They left it until the very end of the article:

Early research on personalized pricing isn’t favorable for the consumer. Consumer Watchdog found that the best deals were offered to the wealthiest customers—with the worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options.

It’s in the comics too.

You’d have to remove half the supreme court

Make that two thirds of the Supreme Court. Most of the worst decisions have been 6-3.

The US has a law to limit the liability of gun manufacturers.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a U.S law, passed in 2005, that protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. Both arms manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible. However, they may be held liable for negligent entrustment if it is found that they had reason to believe a firearm was intended for use in a crime.

I’m pretty sure this supreme court would rule that people don’t have a right to electricity, or even water. They’ll probably be totally ok with people losing internet access as punishment for crossing media owners.

“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.

You shouldn’t be “paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago” regardless of anything an executive has done. Be less lazy and cancel subscriptions to shitty services.

Also, if a CEO doing a bad thing is a dealbreaker for them, why the fuck are they on twitter?.

Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.

Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.

The music labels have responded by trying to make artists wait much longer before they can try something similar:

It’s significant, Greenstein said, that the first Taylor’s Version wasn’t released until she’d been off Big Machine for three years. Until then, she was legally bound not to re-record any of the material, and this time frame was typical of record deals in the past. But this is the part of the equation that Swift likely changed for good.

“For decades, major labels were somewhat rational when it came to the prohibition of re-recordings,” Greenstein said. “But now they’re going to be asking, ‘What’s the risk of a Taylor’s Version?’”

In response, record companies are now trying to prohibit re-recordings for 20 or 30 years, not just two or three. And this has become a key part of contract negotiations. “Will they get 30 years? Probably not, if the lawyer is competent. But they want to make sure that the artist’s vocal cords are not in good shape by the time they get around to re-recording.”

Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.

Australia has never contemplated imposing a similar tax. New Zealand tried but backed down last week after the United States threatened to impose higher tariffs on New Zealand goods.

What happened in New Zealand is almost certainly what will happen in Australia. This will go nowhere.

Microsoft owns id’s parent company these days, and Microsoft provides services to the Israeli military.

Well the AI companies and investors should have understood that building an industry off of doing something questionable was risky and risks don’t always work out.

Slate: The Far Right Thinks Sydney Sweeney Killed Wokeness

It’s a common phenomenon, really. Sydney Sweeney is beautiful now, and would be considered so in any era. But because she’s no longer the only type of woman who’s considered beautiful, certain people on the right think they’re being oppressed and the world has gone to hell.

Why have these weirdos zeroed in on Sweeney in particular? There are lots of beautiful white women with big boobs out there—Kate Upton, Blake Lively, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Ratajkowski, and more. As far as I can tell, part of it seems to be that Sweeney doesn’t shy away from talking about or sharing her body. On Euphoria, she does a lot of nudity, and she’s spoken in interviews about feeling comfortable with it. On SNL, she repeatedly joked about her boobs and even wore a Hooters uniform. The National Post praised Sweeney for “playfully owning her sex appeal with zero apologies” and criticized Vanity Fair for suggesting it might have been nice to give her some material that wasn’t about her beauty.

Trump’s tariffs lowering the US wine industry’s sales is just preparation for his environmental policies lowering their production by making it harder to grow grapes. It’ll all balance out eventually.

The article is out of date. According to this one, the game has been removed from sale on Steam in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the dev is going to withdraw it from Steam entirely.

Zerat Games has announced it will withdraw its sexually explicit visual novel from Steam after it was removed from sale in the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Posted to the game’s Steam page, which is no longer accessible to those who have not previously purchased the game, the developer defended its title but confirmed it would be removed from the platform.

“We don’t intend to fight the whole world, and specifically, we don’t want to cause any problems for Steam and Valve,” the developer said.

The trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that Trump signed in his first term will be up for review next year, but he decided to “negotiate” with tariffs this year instead. Any country can look at how Trump has handled the USMCA for a preview of how an agreement with Trump will go.

If he makes it 420% maybe Elon will get on board.

An x1 slot is an x1 slot, the PCIe version will downgrade but there will still only be one lane because that’s all the slot physically has connections for. It will effectively be a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.

Pretty sure if you put a PCIe 3.0 card in a 4.0 slot the slot will drop to 3.0, and 1 PCIe 3.0 lane probably isn’t going to work great with a card meant for 4 of them.

No, because they can afford the legal fees. It will be worst for smaller sites. From the article:

With Section 230, if a website (or a user!) wants to defend its right to keep content up (or take it down), winning such a case typically costs around $100,000. Without those protections, even if you’d ultimately win on First Amendment grounds, you’re looking at about $2 million in legal fees. For Meta or Google, that’s a rounding error. For a small news site or blog, it’s potentially fatal. And this includes users who simply forward an email or retweet something they saw. Section 230 protects them as well, but without it, they’re at the whims of legal threats.