When you're the size of Google, of course you can have it both ways. What's the entire point of effectively legalized regulatory capture if not the privilege of having it both (or 5 or 10 or N) ways?

Uh, debit cards do all those things. Only you don't have to engage in all the "make work" that middlemen loyalty programs incur. You spend money, it comes out of the money you have, it's a card. The merchant doesn't have to pay anybody to run a loyalty program, and then pass the costs on to you. The end.

So what do you get from using a credit card if you always pay it off? Are you magically always one month behind being able to afford anything?

I'm guessing it's not that. Do you get points? Services? Goodies? I wonder how credit card companies pay for those? Oh yeah, you pay for them - and that's even if you use the stuff that comes "with" credit cards. Truly the ultimate middleman/redistribution scheme.

Yes, I'm sure Nintendo's lawyers have not considered the legality of their business practices in their largest market. *rolls eyes*

Have you taken apart everything in your home to ensure there are no recording devices embedded inside them? Get a grip, bro.

Enjoyable and appropriate reference.

Airlines have been charging different customers different prices based on ability to pay for decades. Leisure pax book in advance and biz pax book last minute. Then there is class and buckets.

You'd be wrong.

From a purely practical standpoint, codebases like this (I have 20+ years in the console games industry as a programmer) contain source code, headers, and other proprietary stuff from other vendors (to say nothing about the console SDKs) we're not allowed to just release. Finding it all, ripping it out, and being confident it's been done properly from a legal perspective is expensive, cumbersome, and risky.

Watch the opening screen of a modern AA to AAAA videogame these days. It's littered with 3rd party software. A multiplatform console game that was never intended to be open sourced is not trivially open source-able.

Also, EA gets to keep it, because it may be of value to them down the road. (I mean, probably not, but that's what they'd say. They own the work.)

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

And the people who think they are those people are the worst.

Okay. Is it your life's work to know about this stuff?

The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, provide justice, and enforce contracts.

The fuck are you on about? There's a link to more information, if you're like .. somebody who huffs glue and can't infer what the gist of the existing policy is (hint: wear body cameras.) Why it's being cancelled is explicitly listed in the summary.

Do you just need to hear the sound of your keyboard or something?

Just to add on to this, isn't not like I'm saying it would be bad for merchants to include taxes in advertised prices. That could be nice. But "no hidden fees" can also mean just that the fee is listed along side a price. Adding it *for you* to the sticker price is a convenience, as it would be with taxes, but not adding a fee to a product price isn't what makes it hidden - it's not disclosing that that fee even exists up front during the process of shopping before intent to purchase.