Carriers will offer better deals on the phones though if you’re planning to stick with them.

I’m looking at a $1000 phone that ATT will give me for 2.99/month for 2 years. That’s over 85% off on the phone. The trick is they give it to you by actually charging like $42/month, but then giving a $39 credit every bill for 2 years, so you have to pay the difference on the $1,000 phone if you jump carriers.

But since they’re the only carrier that works at my office, and this is gonna be a work phone (my company pays me a monthly stipend for it), I can live with that.

That’s also most of what’s on Amazon these days.

We should be able to charge them for ad time. You want to paint an advertisement on my car you have to pay me. Why should it be any different when you want to put ads on my work computer screen when I’m working with clients?

Hidden manual releases that still require you to push the door through the windows trim. FFS people have already died because of this shit. Why the hell hasn’t there been a mandatory recall on all Teslas over this?

Frankly - it’s a lot harder to quantify. “Time at desk” is easy to track. Response times to tickets are much more variable and difficult to measure.

Some jobs necessarily include idle time when you’re waiting for work to come through even if there’s nothing to do in that specific moment. The flip side of that is that the employer is able to require that the worker be available instantly. If they’re leaving their work area because they’re bored then they’re not “at work.”

My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.

The reason he had to be paid is federal law requiring that all workers who are “engaged to wait” are on the clock. If someone is installing mouse-jiggler software so they can leave their workstation and do whatever they want, they’re no longer being engaged to wait.

The jigglers keep you online status from changing to “away.”

Some jobs require you to be at your desk, and using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.

It was a backlash to auto manufacturers classifying everything as a truck to get around emissions and fuel economy standards. The fucking PT Cruiser was a “truck” according to Chrysler.

So they started classifying standards based on vehicle footprint with the idiotic hope that would make the manufacturers act better, but the manufacturers realized they could just make cars bigger every refresh cycle to stay ahead of CAFE.

Heck - even the letter is just a sans sarif Swastika.

Also black powder guns or ANY gun made before 1898.

A breaker panel can be a kill switch in a server farm hosting the Ai.

All to take away jobs and break the internet.

And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that’s somehow legal.

When Chrome launched Firefox was in pretty rough shape, and Google wasn’t what they are today.

Lots of us switched to Chrome then because it simply ran better.

“We don’t know how it works but released it anyway” is a perfectly good reason to be sued when you release a product that causes harm.

She needs to apply for a jobs at these companies that use the software in order to generate damages she can sue over.

Back when I used a Weber charcoal grill I’d bust out the blow dryer.

I also use mine when starting a fire. Way easier than using a pot lid for stoking.

It’s almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.

In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for “maintenance” specifically to increase energy prices.

There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.

The FCC really started pushing for net neutrality in the Bush administration.

In 2005, the Madison River Telephone company (now Lumen/CenturyLink) blocked Vonage from using its networks and the FCC stepped in to stop them. They then established 4 principles of an Open Internet:

Consumers deserve access to the lawful Internet content of their choice.

Consumers should be allowed to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement

Consumers should be able to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

Consumers deserve to choose their network providers, application and service providers, and content providers of choice.

In 2009, they overtly added the principle of non-discrimination, and in 2010 they made the principles official with the Open Internet Order.

Comcast sued and got the order thrown out, so they started the prices of reclassifying broadband, and the fight reached fever pitch in 2014 when it looked like the FCC was finally going to win for us.

But between 2012 and 2016, the ISPs changed their tactics. They stated colluding with the major tech and streaming services pitching net neutrality as a good thing for the established businesses that could pay the ransom or engage in partnerships. A good example was T-Mobile exempting Netflix from their 2gig data limit on cellular plans. T-Mobile was able to advertise the partnership as a good thing instead of an assault on users and the open internet.

Then the Trump administration took over and took a huge steaming dump on the FCC along with everything else, and the Biden administration just spent the better part of 4 years just trying to seat a commissioner to reinstate open internet.

I’m not optimistic we’ll have it for long.