Now, I’m not one of those “muh free market” morons, but I also think that not every potentially-abusable business practice immediately deserves government regulation against it. By and large it seems that most customers really don’t care that much about this (myself included). The ability for customers to choose where they shop has regulatory power which I think a lot of people fail to recognise. If a behaviour is really repulsive, then customers will just not shop there, which provides a strong negative incentive against the behaviour in question, without any state intervention or enforcement resources required.

An example of this working in practice is the practice of restaurants attempting to introduce tipping in Australia (where it is not customary to tip). Whenever a restaurant frequented by locals tries to force them to tip or makes it awkward to not tip, there is an immediate and strong negative reaction to it from the customers which usually causes the restaurant to give up on the idea.

They can track what people are buying just as well without needing to know who is buying what. If all they cared about was making sure they are stocking items that are popular with customers, they could just monitor how many of the item were scanned at the checkout counters.

When you give your phone number to the store, it serves three functions:

1. The rewards scheme encourages loyalty. Once you have spent hundreds at the store, they give you a minor discount on something small, which saves you only a little bit of money. You only need to decide to patronise this store one time over their competitors for this bribe to be worth it.
2. By learning your shopping habits, they can offer you personalised advertisements to encourage you to buy certain products. For example, a grocery store chain which has a location near where I live has learned that I always buy a certain brand of cheese, and so occasionally they will try to tempt me with something like a 50 cent discount on that cheese, or they will send me a message saying “Hey do you still want (the cheese brand)? We have it in stock!”
3. Some people, when putting things into their basket or shopping cart, will see the large, advertised discounted price and think “this item is reasonably priced”, but then they forget to put their phone number in when checking out and are thus charged the inflated price. The store pockets the difference as customers are unlikely to notice or complain about it. Most people do not closely monitor the price of items as they are being scanned. They only look at the total price at the end before tapping their card.

A strictly logical clock for a 24-hour day would have 0 at the top with 1 on the right and 23 on the left. And it would be only ever set to UTC.

If I had to guess this guy (or girl) is a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that’s just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.

Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine?

I would not be surprised if Meta advertised such a thing to prospective employees as a legitimate benefit of the job. A built-in VR goon cave with 30 TB of material available. Limit 1 hour per person, bookings required 6 months in advance. Sessions subject to monitoring for security and training purposes. May contain trace amounts of Zuck.

The symbol in question:

That’s the dual state for you. The normative state applies to all actions by Trump and his goons, everyone else is subject to the prerogative state. This case is just the normative state being used to protect the prerogative state.

The Supreme Court ruled that district courts can only grant relief to the parties of the case. So the district court is powerless to protect those who don’t file a case before it, with one exception, which is a class action. That’s why the DC public defender wants to change the case to a class action, because that is the only way they can get the board to stop enforcing against everyone.

More specifically, the Supreme Court ruled that the court can’t enjoin an agency from enforcing the rule in question, except against the actual named parties to the case.

So if John Doe and Jane Roe sue an agency and want an injunction, the court can only order the agency to not bother those two people. It cannot order the agency stop doing the thing altogether to all people, even in one area only. That requires a class action.

The Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. CASA that district courts don’t have the power to issue nationwide injunctions to enjoin government agencies from enforcing policies nationwide. Instead, they say that a case needs class action status in order for a court to issue nationwide relief.

People who build their own computers, AKA the group most likely to complain about this

They should make a Windows version called Windows 10P which is the same as Windows 10 but only the bare-bones necessities and no extra crap or required online services, and sell it for $59.99 (seeing that Windows is already de facto freeware). That’s probably an order of magnitude than what they make from intrusive advertising anyway to a single user over the lifespan of a computer.

Damn, even school shooters get to work from home now.

I took a screenshot of this page

(Screenshot removed because it takes forever to load and is not interesting enough to waste bandwidth on)

I am connected to a 4K monitor and this picture is also at 3775 × 2119. The total file size:

12.1 MB

I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

Students view doing that as basically the same amount of work as writing the paper yourself

Aye that’s exactly the same thing that I said

Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it’ll be enough.