Yeah I strongly feel that the best outcome of all of this would be the end of sponsorships and affiliate links, and a general reduction in price discrimination.
Something I've occasionally wished for is a classic-style Zelda game[1] where partway through the adventure you discover that all the dungeons are actually adjacent to each other, and you can open up passages connecting them turning it all into one big Metroidvania experience.
[1]: i.e. one with 4-8 dungeons and new navigation/combat tools in each, not a sandbox like BotW
We had this problem, 119 services that all got their dependencies from a shared domain. Individual services had to depend on the exact version of libraries provided by the domain. It made updates essentially impossible.
Eventually we were forced by a licensing change to move to containers, which fixed that issue but substantially increased our research usage, we went from 16 GB of RAM for the entire domain to 1.5 GB per service, with similar increases on CPU.
Microsoft is terrible about this kind of stuff. We have a big problem with MS Teams replacing tabs with nbsps in XML code snippet blocks. It breaks our pom files. We've also had similar issues with pasting excel tables into emails.
American tipping culture has its origins in the post-Civil-War south:
> Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, formerly enslaved Black workers were often relegated to service jobs (e.g., food service workers and railroad porters). However, instead of paying Black workers any wage at all, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services. Thus, the use of tipping to pay a worker’s base wage, instead of as a bonus on top of employer-paid wages, became an increasingly common practice for service sector employment. In the early 20th century, these employers, who shared a common goal of keeping labor costs down and preventing worker organizing, formed the National Restaurant Association (NRA). Over the past century, the NRA has lobbied Congress to achieve these goals, first by excluding tipped occupations from minimum wage protections entirely, and later by establishing permanent subminimum wages for tipped workers (One Fair Wage 2021).
On the other hand, the government staying out of it makes it better, because if you're banned by the main taxi firm or housing market or [insert rhetorical third thing], there remains the chance of using some sketchy unpopular alternative service, and you're not in violation of the law if you find such a option.
I’m reminded of the punishment that Kevin Mitnick received, which included a ban on using any computing device more advanced than a landline phone. I understand that he was agreed to this, but one cannot agree to sell themselves into slavery[0], and yet these supervised release conditions are considered legal and acceptable to most folks not subject to them. Plea deals are a pox on society.
> Mitnick was released from prison on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release period, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
The sketchiness of those alternative services frequently means you are in violation of the law by using them. IP law on its own for film and tv is a series of monopolies granted to pieces of content and if the owner doesn’t want to sell it to you, Pirate Bay is not a legal alternative.
Regardless these arguments about whether it’s bad based on if the government is involved or not is ridiculous given how interwoven our corporations and government are. Like just doing business with any company strips your 4th amendment rights on that data.
There’s no sane way to argue that they have a clear delineation throughout society
The clear delineation is the police and prisons, and courts. If the government is a corporation that happens to control the police, despite having that power it still isn't supposed to have everything all sewn up, because laws and courts and institutional resistance prevent it from doing anything it likes. This system is theoretical and supported mostly by wishing, but used to work for quite a long time. Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
> Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
You should visit some megacorp campuses and then rethink this view. If you actually believe it then I dare you to do something against their rules while in one of their offices and be marveled at how many people pour out of the literal walls dressed in clothing colored based on their specific job, and then tell us about how they lack police forces
They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of. In my naivety I don't believe megacorps carry out extrajudicial punishments, apart from banning people. They have to go through the law, and try to get people punished, not carry it out themselves.
>They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of.
This is not true, they have their own private security forces, with guns, who will seize you on their property. Managing to run away from an organization's controlled territory to be safe from them, applies to public 0governments too
> The government staying out of it makes it worse.
That's because all that power turns the companies into paragovernamental organizations. Anything with the power to gatekeep human rights is a government.
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