JohnGB

You say that as if the courts are a reasonable solution for most people. In many cases the cost and time render them useless and often cost more than the invoice that is due. In some jurisdictions you may recover this, but in many you can't.

This is reported on as if the loopholes allowing foreign money into US politics was not intentional in the first place. It would be quite simple to close these sorts of holes, but those in charge have generally made use of loopholes, and so are not about to close off their funding sources.

What happened to Republicans and small government?

Google's entire process is opaque and open to dodgy behaviour. I had an app which was growing really well with about 5-10k downloads a day growing at about 20% a week and an average rating of 4.8 stars over a few thousand reviews. Suddenly this is tanking overnight and when we look into the data, we have twice as many new uninstalls per day as we do downloads a day. Next to no uninstalls from existing users, no change in the ratings, and no technical outages. It looked like a bot farm was just installing and immediately (as in less than a minute later) uninstalling the app over and over again. Google decided that this meant the app was bad, and we went from position 2-5 for our main keywords to not even in the top 50 overnight. I tried appealing, and tried getting information, but Google did absolutely nothing about it.

Wow, that's going to teach them a lesson! A whole $8.5M - That's literally only 23 minutes of 2022 revenue lost (I did the maths). I'm sure they will never do it again, despite the fact that they likely made way more than $8.5M from doing it.

If we want companies to stop doing illegal things, then the punitive consequences need to be so high that they prioritise not doing it. If a person steals $100, they could spend a decent amount of time in jail for it. Time that is worth a lot more than then $100 benefit they received. Companies want all the benefits of being a "person", so let's apply the same principles to them.

The Netherlands did a study on bike helmets and found that cars tend to be more dangerous with cyclists if the cyclists are wearing a helmet, which is why there are no mandatory bicycle helmet laws in the Netherlands. However, it's worth noting that the cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands also for the most part separates bikes and cars with more than just a line of paint, so their experience may not translate well to other countries with poor cycling infrastructure.

Oh how I wish Mcmaster would open an EU branch... I don't even mind if they charge us more, but PLEASE for the love of all engineers in Europe, just open a branch here.

That's because those laptops were specifically designed to not be easily repairable. The new ones are complying with EU regulations, and so are easier to repair.

It's not as if Apple didn't do everything they could to not do this. They were forced kicking and screaming by the EU to do this, and now they are trying to take credit for doing it.

I have a background in electricity regulation and policy analysis. A good friend (who knows nothing about energy regulation or science got assigned as a senior consultant in one of the big 5 consulting firms to advise a national energy producer on their technical and economic strategy for a new plant.

So, she asked me if I could spare a few hours to sit with her and get her up to speed on electricity regulation and policy so that she would "know all about it" for the kickoff meeting in two days time...

That's an ironic take given that these rules are there to take away monopoly power and have an actual open market.

I'm just dumbfounded by the fact that the US Supreme Court has no term limits, age limits, or reasonable impeachment mechanism for justices that have unethical behaviour or outright lie on their job interview.

The USA is the most "at will employment" country in the world until it comes to the most critical functions of a government. It's absolutely crazy to me.

I see you follow the Chamberlain method of giving Russia whatever it wants because it won't possibly ever come back to affect you...

> Normally, cases of fraud or mistakes could be rectified or reverted by the bank or similar institutions after a review of the situation by humans.

This "could" happen, but in practice it rarely happens because the money has moved on as soon as it hits the account. Additionally, for many types of fraud, there has to be an actual court order to get a bank to take action. So the argument is predicated on a false assumption.

What did the USA have to do with blocking Nordstream 2? Germany stopped certification, no the USA.