Pandemanium

Alternatively, if you really prefer the rotating menu thing you could forget the food truck and do a supper club. Typically a reservation-only, once a week or once a month thing, or whenever you have time. If you could find a small local farm to partner with, they may be able to offer you dining or cooking space in return for showing off their veggies or something.

What exactly do you propose the "normies" do? Is there some non-corporation making road-worthy cars? No? Let me guess, you want a family of 5 to bike 2 hours to the nearest school/park/grocery store in the snow on rural roads with no shoulder just to avoid paying a corporation? Take the nonexistent train?

There's still the issue of birds, which do not like these things in their airspace and, depending on the size, will absolutely either attack drones or be maimed by them. Also, helicopters and small planes often fly quite low. We haven't had a great record with autonomous cars, but sure, let's try autonomous flying drones. What could go wrong?

The part that isn't mentioned in this article is the onus of marketing. Now that anyone can self publish with almost no overhead, more than a million books are published every year. How many of those even get noticed? Sometimes it feels like people see the same 10-20 books on the bestseller list (which is gameable btw) and think that's all there is to read.

These days, traditional publishers don't do any marketing on behalf of authors unless they feel it's a sure thing, similar to how they give out advances. If you are already famous or have large social media following, you're far more likely to get an advance or a marketing effort. Everyone who self publishes, and even most who are traditionally published, have to do their own marketing. Most writers are not marketers, and this is where they fail, no matter how good their book might be.

Personally, I think the big publishers will collapse soon and the whole industry might move to a subscription model ala Spotify. That would probably be worse for writers, but no one seems to be able to come up with a solution that makes book writing a more viable career.

It's insufferable that the answer is always "build your own." Lemmy assumes that every single person on the planet is an engineer with enough free time to design, build, and troubleshoot every device they own.

But what about a car? Cars are as smart as smartphones now, and you certainly wouldn't notice the small amount of power needed to collect and transfer data compared to driving the car. Some car manufacturer TOS agreements seemingly admit that they collect and use your in-car conversations (including any passengers, which they claim is your duty to inform them they are being recorded). Almost all the manufacturers are equally bad for privacy and data collection.

Mozilla details what data each car collects here.

I started a free trial of Adobe stock. I forgot to cancel after the first month. They charged me $30 for the next month, ok, that's on me. But when I tried to cancel during that second month, they said I had signed a contract to pay them for a year (I didn't, all I did was sign up for the free trial) and I now owe them $165 to cancel the subscription. So in essence they were going to charge me $195 for one month of Adobe stock. That's insane.

I've tried. Marge's voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Most of the voice actors are so old they don't sound like the characters at all anymore. At least they stopped doing the trendy celebrity guest of the week on every episode.

software latches onto existing installations, which can include government-owned surveillance cameras as well as privately owned cameras at businesses and homes.

How can that be legal, or even possible? If you and your partner film yourself in the bedroom, I guess they're gonna tap into that too?

I'd say it's not even capitalism but the rabid anti-tax people/movement. Third spaces like libraries and parks are paid for by tax money, and if people keep voting against raising taxes, well guess what. No more public spaces.

It's a little harder to lug around millions in cash without anyone noticing.

Not all secret transactions are illegal, but the people who are doing illegal transactions will do anything they can to keep them secret.

No one is recycling still-working cars after only 5 years. Unless you're talking about insurance deciding to salvage a vehicle after a wreck, which is a different story. Even those don't always get destroyed, some are parted out and some are probably shipped overseas to get a second life.