“loyalty cards” are common. stores (and each of their 369354764 data sharing “partners”) get to track everything you buy and when. in exchange, you get token “discounts” on a small selection of products. some stores have done away with the actual physical cards, and use mobile phone apps or just the mobile phone number to track you.

you can see a big box fan mostly out-of-frame on the left.

when the $ numbers start getting big and scary, just extend the length some more to make it look ‘cheaper’… like 8 year car loans and 50 year mortgages.

that’s a lot of chocolate.

usmobile.com does a cellular-based ‘home phone’ (base station you connect a traditional POTS phone to) for about the same ($9.99/mo, $99/yr), plus hardware at about $100. walmart does the same (via ‘straight talk’) at $15/mo and about $50 for the hardware. no internet needed for the service as they use cellular.

semiconductor fab profits are also ‘abnormally high’.

it’s not FOSS (it is ‘free to use’ at home) or a ‘server’ application (it’s a windows application), but i just use mailstore home to create and update a local archive of a gmail account. its dot.net requirement is minimal (v4.8 or higher) but i have not yet tried to run it with wine, as i have a separate box that runs windows stuff.

https://www.mailstore.com/de/produkte/mailstore-home/
https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/

that whole family is off-the-rails, but with her reach, she could do a lot of good… but instead, this.