It’s the same problem with our new disposable bag ban in Denver.

Now, if I want to grocery shop, I need to take re-usable bags with me all day: on the bus, at work, etc, if there’s any possibility of grocery shopping on the way home.

Gone are the days of deciding to grocery shop on a whim.

Of course, this law was passed by people who all have cars. For them, grocery bags are something you can keep in your car, and then the furthest you have to carry them is from your garage into your kitchen.

Oh, and the bag ban isn’t all stores. It’s just the big evil stores that aren’t allowed to use disposable shopping bags. The rule, specifically, is any store with more than three locations is banned from offering disposable bags. Small, local places are still allowed to have disposable bags.

Well guess what. You know who shops for groceries at small local places? Rich people. You know who shops for groceries at massive chains? Poor people.

By targeting “the big evil corps” they also conveniently targeted the “corps with enough volume to get prices down to serve poor people”.

Now, I don’t think it’s a deliberate attempt to fuck with poor people. I think these legislators are trying to help. It’s just that none of them has any conception of what the life of most of their constituents is like. They’ve been upper middle class for so long, they just don’t know how people live. How much of an utter pain in the ass it is to not be able to have disposable bags.

And the cherry on top is that I bought a little trash can for my bathroom with a soft close lid that’s designed to take shopping bags as its trash bags.

I won’t run out for a while, but eventually I’m gonna run out of shopping bags and have to start buying little trash bags for that bin.

The standard still usable, you just need an adaptor. I don't because Android Auto is my car navigation anyway, so it might as well do audio for podcasts. If I'm out and about, or doing house stuff, my bluetooth ear piece means I can listen to podcasts without wires in the way. At work, I've not used wired headphones since forever. I subconsciously chewed the cable and kept pushing out my chair to roll over somewhere forgetting the wire.

Yer a cable that has both a male USBC and a female USB C and audio Jack. Easy. It's not worth limiting phone options for. Plus mainly I use bluetooth anyway.

Nextcloud fills a lot of the hole. I still use Google as little as I can, but I was bumping into apps that were are hard requirement to do things. Banking apps (no seperate security device anymore), EV charger apps (old chargers don't all have simple card payment) is just two classes.

We have a real issue here. The duopoly of Google and Apple is being reenforced by infrastructure requiring apps. Regulators need to wake up.