Easy! Why do you think it happened? Inadequate food regulation? Underfunded healthcare? Insufficient regulation of pollutants that can impact health and cause chronic disease?
I don't know your individual circumstances, but given the state of the world right now, I'd bet it's a combination of all three.
IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.
The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:
An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:
(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and
(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.
I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:
So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.
Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:
An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.
If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.
I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.
Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,
(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.
So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by 'or', one of which is:
(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: ... (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or
It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.
They'd also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:
(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: ... (c) if paragraph (2)(c) or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or
So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.
bootloader unlocking
I used to buy Xiaomi products because of the bootloader unlocking, but in practice it is a dystopian nightmare - they have built it so to unlock the bootloader you need a cryptographic signature from them, and they don't give that out all that easily.
You have to sign up for an account with them, use a Windows-only tool to request unlocking, and they have a long wait period (deliberately imposed) to unlock, which sometimes randomly restarts. The wait period is different for different models, and can be weeks.
Their support are unwilling to help unlock immediately even for replacement devices where you want to get up and going quickly - if your device breaks (they are not the most durable phones IMO, as you note) and you get a replacement, you'll have to wait the time again before you can restore a backup of a phone using a custom ROM.
It's possible they have improved, but because of their attitude around what I can do with my own hardware, I've stopped buying Xiaomi gear.
The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site
That is assuming they don't make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.
To save on costs, QAs could be paid in exposure.
As an experiment / as a bit of a gag, I tried using Claude 3.7 Sonnet with Cline to write some simple cryptography code in Rust - use ECDHE to establish an ephemeral symmetric key, and then use AES256-GCM (with a counter in the nonce) to encrypt packets from client->server and server->client, using off-the-shelf RustCrypto libraries.
It got the interface right, but it got some details really wrong:
wrapping_add to increment the 32 sequence number! For those who don't know much Rust and/or much cryptography: the golden rule of using ciphers like GCM is that you must never ever re-use the same nonce for the same key (otherwise you leak the XOR of the two messages). wrapping_add explicitly means when you get up to the maximum number (and remember, it's only 32 bits, so there's only about 4.3 billion numbers) it silently wraps back to 0. The secure implementation would be to explicitly fail if you go past the maximum size for the integer before attempting to encrypt / decrypt - and the smart choice would be to use at least 64 bits.To be fair, I didn't really expect it to work well. Some kind of security auditor agent that does a pass over all the output might be able to find some of the issues, and pass it back to another agent to correct - which could make vibe coding more secure (to be proven).
But right now, I'd not put "vibe coded" output into production without someone going over it manually with a fine-toothed comb looking for security and stability issues.
So it would only be better if he wants an extra 4.5 million Americans to die.
Legally, he’s not even allowed to drive.
I think more like the SS advises the president not to drive for their own safety, and to leave it to experts.
Or as Trump probably sees it: The deep state is being insufficiently loyal and trying to tell him - the president - of all people - what to do. So he totally shouldn't listen, and should drive if he wants to, and they should fall in line or be fired.
Years of carefully curated anti-intellectualism in every bit of media they consume, because facts didn't suit the wealthy (smoking is bad for you, fossil fuels are destroying the planet, private prisons drive more recidivism are facts that get in the way of someone making lots of money). Those fighting facts that aren't on their side have embraced a number of other groups with anti-intellectual elements (white supremecists / neo-nazis / anti-woke, religious, anti-vaxxers, natural health advocates) to create alliances of anti-intellectual thought.
This has driven increasing polarisation in the US; 49% of republicans approved of JFK as president, and 49% of democrats approved of Eisenhower. It went down over time - other party approval was 30% of Carter, 31% of Reagan. There was a break in the pattern (44% for Bush Senior), but back on track to 27% for Clinton, 23% for Bush, 13% for Obama, 7% for Trump (first round), and 6% for Biden. So in other words, Americans are so polarised that they'll vote for whoever their side puts up, and for one side, being anti-intellectual is actually seen as a strength.
I think many of the people who started the anti-intellectualism ball rolling on purpose are wealthy neoliberals who believe in laissez-faire free trade as a fundamental value, and so there is a certain aspect of 'leopards ate my face' to this leading to the anti-intellectualism extending back to rejection of mainstream economics (even though the neoliberals' preferred theory is notoriously flawed, Trump's approach to pulling economic levers is wholesale rejection of all theory rather than replacing it with something less flawed).
Traditionally legal tender means that a person / entity has to accept it for the payment of a debt - i.e. they can't refuse cash and say you didn't pay them because you didn't use some other method.
However, in many retail scenarios there is no debt - there is an exchange of payment for goods, and so the traditional common law legal tender rules do not prevent retailers from refusing that exchange (i.e. customer doesn't get the goods, retailer doesn't get the money, the transaction just never happens) on the grounds of payment methods.
Some places have additional laws on top of legal tender that might require retailers to accept cash.
"Except for Claims (i) in which a party is attempting to protect its intellectual property rights (such as its patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, anti-circumvention, or moral rights, but not including its privacy or publicity rights) ..."
So in other words, the types of matters Nintendo thinks it might have a dispute against users, court and class actions are okay, but for everything that they think users might file against Nintendo, they think arbitration is best.