But wait… there is another.

If you think shit is bad for the retail gamer, imagine how fucked actual industry consumers have it.

I have to wonder what this is going to do to the Cloud Computing markets in another three or four years.

They’ll pivot to being the world’s largest RAM re-saler and clean up.

what happens when your profile starts to match up with someone who commits crimes?

I’d dismiss this as fanciful ten years ago. But we’ve got ICE agents staking out grocery stores and flea markets looking for anyone passably “illegal”. Palantir seems to have made a trillion dollar business model out of promising an idiot president the ability to Minority Report crime. And then you’ve got the Israeli’s Lavendar AI and “Where’s Daddy” programs, intended to facilitate murdering suspects by bombing the households of relatives.

I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit more paranoid.

I gotta say, I’ve never really found the appeal of the self-propelled vacuum cleaners. They’re incredibly finicky and prone to getting snagged on surfaces. They don’t have particularly good suction and their waste storage is minimal. Tons of moving parts that wear through easily over time. Belts, fans, and wheels all get worn away from the device’s heat and exhaustive regular use.

The time savings is minimal and the expense is extraordinary. I just don’t think its worth the trouble.

You really think companies in America with monoplies would lower prices just because their costs went down?

So, theoretically, there’s a point at which induced demand through lower prices can raise profits. Having a monopoly on an elastic good only benefits you when you’re onboarding new clients at an escalating pace. Private energy companies looking to increase energy consumption overall may well take an upfront haircut on the retail price in order to encourage more people to adopt hardware that consumes the commodity.

But - over the long term - sure, the incentive is to capture more revenue in pursuit of higher profit. And that means raising prices faster than inflation.

That said, a public investment, could be pursued as a loss-leader. Public money invested in publicly owned utilities raises the availability of low-cost energy for private consumption. This is spent in pursuit of higher overall economic growth.

Our utility bills would be cheaper if the government invested

So much of the price of a thing is bound up in the administrative overhead and profit extracted at every step of the delivery process. You can pull a kwh of energy out of the ground, in the form of a lump of coal or a liter of gas, for pennies on the dollar when it is eventually sold retail. And that’s before we consider the pricing impact of artificial scarcity that occurs under the ERCOT model of wholesale electricity auctions.

By contrast, the TVA system has kept prices below (often far below) the national market rate simply by operating at-cost as a public enterprise. Energy companies in socialist states - from Sweden to Iran to China - can even retail electricity at subsidized rates (below cost of production) as a loss leader intended to spur high value domestic energy-hungry industries like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication.

Getting to green energy now that the global economy is flush with dirt-cheap high yield solar panels and market-competitive lithium batteries definitely cuts the raw labor / machine costs of fossil fuel extraction. And they defer the tail costs of fuel waste pollution management as well as the associated ecological and human health knock-on effects. But even sticking to the old fossil fuel economy is cheaper under a public system when the costs of operation aren’t inflated by the demands of private administrators and investors.

Internet in 2005: “Don’t trust anything you read in the newspaper, watch on TV, or hear on the radio. The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2015: “You can now read the newspaper, watch TV, and listen to the radio on the Internet! The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2025: “AI gibberish”

Fool! This is the only folding phone any true man could need

😏

Same reason Gillette gave us that third razor

Napster was audio only.

It was file type specific and had a soft file side limit, but that’s easy enough to work around.

Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?

They all had it as well, yes

There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state

Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.

Is California no longer liberal?

Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)

Looks like they’re retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the “Supporters and Opponents” what you’re going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.

They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.

The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don’t see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they’re toothless if you’ve got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.

Setting aside the fact that there’s no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.

FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.

soon we’ll have no states to vpn to

I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you’re really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just… not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.

then all the websites will be in French

Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.

States are also considering banning VPNs now as well.

Well, some legislators have proposed taking wack-a-mole to the next level and demanding all VPNs be certified and regulated. But good luck getting that passed through the Silicon Valley Presidency or the Ancap Courts.

I mean, a VPN is way cheaper than whatever hoops Idaho wants you to jump through to watch some 10/10 goth hottie get their ass eaten.

CMD

power

We Just Can’t Win