I don’t know if they do, but I’ve used a service before that provides similar functionality, a “temporary proxy credit card”, which also permits one to not even provide one’s real name and address to a vendor.

But it’s more work to set one up than it is to do a PayPal transaction. Like, I could do it if a vendor doesn’t permit for PayPal payments and I really really want what the vendor is selling, but PayPal does the big “the vendor doesn’t get your credentials” security fix and avoids creating extra hurdles for a purchaser to jump through.

UK households use more water, mostly on showering and bathing, than other comparable European countries, at about 150 litres a day per capita. For France the average is 128, Germany 122 and Spain 120 (although in Italy its 243 litres a day).

Meh. I’m sure that we use more than that in the US.

kagis

https://www.epa.gov/watersense/understanding-your-water-bill

The average American uses around 82 gallons per day per person in the household.

So 310 liters, over double the British average.

https://www.arizonafuture.org/progress-meters/natural-resources/water-use/

It looks like people in Phoenix, Arizona average something like 150 gallons/day for residential stuff, almost twice that again, and they live in a desert.

I mean, I don’t want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.

Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can’t do that with my computer — I don’t have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they’re treating them securely.

But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.

I’m not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don’t send me whatever I paid for.

Based on the screenshot someone else posted, they do have some kind of payment/currency system of their own, Steam Wallet.

I guess you could buy a physical Steam gift card in a store via any mechanism the store accepts, including cash, and then transfer it to that.

“In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring bank for payment transactions in certain currencies was immediately terminating the processing of any transactions related to Steam. This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD,” the message states.

"We hope to offer PayPal as an option for these currencies in the future but the timeline is uncertain.

There are currency conversion services all over the world that manage to do this. How hard can it possibly be to partner with an existing service to do the conversion as part of a transaction?

EDIT: I guess it’s possible to do the conversion yourself and have a bank account in one of those currencies to use to do PayPal, so the practical impact is probably limited, but still. PayPal’s whole point is to facilitate moving funds from Point A to Point B. You’ve got one job here, guys.

I feel like this is a really bad way to think of Puerto Rico

It’s correct. Incorporation is the process via which something becomes part of the US. If it hasn’t undergone incorporation, it isn’t part of the US yet. It’s just administered by the US.

They’re US citizens

Yes. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. (Note: in contrast, American Samoans are not, and are just US nationals, an unusual status related to American Samoa reserving the right to run its own naturalization system.) But Puerto Rico the territory is not yet part of the US. It will become part if it becomes an incorporated territory or, as I expect may be more likely, directly becomes a state.

This is an environmental disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_ID.3

The lowest MPGe I see for it across the model range is 129, the highest 141.

The Ford F-150 is the most-popular vehicle in the US.

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2025_Ford_F150.shtml

The 2025 F-150 has a combined MPG rating of between 16 and 21.

German car industry has one foot in the grave.

I think that all or close to it auto manufacturers have some form of subscription service now with monthly fees. It’s not something specific to German manufacturers.

randomly picks from this list of auto manufacturers

Buick.

https://www.buick.com/ownercenter/onstar/learn

OnStar One Super Cruise

for vehicles with Super Cruise

$64.99/mo.

Save up to 16% by choosing this plan

OnStar Connect Plus

• In-Vehicle Wi-Fi® Hotspot

• Music

• Podcasts

• Audiobooks

• News

• Video Streaming (if properly equipped)

• Games (if properly equipped)

• Internet Browser (if properly equipped)

Safety & Security

• Stolen Vehicle Assistance

• Safety Services

• OnStar Guardian App

• Roadside Assistance

Super Cruise

• Hands-Free Driver Assistance Technology

• Turn Signal Activated Lane Change

• Automatic Lane Change (if properly equipped)

• Hands-Free Trailering (if properly equipped)

Pretty presentation!

He could install Luanti and mod to his heart’s content.

Like, legality aside, he’s fighting to add value to a game whose publisher has tried to prevent him.

According to a survey from S&P Global, some customers may be put off by the cost of in-car subscriptions for features such as connectivity, or by basic functions being split into paid tiers.

I don’t have any particular objection to that. They can choose whatever pricing model they want, and it’s just another number for the spreadsheet in valuing whatever they put on offer. However, I rather suspect that whatever DRM they have on this ties one more-closely to maintaining an Internet connection between the car and auto manufacturer, which I do care about from a privacy standpoint.

And I wonder what happens to one’s subscription if one’s car is no longer able to talk to current cell towers and thus the car can no longer validate that the user has paid the bill this month. Cars that relied on 2G cell network connectivity in the past lost their network connectivity when the cell networks took that down in the US. Maybe the feature is just gone forever. Maybe the manufacturer decides to be nice and just perma-unlock the functionality. shrugs Seems like kind of a substantial unknown and difference from the past, where one could just expect a car to keep working. People have not been very happy about live service games no longer working after a shutdown date. I kind of think that having one’s automobile functionality go away might also be unpopular.

Another issue is that I rather suspect that there’s nothing outside of maybe their reputation keeping a vendor from increasing their subscription fees. If you’ve already put the substantial purchase price into a car, it’s not like you can readily switch away from it to a competitor. That’s not a good situation for the consumer. You’re buying something where if you want the functionality, you’re paying the purchase price…plus some unknown future amount in fees. You’re locked in to buying the functionality from your auto vendor; there’s no form of competitive market at play once you’ve bought in.

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

A captive market is a market where the potential consumers face a severely limited number of competitive suppliers; their only choices are to purchase what is available or to make no purchase at all. The term therefore applies to any market where there is a monopoly or oligopoly.

In theory, I imagine that an auto vendor with enough information about an individual — and Lord knows, they sure are working on gathering a lot — could do individualized pricing, charge the maximum for the functionality that any one individual will pay. That’d convert consumer surplus into producer surplus; it’s a sensible move for a seller with a monopoly.

When we start decent seeing vehicles to a decent price again,

I don’t know about the Volkswagen ID.3, but in general, I think that car prices have tended to come down slightly over the years. I was in a conversation earlier about car prices earlier (talking about how truck prices had greatly increased).

If you go back 20 years, take a pretty plain-Jane standby, the Toyota Camry:

https://www.kbb.com/toyota/camry/2005/

2005 Toyota Camry pricing starts at $4,091 for the Camry LE Sedan 4D, which had a starting MSRP of $20,515 when new.

That’d be $33,934.10 in 2025 dollars.

A 2025 Camry has an MSRP of $28,700, about 15% lower.

Pickup trucks — which are considerably more expensive now in the US than they were a few decades back — are an exception to this, but there are other factors going on there.

EDIT: Though tariffs may wind up driving prices up.

What’s to stop someone just hacking it and unlocking it?

I assume that they try to make that fairly difficult.

I mean, modern cars are Internet-connected, have cell radios. If the vendor can maintain access to the car and can provide the initial trusted hardware, they can make it pretty unpleasant to modify the thing.

You also don’t need a 100% solution to make it financially work. Just need to make the level of inconvenience high enough that the bulk of people won’t do it.

Since we are not making jokes on feddit

No, I mean, like, the submission here was sourced from a thread on Mastodon. I couldn’t tell from a quick glance at the text whether it was actually people joking on a mailing list or whether it was people on Mastodon joking about fictional emails.

Might be a good argument that NYC needs more parking. Here, they’ll be (legally) street-parked or pull over into a parking lot or something. If the police don’t have space to park, probably a good bet that everyone else is also short on parking.

Brooklyn might not have density too-high to permit for ground-level parking lots, but they can still have municipal multistory parking garages.

EDIT: Also, tangentially-related, and it may not be appropriate in NYC, where there are taller buildings that will block some of the light, but I do think that if the concern is shade, rather than decoration, as seems to be the case here:

Robert Lopez was walking home past the 83rd Precinct at 480 Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on an 87-degree Wednesday when he was faced with a particularly vexing challenge on that block: making it to tree-lined Menahan Street without melting into a puddle of his own sweat.

…it might be worth considering whether sticking up solar canopies to provide shade is a good option. That’s one thing that I’ve seen done in California, where shade in a parking lot always makes a slot popular.

kagis

The story here is about Brooklyn, and it looks like there’s a company, Brooklyn Solar Canopy Company, that does those installations. Means that one doesn’t need to deal with leaf litter and all that. I dunno how the overall costs compare, though.

considers

So, I think that there’s a valid point here that the state has an interest in facilitating child-rearing, and that that’s an externality. The hotel can cause harm if people rely on hotels and child-free hotels price out child-permitting hotels.

Hmm.

I can think of a lot of problems.

If a hotel or other service wants to only provide adult access, I can imagine a whole lot of loopholes. That is, I don’t think that France is going to disallow keeping children away from random thing that social norms don’t want children to have, like alcohol (well, okay, this is France, so the bar might be somewhat lower). I mean, have hotel, have attached strip joint, whatever it takes; there are going to be some things that I imagine that France is going to permit as grounds for excluding children. It seems hard to make a blanket prohibition that would stop all this.

On the other hand, it also seems like in many situations, it’d be possible to let people who do want to be be away from children to have that as an option without creating issues for other users.

Maybe it’d be possible to have a best-effort attempt by hotels to simply place people and people without children together? I mean, that might get one most of the way there.

Also…is this presently causing actual problems? I mean, maybe the market will supply what the consumer wants. Hotels and apartments that don’t allow cats and/or dogs are a thing (well, in the US, and I assume France), and it doesn’t seem like that’s created fundamental issues.

kagis

It sounds like there are hotels here in California that prohibit kids and hotels that provide babysitting as a service to guests. It seems like the market has provided in that case.

Maybe first see if this is definitely an issue, and if so, do some kind of targeted mandate? Like, I totally appreciate that maybe a hotel might be the only place in a remote area, and if it’s adults-only, that creates problems, because it’s the only option…and if it soaks up all the adults-only customers, that might prevent an adults-and-kids service from entering the market. But…I can also imagine that it might just not come up, because hotels in that kind of situation don’t want to sacrifice customers with kids.

Depends drastically on the game. I don’t think that it’s possible to give a single answer.

In general, I prefer Western RPG-style games over Japanese RPG-style games, and WRPGs tend to let you craft the main character, unlike JRPGs. And those kind of inhabit the same space. So I guess if you put me in a gun-to-the-head choice between the two, I’d prefer to create the main character myself. I also don’t try to create my real-life self in games.

But, I mean…if I’m playing a Metroid-franchise game, I want to play Samus Aran. I don’t want to play me, and I don’t want to play some sort of character that I craft from scratch.

Could someone save me some digging and let me know how they’re progressing?

If you just want an off-the-top-of-my-head response, the only “remake” I can think of that has been completed is the Tale of Two Wastelands mod for Fallout: New Vegas, which merges Fallout 3’s content into Fallout: New Vegas, lets you play a single character through both. You’ll need to own both games to do the install (and I imagine that any project that incorporates the data would have this requirement, to avoid copyright infringement). IIRC, there are minor content modifications to make the two fit, but it’s not aimed at doing something like “Fallout X with 2025-level assets”.

There are engine reimplementations for the isometric games, but those aren’t aimed at remaking the content so much as they are running the original data on an open-source codebase; I assume that that’s not what you’re after.

That’s especially painful during the dog days of summer, when air conditioners are working overtime.

Evaporative coolers use a lot less power to produce a given amount of cooling than air conditioning does. As long as the relative humidity is low enough where you are and you don’t need more than a given amount of cooling, that’s an option.

I know, he also didn’t understand that Puerto Rico’s population are American citizens.

kagis

It sounds like this might be from a satirical news story that was then cited as being actual news, unless you’re thinking of an unrelated incident:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-puerto-ricans/

Did Trump Say He’ll Revoke U.S. Citizenship of All Puerto Ricans?

“We don’t really need these non-Americans and I don’t need their votes to win the presidency."

Rating: False

There was no truth to this story, which originated with Adobo Chronicles, a fake news website. The article didn’t garner much attention when it was originally published, but the story was eventually picked up by several Spanish-language websites, which then reported it as if it were real news.

While these web sites cited a “South American newspaper,” all of the information they reported originated on The Adobo Chronicles, a site whose disclaimer notes that its content is not meant to be taken seriously: “THE ADOBO CHRONICLES is your source of up-to-date, unbelievable news. Everything you read on this site is based on fact, except for the lies.”