Just did this myself. I had a collection of regular watches that I went back to and I’m loving it.

I also just bought a DAP for music and already have an XTEink X4 ereader. Slowly moving to get rid of a mart phone all together.

This is not unique to America. They exist where you are from too, friend.

Because they weren’t appropriately punished at the time.

Why do so many in the US feel entitled to make decisions for others?

What downvotes?

Forgive me if I doubt it could be appropriately regulated and properly applied in the US.

state seizure of the vehicle

Absolutely not if you’re talking the US. We already have civil forfeiture which is abused far to easily and frequently.

lol your friends want you to come and fake it even if you’re drained? They don’t sound like good friends then.

lol

artificial scarcity

That’s called “lack of demand”

Only a little over 10% of Americans have an e-reader and their popularity is declining.

E-ink screens will continue to be niche technology without the advantages of increased development by competing manufacturers.

Way back in the early 2000s cellphones varied greatly. All the designs and models that were available and all pretty distinctive. Today the market is almost exclusively touch screen smart phones; evolutions of the early designs by Apple, HTC, Samsung etc.

Three years later the first iPad was released and that same year Samsung released the Galaxy Tab.

Widespread adoption and competition drives development.

The market works the other way. You want a lot of adoption at the mobile level which will drive development faster and then those developments can be scaled up.

The iPad exists, in part, because of the iPhones specifically and the development of touch screen mobile technology in general.

There’s a whole article about HOAs. Pay especially close attention to the part about common interest developments, that’ll be the reason why HOAs are growing rapidly across the US.

Every time that happens I’m reminded of the saying, “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”.

Humans are worse. Dogs, and many other animals, simply follow their instinctive behavior. We, as humans, have the ability to reason and still do all the gross and nasty shit we do.

The article I read said the USPS rules they’re trying to implement would be to have the postal service pick up and then verify the ballots against the list of voters. If any don’t match they’d be obligated to throw out the entire bunch.

Blatant election tampering through a federal government controlled service.

Trump was never against war in Iran or the Middle East and he’s not for it now.

Trump’s only interest and allegiance is to Trump and always has been. Donald J. Trump is what NPD would be if it came to life off the pages of a psychology textbook.

He started a war with Iran. It was the Republican president before him, Bush, who started a war with Iraq.

Online piracy is still incredibly common, accounting for as much as 22% of online traffic during peak times.

While it has declined somewhat overall there’s starting to be a resurgence and the crackdown in 2023 that took down most of the pirating sites just consolidated a lot of it and evolved how people pirate.

https://worldmetrics.org/piracy-statistics/

It’s not really about ALPRs though. ALPRs have been in use in some form since the 1970s. The issue is the information they gather and where it goes.

This focused hatred of “ALPRs” is good in the short term to drive change but not in the long term for sustainable action.

For example, all consumer automobiles in the US require front-facing collision avoidance cameras by 2029 under federal automotive safety laws. Tack an ALPR system on, use the built in cellular and satellite collections and all of a sudden every vehicle becomes an ALPR camera on wheels.

People are filmed and photographed all the time these days; think things like business CCTV, home camera systems like Ring, pre-existing DOT cameras, dash cams, people filming their lives and everywhere they go etc. etc.

In the long term people need to control the collection and use of the data and establish some significant penalties for misuse. It would be nice if, in the US, we could establish that any data gathered by ALPRs is covered under the 4th amendment and require a warrant for starters.

I also think the data should be required to be stored by the government agency utilizing it, no third parties.

Pocket shot or wrist ticket with ball bearings?