It’s part of a pattern. Something about HH seems to appeal to them…

The moral calculus favors China’s rise as long as China doesn’t start any major wars, but the danger of China invading Taiwan is so great that I would have favored a policy of economic containment in order to reduce China’s capability to wage war even if it also reduced China’s economic growth.

Even if you disagree, do you acknowledge that, contrary to the claim in the OP, middle-class prosperity has not led to middle-class self-determination in China?

Has that ever worked? China has not liberalized even after trade with the West made it rich, and neither had Russia (before the sanctions related to the war in Ukraine.

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

My dog had been returned to the shelter because the folks who adopted him wanted him to stay in their yard most of the time and he kept digging out and escaping. That’s ok for some dogs but he was a dog who slept in my bed after having me tuck him in.

Texas became its own country after independence from Mexico only because the USA initially wouldn’t let it join. The overall preference for being a member of a larger nation where descendants of English immigrants held power and were allowed to own slaves was stable over time.

I don’t see anything in there that substantially challenges the facts presented in the New York Times coverage being criticized.

How are you opening IE? I needed to run an old project of mine that uses Silverlight and discovered that in the years since I ran it last, Microsoft has deliberately and irreversibly broken the ability to launch IE directly in Windows 10. I had to set up a Windows 8 VM.

I’m glad that at least one government is stepping in to protect the helpless public from the menace of, uh, ads over five seconds long. Disaster averted.

Some hound breeds are pretty creepy.

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.

What happened in 2001? Because it certainly wasn’t the invasion of Iraq.

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?

Windows is transitioning from being software you run to being an experience that Microsoft provides to you. The pattern of pushing new features to users unpredictably and without the option to refuse is clearly inappropriate in the first model but natural in the second. As a power user I strongly prefer the first model, but I recognize that most people these days might be ok with having their computer work like a website they access or an app they run on their phone - something they have no control over the state of.

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.