You're right that businesses might roll fees into the base price, but that’s the point: transparency. When all costs are upfront, customers can more easily compare prices between competitors. Hidden fees make price comparisons difficult and misleading.
Take airlines, for example—if one shows a $200 ticket and another shows $180 but sneaks in $30 of fees later, the second one appears cheaper. By requiring prices to reflect the full cost upfront, businesses compete on the actual price rather than deceptive practices. This won’t magically lower costs, but it will force clarity and reward companies offering genuine value.
Consumers should have a clear picture of what they’re paying, not a surprise at checkout. Isn’t that just fair competition?
If you view a Chromebook as a Android tablet with a keyboard, then we already know what it's like.
Software wise they've done a good job. It isn't some have hearted effort. For example, they've gone to the trouble of ensuring Debian GUI packages you "apt-get install" appear in the Chrome Launcher. The only downside is the Debian container is very isolated compared to solutions like termux, so tricks like port forwarding over ssh and rsync'ing your photos don't work so well. While the isolation is annoying, I'd take security provided by the app isolation model of ChromeOS / Android over what Linux Desktop's provide as a reasonable tradeoff.
But Linux Desktop apps need substantial hardware - at least 8GB of RAM, a CPU with at least I3/N100 single threaded performance. Developer tasks like vscode and kernel compiles require even more. Commonly available Chromebooks don't have that. The situation for phones is worse.
Maybe one day we will get to the point that I can replace my laptop with a phone that plugs into a Thunderbolt port, but that day is not today.
I run it on Linux everyday with Steam on Proton. It is my go to game on steamdeck and my Fedora desktop.
By default steam wants to download the old old old Linux version that doesn't allow online play, but if you enable proton it will download the Windows version and run fine. I am pretty sure it doesn't have a real anti-cheat included.
Right, many or most don't have credit card terminals. You plug in, load an app, find you station, select a port number, tell it to start and hope it works. It doesn't sound that bad, but the chargers janky, the apps are janky and it takes a long time often with multiple attempts.
It is janky as hell, but it sounds like EV owners are making their lives more difficult in just slightly different ways from how you're making your life more difficult :)
I really can't believe how the idea of giving random companies access to electronics, which is what installing an app means, ever got normalised, even among techies. I guess people also do give out tons of personal details just because some form asks them. It goes against any and all security advice even regular people are now given. I guess it's true: the brosephs ook over...
So having an electric car requires an smartphone, one on which you can install random software, where you want to install random software, and have internet (cause I suppose there's no WiFi at those bornes) and you have a CC (also not true for many).
I don't disagree with your principles; I was definitely on your side of the issue ~25 years ago and I suppose I still am, intellectually. I never changed my mind, it just wasn't important enough to me to put the substantial effort into. (which is, I suppose, what "they" are counting on). More power to you for investing the effort rather than just taking the path of least resistance.
Many things and services now 'require' an app, but I never do and in practice that doesn't seem much of an issue. It's just sad to hear it won't be possible to sidestep if I ever do own (or rent) an electric car, which ofc I fully expect. I already caved by having a phone with Google Play services enabled for a few banking apps. But I figure I can have some trust in them, since they are my bank.
A friend of mine has a card with which he can charge at certain places, but definitely not all (so he has some anxiety over that, in new places you never can be sure it actually works). Is such a card an option at those places that 'require' and app?
And what's even the reason for this? Those unmanned fossil fuel stations debit your card with some largish amount before you can take fuel. Why would things need to be more complex than that when charging electrons?
I'm not advocating for banning M&As, but I think that could be addressed by only allowing acquisitions under specific bankruptcy conditions.
Again, though, I'm not advocating for that position. I'd hate to spend part of my life building a business and not be able to cash out when the time comes for me to retire.
Is it possible for private companies to pay dividends? Let's say you retire and you own a portion of a small but thriving company. Could that company potentially provide you with dividends as a form of income?
Yes, a private company can pay dividends. Or you could loan it the money to buy out your shares and collect interest as it pays back the loan. Or a mixture of the two, with a thousand little variations on terms. I believe I ran into an employee-owned company once that had gone through some version of the loan scenario.
Possible, yes, and frequently used I’m sure, but entangles the retirees financial future with the business’s future — the retiree loses if the new owners make bad decisions, overleverage, and end up defaulting / bankrupting themselves. I don’t think it’s reasonable to force all businesspeople to retain this risk after disposing of the business concern.
Gnome-Web if you're on linux and it is fine. It is a little light on features, but it does the basics. Falkon is another for the QT/KDE crowd. There are several forks of chrome and firefox, if that's your thing.
I'm trying to ungoogle and switched to Vivaldi without enough research. Its a really nice browser and I really like the community around it (like their Mastodon service), but I basically jumped from one corporation's browser to another.
I watched one of the developers YouTube video and he said it should run on consumer hardware. He said it's not going to ever run on something like a raspberry pi, but it should run pretty well on an "average Joe PC "
I've been using my Samsung smartwatch with LTE as a smartphone that's hard to abuse. Thursday through Sunday I only carry it and leave my "real" phone at home.
It's pretty nice because I still have Bluetooth calls in my car and navigation in a pinch. I can still stream music and ask Google to look things up for me.
Actual calls on the watch are fine, but I do keep a pair of bluetooth headphones on me so I don't have to take business calls on speakerphone.
If texting is your addiction, technically this doesn't solve it but it doesn't increase the friction so maybe it's less of a temptation. I don't text that much so it's not a big deal to me. Doomscrolling is my downfall and fortunately not really doable on a watch.
The Apple Watch Ultra battery is much better in those circumstances. I used to struggle to last a day now I charge every other day and still have 20% ish left.
Oh man, I have been wondering about this experience myself - though if it would all work with no smartphone at all (I have been rolling with the LightPhone II for a few years now).
It had seemed like stand-alone watches were nearly there, but not quite the last time I dug into it. But it works for you?
It depends on what you mean by stand-alone. It works for me as a stand-alone device for days at a time, but you still need a phone to set up the watch and my phone plan is like an addon to the phone so you need that to set up the account. I don't think you can set up a line for these watches in the US without the "host" phone.
I just use Firefox sync. It integrated with iOS and Android. You just install the app and use the system settings to set Firefox as the default password store for the system. It works in all apps, as far as I can tell. I wish it integrated with Linux& gnome a bit better, but I just work around that by bookmarking the browser link to the password page in Firefox.
I trust Mozilla more than any random app that advertises on random podcasts. I like that it warns me when sites I use have been compromised, and that it is generally easy to use. That said, I am not a security expert, so I am interested to see if anybody has any concerns about this setup.
I mostly use Firefox Sync as well. The main downside is that it is super basic. It can only store basically URL, username, password. There is no option it store TOTP secrets, backup codes, binary data or arbitrary information. If it text you can cheat and make "fake" entries, but it isn't good UX.
Take airlines, for example—if one shows a $200 ticket and another shows $180 but sneaks in $30 of fees later, the second one appears cheaper. By requiring prices to reflect the full cost upfront, businesses compete on the actual price rather than deceptive practices. This won’t magically lower costs, but it will force clarity and reward companies offering genuine value.
Consumers should have a clear picture of what they’re paying, not a surprise at checkout. Isn’t that just fair competition?
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