In the US it’s absolutely sending that data out.

Would you believe it’s right after 121 and 7th? Not 121 and 8th; that leads to the one way bike path. Obviously. And if you make that mistake you have to use 3 highway ramps in perfect conjunction to get back there. Crossing all lanes for each exit.

Same. I loved the independence of it. But it didn’t pay enough to cover the repair bills it generated.

“unskilled labor”

Not AI. People absolutely make the poor choice of wading in. Not everyday but it certainly happens.

To be fair, it’s killed a few ducks with all the algae and chemicals in it right now… It probably isn’t a good idea. But also we know that’s not why they’re stopping people.

It’s several hundred dollars just to get there from the west coast. Many Americans do not have 800 dollars they can throw at a vacation.

Oops, I pushed a patch. Controlling the service is the ultimate Man In The Middle attack.

We could raise money for art without decadent rich people parties if we just like stopped hoovering up all the money and giving it to rich people.

But we might see bewbs!!!111!!11!

We really need to kick this idea that rich people are smarter. The vast majority were born on third base and think they hit a home run.

I see we’ve contracted the Chinese Flag and Drum Corps to make sure we have enough red flags for this guy?

Unless we really screw the pooch in 2028 we won’t get there any time soon. Another term for Maga could very well do it though, so possibly 2030?

Corruption. It just so happens that the GOP is so corrupt it’s ridiculous. The Democrats are not immune to bringing grifters into their party. The entire upper crust of society runs just like the aristocracies we tried to leave behind.

NCD is leaking again. Someone get the 100mph tape.

Hold on I got a thing for that around here somewhere… I think is called a DD214 or something? Oh here’s a PT belt that’ll work.

Yup. The US Patent office isn’t very good at it’s job.

I got bad news for you. Gabe is human and barring a miracle in medical science; he will die. He’s 63, the tables on Age Cohort death aren’t kind after 60. (They’re brutal after 70) Only 1/3rd of men reach 80.

This is something we need to be thinking about now. It could easily take 5-10 years to get competitors working.

Monopolies distort markets even when they act in a pro-consumer manner. For example the credit card companies. A basic credit card is really cheap and easy for the average person to use. All of the fees are actually on the business side, which is why you see businesses that still run on cash only or charge a credit card fee. The credit card network operators, (AMEX, Disc, MC, VISA) are the only option for businesses that want to accept credit cards in the US. You don’t see a Debit card fee because it’s actually illegal for them to pass along the Debit card processing fee.

So while the average person with the line of credit is happy about this, the businesses are not. In a normal system you would pay for the service being provided. So the person with the card would be responsible for paying to have that access.

Steam does this by making their product (the storefront) free to the average person and charging the developers money to use it. While they also effectively own your games. In a system with plenty of storefronts it might be much more common to see downloadable installation files. That’s certainly one way in which they’ve distorted the market. That used to be very common. It doesn’t help that EA, GamePass, and some others who’ve tried to start storefronts have repeatedly tripped over their own feet. Epic seems to be doing it but they’re basically using Steam’s business model because there’s no other choice as long as Steam exerts it’s monopoly power.

It’s nearly to $7/gal here.