dingaling

"would resell on the secondary market for a giant profit."

But you've no evidence that that "giant profit" would be more than the increase that the suppliers would apply.

Arbitrage allows the market to find an agreeable price; a middleman arbiter with a warehouse of RAM has an incentive to agree a price with a buyer because he's stuck with that inventory if he doesn't shift it, and he has costs related to financing it.

A supplier has no such incentive, they can just jack the price up and if sales drop off they run the machines at a lower rate, or sack employees. But sales aren't going to drop off, because the baseline for demand has been lifted

Once this "RAM Crisis" is over, what reason would manufacturers have to reduce prices?

"Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer."

Lockheed had no experience with titanium prior to OXCART. 95% of the first 6,000 sheets of titanium had to be scrapped.

It was the first production design to incorporate low-observable shaping.

It was 50% faster than anything Lockheed had previously tried to build, and four times faster than the U-2.

And they literally did all that between April 1958 and April 1962.

So, yes, it was designed from scratch as nothing useful from prior projects read across to it.

Every 15 years, MDI gets re-discovered and then deprecated.

> Wait, insurance includes repair costs?

Yes of course, it's part of the actuarial calculation. As cars age they become more expensive to repair and eventually will cross a boundary where the insurer will write them off on any type of accident, rather than trying to repair. This naturally increases the base insurance price.

OEMs in the EU are only required to produce spare parts for 10 years after a model is withdrawn, which is a strong indicator of when write-off becomes the primary option.

You really shouldn't be running anything with an electric heating element whilst you're asleep.

> The cheapest car for sale in the UK is an EV at this point.

It's still 12,000UKP more expensive than the paid-off ICE 15-yo I have on my driveway, which is a heck of a lot of petrol.

> MAD is a very real thing.

As repeatedly stated over the years, it is _not_.

Every nuclear nation plans on winning a nuclear exchange. Of course, what 'winning' means is debatable, but they very much plan to beat the threat and not just bluster about mutual nuclear annihilation.

They don't really have to fight, most people these days accept their role as a guest on their hand-held computer.

The hand-held computer tells them what they're permitted to do, and they conform.

Sometimes, one of the users has a non-conforming idea and says "I'd like to be a superuser on my computer" and they're shouted down with a chorus of "you'll be hacked" and "nobody will be able to trust your computer and you'll be excluded from online services". Sometimes the organisations saying this even use the excuse that "restricting the user is essential to maintaining the user's privacy".

It's hardly slop when an entire early and influential Christian sect, the Gnostics, arose to explain the difference.

Part of their theology even leaked into the Gospel ( John 1:1-15 ).

This is what the market is being told to expect from an EV.

The Dacia Spring is what the market actually seems to want:

https://www.dacia.co.uk/hybrid-and-electric-range/spring-cit...

It's a car, not an Autobot.

Yes, there are many cameras. But they're not interlinked, most of them record locally or to the chain's HQ, not some mass surveillance panopticon like TV shows portray.

The irony being that Eco loads are necessarily smaller, for soaking and to draw less current through the motor, so to do the same amount of clothes as one 'planet killer' wash you need to do at least two 'Eco' cycles.

TLDR: there aren't really any shortcuts to getting dirt out of clothes.

> why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?

How about "not worth the cost" instead.

Not worth the cost of losing the freedom to run your own software and make your own choices.

Commodity laptops might be slower and less flashy, but if Linux goes in the wrong direction I can install FreeBSD or OpenBSD or my own vibe-coded OS or whatever.

Western society has for the last few decades surrendered principles for convenience, and the state of modern computing is a microcosm of the consequences. You're all consumers now, instead of users.

Quick, name three tyre brands. No, not those ones - ones for which you've never seen an ad

> You'd be ok with that trade?

Umm, yes...?

Just put a 'warranty void when removed' frangible sticker on it. Seems to work fine for PCs.

But so many people these days seem to be brainwashed into accepting that computing devices should come with soldered RAM and locked bootloaders, they probably can't even envisage how hardware used to be. Yes, modding my device voided the warranty and I didn't care. Freedom has a cost.

They have tried 'asking nicely' but Denmark had been playing the independence card, claiming any deal would have to involve Greenlandic consent.

Last year's US-Denmark military basing agreement excluded Greenland for this 'reason'.

But both sides knew this was a deflection as Denmark has military and foreign relations responsibility for its "non-colony".

The US got fed up, pushed harder and apparently got what they wanted.

There are about 3.9 billion Android phones currently in use globally. I don't think a niche fork with 0.00025 billion users will worry them.

> Can't wait to buy their phone.

Good phrasing. It's certainly not _your_ phone, you're just an untrusted user who is extended the privilege of using it.

Russia wants a non-NATO buffer zone around its western periphery. None of those countries want to be 'unaligned' no-man's-lands.

There is nothing to negotiate.

That's more because attestation breaks their passkey cross-device sync process, rather than out of benevolence.

"companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions."

Because the end users keep rushing to use the megacorps' latest AI models, weaving them into their work and life. So the megacorps keep locking in contracts to build more compute.

If you use LLMs, you're responsible for this, there's no way to pass the buck. "I only use it as a companion for learning about history" - it's still your fault. "I only use it to help guide my solitions, not for vibecoding" - it's still your fault.

"They work perfectly fine."

The fact that you mention light-controlled roundabouts highlights that they do not, actually, "work perfectly fine".

Roundabouts are a practical example of the tyranny of the majority; minor traffic flows suffer against major. The centre of Salisbury is a perfect example, constantly gridlocked at two roundabouts except at odd hours on a Sunday.

Adding traffic lights to 'fix' this problem then leads to tailbacks on the major routes and congestion on the roundabout, such that the timing sequence for the minor routes are subsequently reduced, returning to the original problem.

Roundabouts, in the plurality, are used as a lazy 'solution' to at-grade traffic crossing, which the road designers themselves presumably don't have to suffer. They also cause pollution from brake dust from slowing and exhaust fumes from accelerating.

MAD is not military doctrine and never has been. It's a philosophical concept that arose in the mid 1960s and gained column-inches in the press because it had a cool and ironic name. Even McNamara rejected it.

USA, China and Russia all plan to fight and win wars, not go out in a blaze with the other guy. And that includes 'nuclear warfighting' which involves the ability to command and control nuclear exchanges and come out the other side victorious.

"as it highlights how humans have essentially two reactions to change"

I'd wager that the most common reaction to change is actually "wearily accept it as there is no realistic option".

Most change is deleterious to those affected; it requires them to change how they live or work, or pay more, just to maintain the status quo. This sort of change is usually imposed by large organisations against which the individual is helpless.

When people are faced with that sort of change it's little wonder they complain about it, but eventually they have to submit to it or face a degredation in their life or work.

Then those who imposed the change roll their eyes and say "ugh, people are so afraid of change," being insulated from and benefitting from it.

The next time you receive a ToS update from your $FAVORITEVENDOR that negatively affects how you do something, or a new tax filing requirement from $GOV that takes up more of your personal time, do come on here and post about how you embraced the change.

" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..."

It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.

So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".

CPI is based on prices such as these, so it provides no useful signal.

Apple sold around six million Mini models per year that they were on sale.

It's hard to envisage a boardroom scenario where that's not considered successful, but apparently it exists.

" to spend half of your earnings on the collective"

Why not 99% then? Or 90%? Or a bargain 85%, leaving you some money for bread and circuses ?

It's for the collective good, so how could you complain?

Even if the features are ignorable, they have consumed development time and attention to get there.

No, that's almost as bad.

Locking knowledge into a benignly-ruled centralised blackbox instead of a despicably-ruled centralised blackbox isn't solving the core problem.