've already picked up a ton of wares.
The whole practice smells sky-high of bullshit, and I'm certainly not going to visit any store that has electronic price tags.

Well... if you want to wait for the ideal champion with a flaming sword and white shining armour, be my guest. For the rest of us, Alexandra Elbakyan is enough.

The eight years of shelling of Doneck and Luhansk was sure peaceful.

We're in a story about an unelected group with long history of malfeasance towards poorer countries talks about setting up the exchange protocol for CBDCs, thus both proving CBDCs are in the putting and revealing plans of making the system even more intractable and inter-linked. There's absolutely nothing to worry about here, much like for the countries that took on "cheap" loans from IMF in the 60s, then turned into impoverished colonies when the interest rates sharply rose.

Combining every disadvantage of state fiat currency with every disadvantage of crypto.

Stuff 'em where the sun don't shine.

...Are you for real?

I'm not even going to address the more discutable claims - the fact that you assert that inflation means more money (what in fact means is everyone's savings going to hell, all the while the rich get richer because their wealth is held in assets) and your interesting assertion that there's less poverty at a time when real wages have fallen almost everywhere, public services are continuously being outright dismantled or simply set up for failure and the main conclusion governments have taken from the entire COVID fiasco is that social consensus doesn't matter and if you force an issue long enough, the public will comply (being put to the test, see, say, the protests in France and Netherlands) means that you apparently live n an alternate reality that has, in fact, been doing wonderfully

Say hi to Doc and Marty McFly for me!

I absolutely would? Because it of course included people whose job it was to help sort the stuff out and who were usually competent, as opposed to nowadays, where half the time when you reach out to a company to get an order (place I work for requires a written offer and a pro-forma bill to pay, to put it very short) half the time you get someone utterly baffled and suggesting "just order through our website?"

And other BS like people expecting you to be within reach 24/7, both private and public, and, what I think even dumber, phones not auto-dumping a call because the line is blocked but allowing to ring anyways? Because yeah, you should just excuse yourself from the call you're making now to go deal with some moron calling you *now*.

I have a half-dumb button phone and I wouldn't touch modern touchscreen bricks with a pole... at least east germany et al. had the decency of bugging your conversations at the state's expense, rather than expecting you to pay for your own.

Considering that, clearly, this kind of "abuse" wasn't actually reported by the individuals in question (since that would need no AI), one has to wonder what's the point of prosecuting a few hundred people for the equivalent of running their mouth at a pub

Of course, this only goes to show the main use of AI, which I've been mentioning ever since the articles about "Google AI can understand humour" were popping up a year and something ago, which is that at the end, this will be used to suppress political dissent more than anything, as AI is a state security cop that doesn't sleep and doesn't get bored.

Let's make a wild guess, Germany or UK are going to use AI to find people with adverse political opinions next, if they haven't already.

Congratulations, you really beat that strawman into strawy chunks! Go you!

FIrst of all, the topic of the survey emphatically wasn't a return to the 1800s or even 1900s so your post missed the point worse than your usual train-station restroom goer misses the bowl. It missed the point on purpose, though - unlike the mentioned 1800s, the life of the average person has not improved in the last thirty years, economically or socially, so of course people wish for it to go away. Internet is, in part, an easy stand-in to point at - in fact, it's probably one of the few things holding modern society together as people rant online and spend their time there, for relatively cheap, and if they didn't have the distraction, they'd be getting properly pissed off.

After their last push to ban gas stoves has failed, they're trying to put in a "scientific" rationale.

Fact is, outside of people operating stoves day and night in specific conditions (working in cramped and poorly aired kitchens professionally), this is of zero consequence to anyone because the safety margins that it exceeded in some circumstances already have proofing factors anyways. The whole thing is on par with worrying about banana radioactivity, but the current "green" agenda gives it a sinister bend.

A gas stove is easier to use, more reliable and cheaper than an electric stove, and furthermore, the distribution network is more resilient and less prone to meddling and blackouts + brownouts. Gas stoves have, in the recent years US, probably saved more lives just by preventing hypothermia than they've taken through any obscure mechanism of this nature.

I fully expect the next scientific research topic to be the dangerous bulkiness of gas stoves, since if one falls on you it can absolutely kill you!

Fortunately, this stuff needs enormous databanks so it's not at all hard to regulate - in the same sense we regulare people trying to grow weed indoors.
Out of all the things society doesn't need, quickly producing enormous amounts of low quality rehashed content with central control/injection enabled in it is among the top. We've already seen the extent of manipulation via subtle alteration of search and social media algorithms that is possible, and that doesn't even approach the realms of possibility a service that pre-digests information does.

Never mind, the ability to go through large amounts of text, including speech-to-text output obtained from gods-know-where is basically the wet dream of a Stasi agent.

So far ,there's no application of this that I'd remotely call good, useful or socially beneficial.

This analogy is not so much lame as legless. A more apt one would be you pretending to be a computer repairman, entering home, then essentially smugly waltzing about the fact that you can't be sued for fraudulently calling yourself a computer repairman, then finally being surprised at having your nose broken, when caught "repairing" in bed with my wife.

The promise, however binding or not had (perhaps mistakenly) averted a certain sharpening of conflicts then.. .and while its hollowness was made manifest with impunity, it by itself does nothing and has nothing to do with Russian red lines, constituting NATO moving into their backyard.

In this sense, these attempts to expand NATO are a clear breach of the principle of indivisibility of security - security options don't exist in a vacuum and Ukraine doesn't get to expand its security at Russian expense by becoming a forwards operating base for their self-declared enemies.