I think if you had just left it at “Got a substitute?” and left off the snark you wouldn’t be downvoted into oblivion. I’ll try to give you my honest take. It’s a fair question. Amazon is a really nice service. I was a prime member for many years. About 3 years ago I cancelled because: the price kept going up, the usability of the site keeps getting worse, (alphabet soup pop up “brands” poisoning search results) and the customer service has gotten worse.

My process now is, search for what I want with one or more search engines, or, a website with reviews I trust like wirecutter, seriouseats, rtings, gamersnexus, etc. Once I decide on the item, see if the manufacturer sells it direct. Then, I price compare using a google shopping search. If Amazon comes in at MUCH cheaper than everyone else, I might still buy from them. If it’s close, especially if it’s a small business, I try to go more direct. If your cart is over USD $35, shipping is still free but slower. If I have smaller things less than $35, I sit on them and wait until I need enough to put me over or stock up on basics like garbage bags. If I need something fast and Amazon is the only place to get it, I can still pay for shipping several times a year and spend less than I would on the prime subscription. I typically only need to pay for shipping once or twice a year.

You can make Amazon compete and behave better without completely cutting them out of your life. Cancel prime, and shop around.

Trading halts are done automatically by the exchanges anytime any stock falls by a certain amount within a certain time frame. It’s meant to interrupt automatic, algorithmic high frequency trading from a runaway out of control feedback loop - think of it like muting the microphone when the speakers start making that high pitched feedback screech. Give it time. If there’s any justice left in the world it will be a penny stock by the new year.

That’s just straight up factually incorrect. From the link:

As a storage technology, Silica offers volumetric data densities higher than current magnetic tapes (raw capacity upwards of 7TB in a square glass platter the size of a DVD), and using beam steering of the laser beam, we’re able to achieve system-level aggregate write throughputs comparable to current archival systems.

Probably M Disk as others have said for consumer use, but Microsoft is working on storing data in glass that could last for potentially 100,000 years +. Not that you’d ever likely have that in your home. Although, maybe by 2100 we will, who knows. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/

I’m going to agree with you 100% but offer an anecdote, my lg tv has an hdmi 2.0 port but didn’t support Dolby vision at 120 hz out of the box. After an update, it now supports it. Should LG have had that ready to go by the time of manufacture ? Maybe. With design and manufacturing timelines maybe the spec wasn’t ready to implement by the time needed. Is Samsung going to use this to enshitify the tv? Maybe. But the time from design, to manufacture, to retail is such a long process there are cases where a feature update can be justified

PSA: your local fire precinct (in the USA, probably England too) can do a car seat installation and fit check for you. Strap your kids in, and strap them TIGHT. It can be very easy to install a seat improperly, I had mine checked when I was a new parent until I was confident I had it right.

Before anyone flames me for victim blaming I am 100% not blaming the mother. It is quite possible that at those speeds the child would have died regardless, and the driver deserves every day in jail that he spends.

All that conservatives will see is a violent black man. Gun control will continue to not be part of the solution. He was going to do it gun or no gun, if those women had their own guns they could have defended themselves, clearly it was a mental health issue….

FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?

If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.

(citation needed)

That’s unfortunate and disappointing. It’s John Oliver’s recent LWT on Indian elections. He stated in the show that the site was created to get around any potential government censorship.

I’ll just leave this here

http://oppositesnakes.com This is definitely just a website about opposite snakes, totally not related to the topic of this thread in any way.

This comment feels pretty derogatory to me. We know that, and if you had bothered to read the thread before coming in and making assumptions you’d have seen that. You’re missing the point. An enormous amount of information can be inferred by knowing your activity and fitness levels. This guy is on his feet 14 hours a day? Here’s a coupon for some shoe inserts. This guy spent 5 minutes pacing back and forth down the candy isle and didn’t buy anything? We need to give him a nudge to make that purchase. This person does yoga every morning and only buys organic produce? Well, they probably don’t shop at Jewel honestly but hey did you know we carry aluminum free deodorant in the health department? Your motion and fitness data can absolutely be used to infer a general level of healthiness, which is often times (and often incorrectly) also summarized as your BMI.

It was also wisely mentioned elsewhere in the thread that targeting advertising is only the tip of the iceberg as far as what can be done with the profiles these companies build about us. But none of that exactly fits very well into a title for a post.

You know, I almost thought for a minute there was going to be a chance there was something cool behind it, like, “it can guide you to the exact location of a product that you’re looking for with x,y,z precision such as how AirTags work” or, “they look at data to optimize placement of items in the store to make it easier for people to find things efficiently” but it’s actually just another degree of shittyness. That stinks.

That sounds pretty plausible I’ll give you that, and strictly speaking in iOS if they were gathering BMI and that type of data it would come up as a request for “Health”

So with that said to purpose would this information serve them given the way you described it? And is there any guarantee that it wouldn’t also be used to further build their marketing profile? Not trying to be argumentative, you have me genuinely curious now.