The difference I think you are missing is that most of these Amazon “knock-offs” are still coming from the primary manufacturer of the product. They sell them to basically anyone and will put their customer’s logo on it to be resold as whatever brand they want. The mfr doesn’t care what label it has and whether the person buying it knows the company logo on the side or not.

They (typically) didn’t see a successful product and decide to start making a similar product to undercut the original product.

Not an average person no, but the article seems to be aimed more at the people running businesses - and I think more in terms of the value of all of the people crammed into your conference room slowly losing it to CO2 concentrations.

*If you get 10-20 people together in a room, I really hope they are costing the company more than $300 an hour.

It’s even more sickening when thinking about PayPal’s business model for years was basically “steal money directly out of users’ accounts”. They used to get a big ol’ class action lawsuit every couple years where everyone they stole from would “band together” to make them pay literal pennies on the dollar for what was literally just stolen.

If we had a justice department that was interested in actually stopping any crime at some point in the last 30 years, things could look a lot different today if PayPal was killed in its infancy like it should have been.

“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”

Yes, that is what everyone has been warning about for years and why we want the communication monopolies torn down… Fucking leopards running loose out here eating faces and they still just kinda shrug and go “wish there was an alternative to letting all the leopards run free eating our faces”.

As an aside, I don’t think you actually have fast internet - or whatever you are downloading doesn’t have any mirrors even remotely close to you.

Assuming the GB is Gibibytes (worst case scenario), that is 730,144 Megabits (not bytes). With a 100 Megabit connection (lower end of what most ISPs offer that I’ve seen and still call it “high-speed”) that should be done in about 2 hours. In 8 hours at 100 Mb speed you should be able to download over 300 Gigs of data.

85GB in 8-12 hours is somewhere between 17 and 25 Mbps, which would be stressed out by 1080p video streaming.

Skype and OneDrive. They just WOULD NOT GO THE FUCK AWAY. My hard drive died, so I already lost everything OS related, and re-installing windows 10 was already infuriating me, and then every reboot, even after disabling them, skype and onedrive just kept popping up at boot. I used windows to download i think 8 different distro ISOs, gathered a gaggle of flash drives and set them all up. Then I tried them all out until I landed on one that did everything I wanted it to and haven’t looked back. I kept that windows drive for about 6 months before I realized I was never using it and the storage space would be better served reformatted to btrfs for the linux system to use.

Thankfully Windows 8 was a quickly passing beast and a lot of people managed to avoid it, through knowledge or luck. Windows 11 has not been so lucky.

I’ve had and been using steam since 2003… I really don’t want to know what that number is. And I am also convinced someone is collecting this data point for nefarious purposes, because its 2026 and everything is being used for nefarious purposes. Including this comment.

And google definitely doesn’t like that. lol

significant investment to ensure Android remains open.

Unless you want to install apps not from the google app store. Or develop apps not for the google app store. Or use a Captcha without having google services. Or use your bank website without google services. or use the internet without chrome. or… shit, sorry, I don’t have time to list all the ways google wants the exact opposite of anything anywhere remaining “open” unless by “open” they mean “open to google’s exploitation”.