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.

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I know everybody hates AI but to me it's weird to treat artificially generated nudity differently from if somebody painted a naked body with a real person's face on it - which I assume would be legally protected freedom of expression.

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$ ls space?

Tokyo banned diesel motors in the late 90s. As far as I know that didn't kill Toyota. At the same time European car makers started to lobby for particle filters that were supposed to solve everything. The politics who where naive enough to believe them do share responsibility, but not as much as the european auto industry that created this whole situation. Also, you implies that laws are made by politicians without any intervention of the industries whatsoever. I think you know that it is not how it works.