some day I hope to be brave enough to post pictures of my house on the internet

the US the 50 states basically act like they are different countries instead of different states. There's a lot of back and forth on that - through the last 50+ years the US federal government has done a lot to unify and centralize control. Visible things like the highway and air traffic systems, civil rights, federal funding of education and other programs which means the states either comply with federal "guidance" or they lose that (significant) money while still paying the same taxes... making more informed decisions and realise that often the mom and pop store option is cheaper in the long run. Informed, long run decisions don't seem to be a common practice in the US, especially in rural areas. we had a store (the Jumbo) which used to not have discounts, but saw less people buying from them that they changed it so now they are offering discounts again. In order for that to happen the Jumbo needs competition. In rural US areas that doesn't usually exist. There are examples of rural Florida WalMarts charging over double for products in their rural stores as compared to their stores in the cities 50 miles away - where they have competition. So, rural people have a choice: drive 100 miles for 50% off their purchases, or save the travel expense and get it at the local store. Transparently showing their strategy: the bigger ticket items that would be worth the trip into the city to save the margin are much closer in pricing. retro gaming community GameStop died here not long ago. I never saw the appeal in the first place: high prices to buy, insultingly low prices to sell, and they didn't really support older consoles/platforms - focusing always on the newer ones.

Worse. Office.com now takes me to m365.cloud.microsoft which as of today now takes me to a fucking Copilot chat window. Ofc no way to disable it because gee why would anyone want to do that?

Lots of people have kids nowadays in their houses, we should ban all of that and out them all in a specialized center or something. I can't imagine what all those people are doing with kids behind close doors under he guise of "family". Truly scary if you think about it.

This is a weirdly aggressive take without considering variables. Almost petulant seeming. 6” readers are relatively cheap no matter the brand, but cost goes up with size. $250 to $300 is what a 7.8” or 8” reader costs, but there’s not a single one I know of at 6” at that price. There’s 10” and 13” models. Are you saying they should cost the same as a Kindle? Not to mention, regarding Kindle, Amazon spent years building the brand but selling either at cost or possibly even taking a loss on the devices as they make money on the book sales. Companies who can’t do that tend to charge more. Lastly, it’s not “feature creep” to improve the devices over time, many changes are quality of life. Larger displays for those that want them. Frontlit displays, and later the addition of warm lighting. Displays essentially doubled their resolution allowing for crisper fonts and custom fonts to render well. Higher contrast displays with darker blacks for text. More recently color displays as an option. This is all progress, but it’s not free. Also, inflation is a thing and generally happens at a rate of 2% to 3% annually or thereabouts during “normal” times, and we’ve hardly been living in normal times over the last decade and a half.

So they.just reinvented the DVB-T tuner. Edit: I looked it up and it's literally just that. The fact they're shoving it into feature phones is interesting.