So much this. I started using it during Covid, and it’s been so great that I prefer Sams over any other shopping experience.

Clearly you haven’t spent 3 minutes playing with StableDiffusion. AI has already plumbed the depths of human awfulness.

If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.

Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.

But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.

Is it “don’t use them and just keep track of your stuff”? Because that seems like the most right answer here.

That’s what I’m saying - there’s absolutely nothing about nonprofit status that demands a company not act like a total asshole. Have a look at all the really bad ones like the Komen Foundation or Red Cross if you want an example.

Best bet, barring adding more legal mechanisms to the law, is a private for-profit with careful leadership. Yeah, it can change, but companies that put values first can and often do confer those same values to future leadership. Versus, of course, publicly traded companies where rampant growth at all costs is the only legal requirement.

Most nonprofits don’t do a lot with the general public. They have the community they serve (which is getting something for nothing and therefore “customer service” is not a thing) and the community that funds them (where, of course, service is king). How the company treats you on the outside very much depends on which side of that equation you’re on.

This is necessary behavior for nonprofits, at least in the US, because of the demand for charitable giving. It’s ultimately a decent structure for a charity, but a pretty awful way to run a product or service business, since the incentives are all on the opposite side of “good product/service”. Private for-profits with strong, conscientious leadership do much better - I encourage you to read up on Patagonia and Gore-Tex as examples.

The idea that non-profits aren’t profiting-seeking is the biggest misunderstanding in the world. I work for a large one, and it’s absolutely the same rampant penny-squeezing 30%-unsustainable-growth-seeking monstrosity as anything in the Valley. The pittance that gets thrown to “charitable causes” is just another tax dodge in an otherwise profit-demanding venture. Swap “shareholders” with “the endowment” and there’s no difference at all.

Much better to be a for-profit company with a charter demanding where profits in excess of modest growth targets are spent internally.

They need to make some money - infrastructure isn’t free, employees need paid, etc. they should be self sustaining.

They don’t need to be 2009-Google profitable though. That pipe dream needs to end. 3-5% YoY growth is plenty.

My 80 year old dad has been using a XUbuntu for years and never even noticed. The only reason he knows he’s using Linux at all is because he saw a news story about Windows tracking and asked about it. He was quite happy not to be affected.

At least this article calls out that the stores kept open also are busier, so the higher potential for theft has less impact on profitability.

Nobody closes a profitable location solely over theft. The only closures that shoplifting is driving are ones at stores that were already underperforming. If increasing theft drives a store into the red, that’s a sensible closure, but profitability is the real driver, not theft.

Continue living my life as if federal shenanigans mostly don’t affect daily life, because they don’t.

Hence people falling back to “I don’t care” as a defense mechanism. The world is too big, and there’s too much awful happening, to emotionally invest in all of it. Not and stay sane. It’s so much easier to narrow focus to your own life and pursuits, and let everything else be what it is.

And so we get these useless platitudes, because “I don’t care about that” can be both true and socially unacceptable at the same time.

New socially acceptable ways to say “I don’t give a crap”.

Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.

That’s…a good portion of the free email providers on the planet. Even if companies are using this list as a filter for signups, it’s only going to be for a limited time.

Companies want new accounts. They don’t mind very much if those accounts are fake - big numbers get investor attention. It only takes a handful of support cases with “I tried to register but it says my email address isn’t allowed” before the C-suite makes it clear to IT that this filter is no longer in sync with the corporate strategy.

Unfortunately DoD is right. PFAS are terrible things, but they’re used everywhere (including consumer goods at an astonishing rate) because they’re really effective. Once there are good alternatives, yes let’s ban them forever, but until then we’d all notice their absence in our goods in a big bad way.

According to the rental company I use for work travel, I’ve driven 33 different brand new cars this year, primarily sedans and small SUVs, all ICE (not a lot of EV on rental lots). Every single one had the auto start/stop feature.

Vehicles without it exist, especially as you mention full and partial electrics. But I’m perfectly comfortable with how I represented the situation based on my own experiences.

It’s not explicitly required by law, but that doesn’t make it any less mandatory. It’s one of those “we’re not saying you have to, we’re just saying we’ll beat you up if you don’t” rules federal agencies (EPA, in this case) love so much.

Car and Driver explains some of the reasoning here, though they forget to mention efficiency standards that are explicitly mandated.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a19561461/automakers-increasingly-offer-ways-to-deactivate-stopstart-systems-temporarily/

Oh, sorry. American cars are require to ship with a feature that shuts the engine off at stop lights, and restarts it when you take your foot off the brake. It’s done to supposedly help the environment, which it doesn’t do in the least and is also incredibly irritating.

So car hackers reconfigure their cars to disable that feature.

Cars are computers. All those fancy features run on software. Software can be patched to get rid of unpleasant functionality.

It’s not always easy, but it’s doable, and the more of these stupid features they add, the more people spend time working on undoing them.