What really is so stupid is "Fake Typing" when you respond to the question. There's no typing going on, you're just red to believe there is because they want you to believe you're talking to someone with a pulse.

and cool climates. Expect consumers to pay more for power in those states.

"and the donor class of the other party doesn't want them to make material changes"

This is spot on, and one of the main drivers why no material changes will ever occur as long as there is really only "one and a half parties" in the United States.

How is this fixed? Probably only by a constitutional amendment stating that all candidates are to be publicly financed in some form which cannot be perverted by special interests.

Will this constitutional amendment ever be ratified? No, not without tremendous sacrifices by the citizenry to dig out of the quasi-authoritarian state we are in now,

Living is becoming more precarious as time marches on.

Most jobs will be come "Work to Live".

The degradation/enshittification has been slowly occurring for some time now and will continue until we get to a point were we were in the mid to late 19th century again. In the mid to late 19th people worked in factories for 14 hours per day 6-7 days per week.

The biggest flaw of the citizens of the USA, as that they don't seem to care about this gradual decline in job quality and living standards. The proverbial frog is being boiled and they don't even know they're cooked yet.

The right to vote will be taken away soon. This because once the citizenry realize they are cooked, they'll try to vote out the politicians who put them in this condition. The politicians in power will have none of this. The politicians in power will break their oath to uphold the constitution and they'll declare martial law under the guise of some kind of national emergency or "invasion".

Anti-vagrancy laws and debtors prisons will make a comeback. People who refuse to work or can't hold down a job will be sentenced to the Workhouses". Those who can't pay their debts will end up in the workhouses as well. Those who can no longer work due to health conditions will be euthanized.

From TFA: "Faced with unprecedented volatility, investors and wealthy American families are adopting a strategy of geopolitical arbitrage to acquire additional residence and citizenship options."

The question is will anyone be allowed to leave should it turn into a shitshow in America?

Even the wealthy could end up a significant portion of their unrealized gains on assets to taxes to the US Government if the rules are tweaked just a little bit.

In America you can be fired for any reason, just as long as it isn't an illegal reason thanks to "Employment-At-Will"

So if your job is that precarious, does it even make financial sense to sign up for long term contracts of more than 30 days?

Being able to live is getting more precarious as time goes on. Welcome to the "Precarious Economy". Eventually all workers will be Contractors or Gig workers and there will be no more "Regular Employees" other than those in the C-suite.

So If companies want to treat their employees as disposable assets, then why not treat the businesses you deal with in the same manner? What goes around comes around.

If you need a particular service and it is only available via long term contract, and there's no one offering it on a month to month basis. You'll need to figure out how to do without it. It might mean you even have to move out of the area if all that is offered by landlords are long term leases.

Crappy economy -> Shareholders complain about shareholder value -> Board of directors responds -> CEO gets new marching orders to increase profitability -> It travels down the management hierarchy -> Layoffs, increased hours, more pressure to meet deadlines which seem unattainable -> Monetary Policy Loosens -> People quit or suck it up -> Company suddenly realizes they are understaffed -> Company goes on a hiring spree -> Salaries increase -> Monentary policy tightens -> Crappy economy

"This has a strong chance of causing retails to literally stop offering this, which will just increase prices overall."

Good. Then I'll continue to shop at stores which don't play these games. I don't use coupons, and a lot of stores that I shop at don't take them. (e.g. Aldi, Costco)

There's going to be a big knock-down drag out war on transparent pricing over the next few years. Personalized pricing is just one aspect of it. Getting through the minefield of hidden surcharges, fees, and taxes is another.

Apparently so.

They want to charge the marks more. Those who let money easily slip from their fingers will be paying more. Those who watch every dollar (sorry, pennies are meaningless these days) will be given the best deals.

The way they'll know you are a mark is by looking up your spending habits and income level. If you are a rich tightwad, you'll get a better deal. If you are a poor spendthrift, you won't.

There are a lot of marks out there.

The American way of doing things is to advertise the price before all of the fees and taxes. This is totally opaque (by design, I might add)

The easiest way to get a real cost is to submit and sign up, wait for the first bill, and then and only then you get to see the true cost. Trying to piece it together is bordering on an exercise in futility. I could almost argue that you are wasting your own time (depending upon how you value it by trying to get to the bottom of all the taxes and fees) You just need to make sure the contract is month-to-month so you can cancel it if you think the taxes and fees are unreasonable.

Maybe a progressive state such as California could require complete disclosure of the total monthly cost at sign-up, since they should have all of the information at the end of the sign-up process to determine this.

I think all of this boils down to American Culture, and the fact that Americans don't seem to care as much on the bottom line costs compared to the rest of the world.
American consumers just don't signal that transparent pricing is high on their priority list.

Americans pay sales taxes and don't have the final price at their fingertips without using a calculator. This is presumably so one can figure out how much tax they are paying for an item, but I think the real reason is to make the cost not seem so high when they're deciding whether to purchase the item or not.

The Europeans pay value added tax on goods sols, and the price tag shows the price they will pay when they pay for it. This is the preferred system. 100% price transparency.

"Their discards will be a feast far larger than the potential Linux user market (burp!) as always."

For a while, until more and more websites start enforcing passkeys which require tpm2.0. Also some authoritarian governments may not even allow isp's to permit pc's to connect to the Internet unless they do a TPM signed certificate exchange identifying the user.

Reminds me of canings/paddlings they used to (some US states stll do) give out in school for malfeasance.

They're like Marvell Semiconductor. No data sheets unless you are a muilimillion dollar customer who can pay for the right to access the data sheet under NDA. That makes the chips next to impossible to use by the average hobbyist, and keeps support costs to a minimum.

This also means there will be no clone Arduino boards like there was for the AVR. Of course, this is also true with RPI, but at least they make the RP2040 available in chip form at a fair price.

I really don't get this move by Q. Is Arduino going to handle all the support burden from the hobbyists? Are they purchasing this to hurt the Raspberry PI foundation or Broadcom? Or, do they just want the Arduino trademark and will shut out all the hobbyists eventually. I would think Q would want to continue focusing on large business customers and not want to get involved in the hobbyist market. There's no serious money in the hobbyist market.

Broadcasting is on the decline. It is very common for companies whose products are no longer generating lots of revenue to merge and "Circle the Wagons". The last time I watched any broadcast TV was in the mid 2000's.

What I'd really be worried about is companies like Big News media outlets AP,CNN,Axios,Fox News merging OR a government-imposed "Great American Firewall" cutting off Americans from international news sources. With the serious cutback of PBS, one of the ways you can really find out what's happening iin America, is to go outside and look back in.

First they made it easy for you to listen to your music. Everybody but a few of us embraced this.

Next they're going to enshittify that experience.

The only way to protect yourself from that is to have complete control over your music files.

I wrote a python app to manage all of my music files. Nowadays one with some programming skills could write a personal app using an AI IDE such as Cursor to do the same thing, I'm writing personal apps using Cursor to replace a lot of scripts I've been using over the years. Revamping my music scripts is on my todo list.