This quickly escalates to 'Why are you so nervous? You're sweating', 'Your speech patterns and eye dilation gives me probable cause to suspect you', or simply 'What's that I smell?'.

Everybody needs to buy at least one dashcam with motion record, and learn two simple statements:

"I don't answer questions" "Am I being detained"

Even if you're a shark of a criminal attorney, this is literally all you should ever be saying to an American law enforcement official.

https://beijaflor.io/qwertymidi/

In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.

This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.

This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.

https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/

https://cictar.org/all-research/amazon

Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.

It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Sony have already introduced a change via a March 2026 firmware update to combat refund exploits and digital piracy (specifically targeting web-store refund loopholes on jailbroken or manipulated consoles) - but this again is firmware and in-memory address storage which is easily parsed and manipulated by Agentic AI.

Simply put, GTA V thinks its running on real hardware. Any sort of hardware based validation check (e.g. hitting hardware specific functions that are HLE in the emulator as more general API calls) will be patched nightly if the likes of the dolphin devlog in recent times is anything to go by. Online checks are even more easily bypassed, unless there's some sort of esoteric quantum or one-time pad style implementation which I can't foresee.

"CoPilot, download that PS5 emulator everyone is talking about and then set it up for me."

// Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally

How on earth would they know? At the very least the gold master will be playable in perpetuity. If their netcode is anywhere near as bad as GTA V as well, every piece of DLC or online-service will be replicated on Private servers.

We already have a full eco-system and community-driven multiplayer modification framework for GTA V on PC in the form of FiveM. I'd imagine many talented people (and/or those with token capital) are chomping at the bit to replicate the same with GTA 6.

//Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses,

The PlayStation 5 @ $499 became profitable to manufacture within its first year on the market.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...

Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.

https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-is-making-59-more-revenue-...

If the introduction HP-65 was the first time an individual was capable of fully replicating the logical and cryptanalytic functionality of the WWII Turing-Welchman Bombe, then the roll-out of Agentic AI could be said to represent the first time an individual was capable of replicating the functionality and deliverables of the WRENs of Bletchley Park. Mindboggling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRENS

Even more impressive is the Astra-6 report recently. Given access to the Crypto Cellar Research archive of unbroken intercepts, the AI wrote its own custom Python and C++ software to simulate an Enigma machine and a mechanical Enigma Bombe.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.

We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.

EU's Energy Tax Directive (ETD) enforces a rigid minimum excise duty of €0.330 (33 cents) per litre on auto-diesel used as a propellant. Ireland's VAT rate is 23%. Pre-tax costs account for about 62% and various government taxes/levies account for 38%.

It's running at about €2.16/l in Ireland so that's about $9.30/gallon today. It's €2.70 in Germany and around €2.50 in Greece. For reference Greece's statutory gross minimum wage is €920 per month and Germany's is about €2,400. People are going to starve/freeze this Winter.

A minimum wage teenager, in a city of less than 50,000, on the tills during the breakfast rush, managed to positively ID the suspect, despite him wearing a mask and beanie, based on ambiguous CCTV photos, and decided to snitch. He was then detained within 11 minutes.

Versus

A federal agency tapped into CCTV or kiosk-cameras automatically ID'd him via facial recognition, and then established clean, admissible evidentiary trail to mask an unconstitutional investigative source.

Very easy to keep the parks 'beautiful' when you could just shift anyone undesirable to a prison, asylum, or skid row.

N.B. Littering also wasn't seen as a social failing in 50s America, so there's a bit of a juxtaposition there versus the contemporary reality.

The population of the 26 counties only hit 5 million in 2021, in the midst of lockdown. It then surged massively with global instability, with a 2.2 per cent increase in 2022 alone with the first round of Ukrainian refugees forming the majority of the 117,000 added to the population count.