During the first winter after I got my dog, it took me a few days to notice that the reason he wasn’t asking to go outside as much in the snow was because he was sneaking into the unused bedroom and pooping there.

(Oddly, he had still only peed outside. I guess that’s where he drew the line himself.)

Idealists are letting perfect be the enemy of the good but I don’t think that’s why Democrats underperformed. Neither Clinton nor Biden/Harris were idealists of this sort (despite some stuff Harris said but didn’t mean back in the 2020 primaries) and they didn’t lose elections because of a lack of support from the idealists. So IMO while the idealists aren’t helping, the very much non-idealistic institutions of the Democratic party which prioritize seniority within the party over electability are to blame.

I didn’t think a newborn bear could really be that small, but apparently bears are actually born extremely tiny relative to their adult size, with a newborn polar bear weighing only about one pound!

I still can’t get over the fact that there’s just no way to prevent Windows 11 home edition from ever rebooting automatically.

We reached peak meme back then and it has been all downhill since.

Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.

I’m used to driving a car from 2008, but I borrowed a friend’s 2021 Subaru Forester and there the engine just shuts off after the car is stopped for a few seconds, even without any sort of cruise control. The engine turns back on when I let go of the brake, but I find the noise, the vibration, and the delay of the startups irritating. There’s no way to get the feature to stay off - it defaults to on every time the car starts and it will eventually turn back on while you’re driving even after you’ve pressed the button to turn it off temporarily. I find that especially irritating. (IMO it’s simply not OK for a car to do something after I’ve pressed the button telling it not to do that.)

If they’re undoing changes that customers hate, maybe they’ll get rid of automatic stop-start too?

Are you arguing that it isn’t a scam?

Generally a scam is something done in secret, and if the government finds out exactly what the scammer is doing then the scammer can get in legal trouble. Here Uber is acting entirely out in the open, the government clearly wants to stop Uber, but writing a law that restricts Uber in the intended way appears to be difficult. (Maybe a law written strictly enough that Uber couldn’t work around it would also impact others that the government doesn’t want to target?) So I would argue that this is against the spirit of the law but it isn’t a scam.

I suppose I don’t give “loophole” the same moral weight that you do. Even if this was not intended to be legal, if the law as written permits it then the blame is on the government for passing a law other than the one intended to pass, not on Uber for taking action in accordance with the law.

(Moral obligations can exist without being legally required, but taxes are a legal construct and there is no such moral obligation to pay them which extends beyond the legal one.)

I’m not saying that taxes are bad. I’m saying that if the government says “there’s a new tax you have to pay if you do that” and you say “ok, then I won’t do that,” you have done nothing wrong. You have a duty to obey the law, but no duty to maximize government revenue.

Do you just voluntarily give the government money that you aren’t legally required to pay?

Price is what people are willing to pay, so I’m not sympathetic to your idea that the higher price that people are willing to pay to avoid needing a loyalty card is in any sense illegitimate. It might be a different matter if there was simply no option to buy groceries without a loyalty card, but many stores don’t have cards and even the ones with cards often have close substitutes for products that are on sale, so that if you want to you can limit yourself to buying only those products for which the price without a card is not higher.

My more general opinion is that people who want to legally prohibit things that they can freely choose not to participate in, so that their own behavior won’t have to change but no one else will be allowed to do the thing they don’t like, are displaying an authoritarian impulse.

I can imagine how someone who is still a good person overall might commit certain serious crimes. But the petty stuff like this or littering immediately places whoever does it in the “person I detest” category in a way that, say, robbing a bank would not. The thought of having all that money is a genuine temptation, and maybe the robber needs it for something important. Meanwhile playing audio in a subway car is just completely unjustifiable.

The World Socialist Web Site? Seriously? This isn’t ML.

Demands made by hunger strikers are not democratic demands because rule by those willing to kill themselves isn’t a democracy.

This seems like something they’re being legally required to track to “protect the children”.

I’m really annoyed by this as well, but why do you jump from that to concluding that the government should ban it? I don’t see any reason why the stores should not in principle be allowed to do it.

Sexy legs dragon.

I once had a package marked as having arrived despite never moving past the “shipping label printed” stage. But the company did send me a second one, and then a week later the first one arrived too and they told me to keep it.

Not really archaic - if this was valuable stuff washing up on shore, the law would still be relevant.