that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information

Do they?

Let’s use Nintendo as the example.

First and foremost, how much did they change the price of the switch 2 based upon tariffs? More specifically, how much can you prove they did? Should a company that chose to eat the costs of the tariffs themselves be penalized and forced to lose even more money over NOT raising the price every time fuckface did? What about the specific case of the Switch 2 where they intentionally waited a week or three to announce the price after revealing it to factor in expected tariffs?

Also, what about the units they had stockpiled ahead of Liberation Day? Do they now owe “the customers” money based on the date of sale rather than the date of import? Or does Baby Jane Doe get less because her gameboy’s serial number corresponds to a unit imported in March rather than May?

All of which ignore that Nintendo weren’t doing direct to consumer sales in the vast majority of cases. They went through intermediaries like Best buy and Amazon. Many of whom ALSO were playing the same math regarding stockpiled units and ordering more supply from Nintendo.

Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).

The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months… or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.

Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day… which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were “low”. Others would eat the cost because they didn’t want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.

And… people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.

So… it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would “pass it on” to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but… this is a case where the problem isn’t the corporations: it is the government.

Symfonium on my phone (so also android auto and just connecting to a bluetooth speaker while I cook) and Feishin on my desktop. Still need to verify that scrobbles are propagated correctly for discoverability purposes (so far it looks like ratings in Feishin aren’t propagated to the server).

I could probably have gotten away with just mpd but figured “why not?”.

And there have been a lot of discussions over the decades over artists/“aritists” who overly sampled a song and became orders of magnitude bigger than the original artist.

Its a balancing act. Most people aren’t going to get too annoyed if someone uses generative AI to help build a backing track or a beat to go with their song.

The issue is that so much of this slop is “make a song like this” from scratch. And while there is a lot to be said about manufactured acts and the role of major labels… one of the few good things about spotify et al destroying the music industry is that it has become so much easier for smaller independent artists to get a foothold.

And all this does is add more slop to push them back out. And the difficulties with detecting slop will mean people will be a lot less likely to ever check out a smaller band when they can instead listen to whatever the latest major act that beyonce et al vouched for is.

This (moreso for youtube music, since Deezer seems to not have a lot of East Asian labels signed) is a huge part of why I’ve been building out a selfhosted Navidrome.

Obviously there is the old school way of getting music. But Bandcamp is WAY more beneficial to the artists and ebay and Half Price Books are also awesome for grabbing music.

And combine all that with musicbrainz for scrobbling and discoverability of new bands.

Localized age checks ARE a good system and are something that should have been in the OS for decades. It is the basis for being able to make “child accounts” and is a genuine requirement for Linux to be a meaningful option for “normal people”. And having a protocol for software/websites to request that is a very good system to build on that.

We talk about how the problem of kids getting exposed to horrendous shit is a problem of “bad parenting”. This is the tool you provide to allow parents some control.

The issue is not the age check. The issue is verification. To my understanding, the California legislature explicitly does NOT require a third party. So it is literally just you saying “Sure, whatever. I was born in 1901. Now load the Maya Woulfe video faster”. And yes, this is a step towards that. But so is having network access or user accounts at all.