conciselyverbose

It’s really not.

In poor countries sure, but not the US or Europe. You will get sued and you will pay if you do that at any scale.

The other benefit with Costco is that they have an extremely generous return policy.

Some obvious stuff has different rules (electronics is 90 days, stuff like tires that have clear expected lifespans have their own rules), but it is extremely liberal. And my experience is that I pretty rarely have to use it, because while not everything is a premium product for a bargain price, they tend to ensure that the suppliers for products they sell have reasonable build quality and make stuff that isn’t trash designed to fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp.

The courts aren’t. Nintendo is.

Emulation has already been litigated to hell and back. It’s very clearly legal, including relying on users pulling a blob or two from their hardware for the whole thing to function.

There isn’t guesswork involved. They know for certain that people will. They have network effect on their side. Their entire audience is captive. Anyone willing to leave already has after the hundreds of different “revelations” of how fucking disgusting everything they have ever touched is.

They aren’t selling anything but your privacy. It’s Apple’s limitations on being overt malware that they’d be bypassing, and it is absolutely guaranteed that they would do so the literal minute they can.

Yes, it would.

They don’t leave the play store because, and exclusively because, Google allows them to do anything they want. Apple does not. The literally exact day a similar law goes into effect in the US, it’s an absolute guarantee Facebook leaves the App Store with every single app they have. There’s not even the slight possibility they stay there.

Facebook/ten cent/etc have literally zero reason to stay off the play store. Google encourages them to be malware, and doesnt curtail their bad behavior is any way.

Apple doesn’t. They might not leave while they think they can also destroy the security of iOS in the US, but it is a complete and utter certainty that the literal day any similar law takes effect in the US that Facebook and all their apps leave the App Store completely. They absolutely can trivially walk people through the steps from their website and the apps that are already installed, and they already have the monopoly to force their users to deal with it.

Apple isn’t Reddit, building a market by claiming to be open then locking it down. They built their market because the walled garden is a massively better product.

I literally buy iPhone mostly because of the walled garden. It’s by far the biggest value add they have, and they grew to the scale they are in large part because of the value that adds.

If you want to sell an app on iPhone, you have to follow their human interface guidelines. You have to respect users’ privacy (not enough, but as much as they can enforce). You used to be required to take payment through Apple’s payment methods that make it incredibly easy to track and cancel subscriptions. Courts taking the payment rules away makes my experience worse. A shitty law forcing Apple to allow apps to pull out of the App Store and do whatever they want would make my experience much worse. (Thank God I’m not in the EU or subject to that.) If I was in the EU, the government be stealing a large portion of the value of the phone I paid for from me, to be replaced by stuff I can already do if I really want to.

These laws aren’t giving power to the people. They’re taking away Apple’s power to protect people and giving the power to fucking China through epic.

The problem is that “don’t let people game you” is extremely difficult.

It’s many, many orders of magnitude easier to provide a useful search of sites that tell you the truth about what they are than it is when 99% of sites lie to you.

But still declared them liable for the actions of their users.

Bad ruling, just less bad than it could be.

I’m guessing they’re the leagues they have some rights to. But even assuming they have it solved way before football season it dampens my interest a bunch.

No NFL? I don’t care that it’s the offseason. It dwarves every other US sport. Not having it to select day one is odd.

Edit: “yesterday” instead of “recent games” is just as weird.

If I put the over/under at 10x male pirate to female, are you taking the under?

I’ve definitely noticed the results suck ass, but this is a nice breakdown.

That shouldn’t work. They should still be unconditionally liable for anything the rep said in all scenarios, with the sole exception being obvious sabotage like “we’ll give you a billion dollars to sign up” that the customer knows can’t be real.

I think what I’m eventually going to have to do is roll my own. I don’t need crazy complexity, but I do want some features nothing seems to have. I want the bulk editing that’s only on goodreads, and I really want series to be first class citizens. That means series nesting in other series and being able to have a blurb/rating for a series instead of each individual entry, mostly. I just haven’t got to it yet.

I don’t necessarily have to have the metadata all the public social network style tools use to combine everyone’s input to one book object, though I definitely understand how it’s frustrating for services to lose information when you import your lists. But organization tools are critical to me.

I had like 1200 books when I tried it, and the number missing wasn’t too bad.

But I’m not doing a list of 100 books searching one at a time. It’s bad enough to have to do big chunks to add to my reading history because I don’t keep that up. Re-doing organization without bulk editing just isn’t going to happen.

I don’t use their reviews to decide what to read, but I have checked after the fact on books I like and I think the quality of what they surface tends to be pretty bad.

A lot of mindless criticism, especially. It’s perfectly OK to be critical when a book has flaws, but so many of the top reviews were people who just weren’t the target audience criticizing it for being targeted at something different than they wanted. Whether that’s rigorous academic nonfiction with reviews complaining that it cites its sources, kid/YA books with people complaining that there isn’t enough depth, someone like Janet Evanovich or Jana Deleon writing deliberately nonsensical stuff for light humor getting complaints about not being realistic, romantic suspense getting criticism because characters are emotionally connected too fast when that’s part of what the genre is, etc.

It’s perfectly fine to be disinterested in a book because you’re not interested in that genre, but it seems like way too many of the higher visibility reviews are people who just aren’t interested in what the book is trying to do.

I have no idea.

I do know that I’m not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I’ve tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it’s just too much.

Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I’m willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I’m not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that’s the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.

I wish there were more cards.

I have played it a decent amount, but I probably wouldn’t still play it if it wasn’t also on my iPhone (there’s a “plus” on Apple Arcade that looks identical, too).

I like Monster Train better mechanically for the reason that it does feel like there’s a lot more variety, though I dislike how short the runs are to build a deck with. (I’d like Slay the Spire to go longer on a good run, too).

I haven’t been too far on ascensions. I don’t think they’re really more entertaining. I mostly do the daily runs because at least there’s variety there.