481 karma · joined July 29, 2016
The smaller/lower tier companies did not have the cash to compete with this, and now do not have as much to fix.
Also the layoffs in smaller companies just aren't big news.
Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.
In fact, every medical insurance provider I've had for years has tried to push me onto their in-house pharmaceutical delivery service. Traditional pharmacies have been getting squeezed for a long time.
For me, the standard medium for a meeting for decades been face to face, with videoconference in second, long before covid changed everything.
I have always hated phone calls, and conference calls specifically are one of the circles of hell.
VCS can only ever be intent at best.
If there is a fully driverless (not driving itself with a human still in it) truck - as companies tell us is their goal - it does not increase or decrease safety to have or not have a seat and a steering wheel in it.
The argument here is that building an autonomous Russian roulette revolver is a stupid thing to do, which is orthogonal.
Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.
In an incident, an un-seat-belted occupant can turn into a projectile and harm or kill others in the vehicle that might be wearing seatbelts.
The baseplate is custom and the most egregious example of what you are talking about, of course. The slope at the front with the swirl on it is also custom. There's a round tile with a snowflake on it, that appears in two other sets. The giant snowflake on top, about two dozen other winter-themed sets. The slide also appears in only a couple of dozen pieces, but this basically all pieces that include a playground or similar. The slide is functional for play so it can't be trivially made of smaller pieces without compromising that. There also an ornamental swirly translucent smoke-like piece that only appears in a handful of sets, again, all winter themed.
That's it, the rest of the pieces in the kit appear in literally hundreds of other sets.
I do not believe this is true. There are Lego enthusiasts that thoroughly review every new set and are careful to point out the introduction of new pieces and new building techniques. The number of new pieces per set is very low, and even then the pieces are typically well received for the number of new build techniques they may open up.
Yes, yes I do think we would be saying the same things.
It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been in my house recently.
Your link says nothing of the sort.
This is somewhat but not entirely aligned with cost of living, and there have always been clear examples of better and worse markets - eg engineers in London are not that well compensated compared to their cost of living.
The big losers here will be people who lived in a HCOL location and yet still had a long commute to an office. They have no tradeoff to leverage if they decide to leave the high-pay salary market.