Correction: When people were only able to read William Randolph Hearst-approved nonsense.

The media moguls of those days, Hearst, Pulitzer, Insull and others would be rolling over in their graves at the thought of plebeians having a voice that they, the elite didn't control. And they controlled the government too. Just try to run a campaign for office during the days of the old media kings and the era of the owners of the new social media. Who provide editorial control in much the same way. Just the new generation of elites that Hearst would be quite comfortable with.

A 14 year old would have seen this crunch coming. And invested heavily in semiconductor companies like Micron. Thereby making enough money that a 5x or 10x increase in memory prices means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

... these records are worth on the dark web market? Or to some foreign adversary's intelligence department?

By the way: Nice Lamborghini, PFC Pyle.

Oh noes! No more toilet paper.

"We can kill it off ourselves. Thanks anyway."

Tosses it on the pile of Zune, Bob, ME, OutLook, Clippy, IE, Cortana, ...

... there's still 4Chan.

The LLM, being offended by the idea of driving a Corolla, promptly drove itself to a nearby dealer and traded the Toyota in for a Bentley.

Just think! Photovoltaics to collect power from the night sky. To power all the night time illumination. Infinite power!

Just like tax revenue. Let's get to work on it now.

For most of them you can. Absent some activity that causes the public harm, you can start a business "for any legal purpose". We don't require royal warrants in this country. No kings, remember?

Ice age is ending.

Something like this happened to my father when I was a kid. Go to Europe, lose your clearance. Of course, he could have gone into the private sector. Designing nuclear weapons for Elon Musk. :-/

Big numbers scary!!

OTOH, if you look at things like solar irradiance, anthropogenic figures start looking like a zit on a gnat's ass.

Yeah.

But high earners look for good deals and will change their shopping habits if they think they are getting screwed.

The stores where these tactics may work are the downtown grocery and department stores that attract a lot of foot traffic from nearby residents. The rich can just jump in their Bentley and head down the street. Foot traffic is attracted to the nearest outlet and pretty sticky in the face of lugging groceries, squeezing onto public transit with them, or paying for a cab.

WalMart just needs to install electronic scales in the snack aisle floor. Fatso walks in and the prices go up.

Recently changed to "don't get caught."