Looking after your health or taking proper care of your kids is really not in the same category as spending less on veblen goods.

(I'm noticing that people are getting very different messages from this game.)

Yes, I absolutely know folks who buy new phones every year, and who lease new cars and upgrade every 3 years. Most of whom really can't really afford to do these things but do it anyway and end up in increasing debt.

And sure, buy clothes from Walmart if you have a Walmart location near you. I just picked the nearest big-box store to me, for some reason Walmart doesn't have much of a presence out where I am.

(The takeaway I got from the game is "don't try to buy the hat, it's a trap". I'm curious what your takeaway was?)

For example:

- Do you really need a new car, when a lightly used one will do just fine and will be more economical?

- Do you really need to upgrade to a new phone every year when your current one is still working fine?

- Do you really need to buy premium clothes from the mall when the ones from Target are much cheaper?

Brown-outs are arguably more dangerous to your electronics, and those are more common now with more frequent heat waves during the summer, stressing the electric grid and triggering public safety shutoffs on the US west coast.

I also think the concerns in the article are overblown. I grew up in the mountains where the electric grid was notoriously poor quality, especially when buildings would fail over to (often poor-quality) generators. It would make computer monitors misbehave, but rarely did it actually damage anything.

This is a very narrow exemption, however.

(You would also want to make sure you're using a paid AI plan with contractually guaranteed privacy protections, otherwise it could be construed as third-party communications, which implicitly waives privilege.)

See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.

There's a good summary of the current state of things here: https://www.akerman.com/en/perspectives/ai-privilege-and-wor...

Also worth noting that none of this is binding precedent, so expect this field to evolve over time.

I would assume so. Even on older cars, service techs can typically manually push firmware updates over the OBD-II / J2534 port. Rivian's OBD-II port actually hides an Ethernet signal inside of it - so the interface is certainly there.

Fun fact: You can buy an Ethernet adapter directly from Rivian here to connect to the car's internal network: https://rivianservicetools.com/Catalog/Product/TSN00535-300-...

You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.

> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.

At the very least, the writing takes way too long to get to a point.

I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.

For a criminal case, yes, they need to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" - which would require that you are positively identified as the driver.

For a civil case, they only need to prove by a "preponderance of the evidence" - which is a much lower standard.

This is why tickets from red-light cameras in many states are zero-point citations. You're still charged a fine, but there's no finding of guilt attached to the offense, which keeps it away from being considered a criminal matter. (This is the same way parking tickets work.)

Microsoft Access was strictly file based. You could drop the .mdb/.accdb file on a SMB share and it would support basic concurrency via lock files. However, you could also swap out the internal database engine (Jet) with anything else via ODBC, so your Access database could connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server instance - or even MySQL/Postgres.

Back in high school, I even wired up an Access database to give a graphical frontend to an accounting app running on an IBM AS/400 mainframe. ODBC made it easy, and Access itself didn't really care where the data lived.

There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.

The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).