smnrchrds

> (CRTC) today announced that as of December 1, 2017, all individual and small business wireless service customers will have the right to have their cellphones and other mobile devices unlocked free of charge upon request. In addition, all newly purchased devices must be provided unlocked from that day forward.

https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crtc-wireless-code-cellphon...

> I bought a Pixel 7 Pro from store.google.com (Canada) ... being sold “unlocked” by Google

Carrier-locking is not permitted in Canada, so all the discussions about where the phone was bought and that the full price was paid are immaterial.

Not familiar with the attorney, and the Wikipedia page does not imply he is a grifter. Care to elaborate?

It's curious that the market (almost?) always decides what is bad for the consumer and profitable for the companies. As a person who is a person not a company, I would rather we don't let the market decide so much about our lives.

Examples: Smart (spying ad-showing) TVs, non-compete agreements, water heater rentals, not-really-unlimited "unlimited data" cell plans, surveillance economy, only-rentable-not-buyable software and films and TV shows and audiobooks, etc.

The list only includes "bank"s, that are federally-regulated entities. The biggest provider of banking services in Quebec is Desjardins, but it doesn't appear in the list because technically it's not a bank and it is regulated provincially not federally. Also depending on how you want to count it, Desjardins is either one entity or an ensemble of 210 credit unions. Similarly, ATB gets an honourable mention, but other non-bank providers of banking services such as First Calgary Financial or Vancity (both credit unions) are not shown in the list.

It's interesting that in the US, even small banking service provides are banks. But in Canada, small ones tend to be provincially regulated entities such as credit unions. It's not that small entities don't exist. They just belong to a different list.

And on the other end, we have people who get treated like this:

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

No. Those are unfortunately exempt.

It's one of those things that consumer protection laws should fix. By law, most gift cards cannot expire in my province in Canada.

> Gift cards purchased in Alberta are not subject to expiry dates and fees that lower their value over time. This includes cards purchased in Alberta on the internet.

https://www.alberta.ca/information-about-gift-cards.aspx

It would show a decoupling between revenue and headcount, which is certainly bad news for tech workers. Meta's revenue in 2022 was 35% higher than 2020, 65% higher than 2019. If tech companies have found a way to simultaneously increase revenue and decrease headcount, the future of employment in tech would not be as rosy as its past.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...

> for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU.

Interesting. I couldn't find a good graph showing this. Do you by any chance have a graph or a source?

The famous Microsoft numbering system! I think we should all skip GPT-Vista, but I can't wait for GPT-7.

It's not a joke, it's the (informal) industry term. See this for example:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/protect-your-data-with-a-usb-c...

https://lifehacker.com/use-a-usb-condom-to-protect-your-devi...

probably better than a race condition sandwich

Arrests in general, sure. But this is about arrests for fraud. I don't know the stats on that.

90% of the bottleneck, not 90% of their whole application. The author says that rewriting everything in Rust would have taken months, so the whole application must be huge.

"It is big and complex and very business critical and highly algorithmic, so that would take ~months of work, ..."

> it sounds like Apple is still coming out way ahead

I disagree for three reasons:

1. Apple Ads are incessant about their own services. Why is (or was?) not having iCloud set up showing up as a permanent notification badge over Settings? It was a while ago, but I remember I subscribed just to shut iOS up. It worked for Apple I guess, but only in a shortsighted way.

2. Ads are big business. Microsoft didn't start with shameless ads, and I don't think Apple would stop at current ad levels. They have to show growth quarter after quarter, so in all likelihood, like we have seen with other companies, it's only gonna get worse. I would love to be proven wrong, but I would also be surprised if I do.

3. The gap between "no ad" and "low ad" feels much bigger the gap between "low ad" and "more ad". Just replace Apple and Microsoft with Netflix and imagine how we would feel if Netflix started showing some—not too many and not too outrageous—ads. For me at least, it moves the service from the "no ad" category to the "with ad" category, and I hate the latter category. So at least in my view, the gap between Apple and Microsoft in this regard is not "way ahead", it is "slightly ahead and getting closer". So while I would be happy to spend an extra X$ for a "no ad" product compared to a "with ad" product, I wouldn't feel the same about a "low ad" product. The Apple premium makes much less sense now, and I am not sure if I am gonna go with Apple for my next phone or computer purchase.

I wish Apple was actually good in that regard. I ended up uninstalling Apple Stocks app from my Mac and iPhone because of all the terrible ads. The ads I saw were even worse than this:

https://images.app.goo.gl/dVbDoBuScVzp3uAg9

I knew Ryan Gosling was innocent!

Context: https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650

How is the system in Australia now and why was it changed?

Can normal people read Japanese cursive?

If that's all it takes to make chargebacks impossible, why doesn't every merchant add that to their 67-page terms and conditions?

The print, i.e. write detached letters, not attached letter like cursive.

This?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc0bLIv0V1U

The difference is whether the whole society pays (via taxes or higher overall prices at the till because of the higher cost of doing business) or the person needing the extra service does. In the countries without anti-discrimination laws, those in discriminated groups (like people with disabilities) tend to have a much lower quality of life—they cannot get hired, even if they get hired they earn much less, they cannot access services, even if they can they must pay much more. In the societies that have these sorts of regulations, the whole society bears the extra cost, so everyone's individual burden is lower and manageable.

My point still stands—unless the society via regulations forces businesses to accommodate groups like people with disabilities, those groups will be excluded from society, as they are in my old country.

Generally in rich countries, it is not "the society" that covers the cost. For example, government does not give money to grocery stores to create ramps and accessible bathrooms—they fine the stores that don't have them. That's the core of accessibility regulations in rich countries, like ADA in the US.

The difference between rich countries, the government forces the businesses to accommodate people with disabilities at the cost to the business. In poor countries, at least the one I came from, they leave it to the businesses to make that decision themselves. The result is that in rich countries are much more accessible than poor countries.

I don't know if your model (where "the society", which I guess means the government pays for this stuff) is tested in any jurisdiction. If it has, I would appreciate a link to an article about the results. But the model where businesses are forced by regulations to cover the costs works very well, as evidenced by how accessible US is thanks to ADA.

> Maybe the country you moved to was also rich and with a functioning free-market economy?

Yes, but the economy of the old country, while poorer, was not exactly state-run. All grocery stores were private businesses created by entrepreneurs. Same with taxis. Yet neither accommodated people with disabilities. It was not like grocery stores were owned by the government and those who ran them were disinterested government employees. They were private businesses who made their own decisions and still they did not accommodate people with disabilities.

It's not a matter of hatred in the vast majority of the cases, but convenience and profits. In a society where discrimination on the basis of disability is permitted, you may find that as people with disabilities cannot get a taxi or get on an airplane: the disability makes such a service more expensive to run and capitalism and profit maximization eliminates it naturally, no hate needed. Perhaps at some point an enterprising entity decides to break into the market of providing services for people with disabilities, at three times the cost of a normal fare. That would be somewhat better, but still not ideal.

I know this would happen because I moved from a country without anti-discrimination laws to a country with. I encountered more people on wheelchairs in the public during my first month in the latter than the previous 20-something years in the former. In the absence of anti-discrimination laws, all avenues for participation of people with disabilities in the society, even things as simple as going grocery shopping, was all but non-existent. As far as I know it still is like that in the old country. Not because people hate everyone needing a wheelchair: people are reasonably nice and thoughtful in the old country too. But in the absence of laws forcing accommodations, no accommodations are made, with obvious results.

It would only be weird if we did not live in a society. We as a society have decided it is wrong, for example, to not hire someone because they have a disability and it would be an inconvenience to accommodate their disability, or to pay them less to account for the extra inconvenience, or to charge people with disabilities more for services (such as a plane ticket) because of those extra costs or inconveniences. We as a society have made similar decisions about treatment of people based on their ethnicity, gender, and many more criteria, including family status.

UC Berkeley's annual budget is 3 billion dollars. I still think they can afford this.

https://cfo.berkeley.edu/budget-101