There is in fact an interstate market in many substances that are illegal to trade because laws against things do not make those things fail to exist.

Most attempts to analyze what Satoshi would do suffer from a serious theory of mind blindspot. Just a failure to imagine someone who's motivated by significantly different things than the average person. It's the same failure as when people marvel at billionaire CEOs who continue to work despite having more than enough money to satisfy their every material whim.

Yes, if I were Satoshi or Bezos I'd have fucked off to a private island long ago. But they're not like me.

The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.

People can do that too, and also benefit from actual structured data. But the avoidance of the chicken and egg problem didn't seem to result in widespread structured data stores beating out the SEO-spam-style listings.

I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's not hard to specify structured data about items and run queries against it. But it largely has not materialized outside of a few special suppliers.

You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can, however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6 Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors, Birthday Gifts "

Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What economic incentives will lead to good structured data and transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent of glurge/slop listings is?

3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play ", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.

Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.

I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.

It's quite possible that these problems are solvable and can be engineered around, that there's a whisker-based solution, but I don't see it. It's certainly not an obviously workable solution.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to " This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to " and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.

My family has two phone lines for $50/mo, plus we buy two ~2 year old iPhones every 3-4 years, which adds maybe another $20/mo average to the cost.

And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as much about the team, or the sport, and so on.

What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For some people and some things, the short-term demand is very inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the people making these decisions have better models of that than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.

But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.

And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.

The same way that I wouldn't bother to fact-check a spam phone caller, why give any credence to this kind of thing?

There will surely be some customer pissed about the extra 2 cents they were charged who will raise hell over the exact change law.

But what customer is going to be upset over a small discount?

But good luck convincing every state, county, municipality, and other weird governing body that requires something other than that and also collects a weird sales tax.

Or go with the solution that papers over all that nonsense: a flexible and maximum $0.04 per purchase discount.