289 karma · joined February 4, 2013
I'd rather have a touchscreen macbook pro.
Still, a small camera is an odd thing to cut.
For nice hardware with hardly any content, not making huge strides to get existing VR content on it was a terrible strategy. And Apple can afford to just buy one of the bigger players to get content too.
This can easily translate to a 50-80% higher salary after housing costs, which for sure would translate into better wellbeing for most people anyway. For some EU companies, this can mean not even having to live in the same country, so wildly different cost of living.
Just having to live somewhere you can reasonably commute to an office, even just 2 days a week, is massively limiting in terms of where and how you can afford to live on any salary. For a daily in office work it's even worse.
Then the commute costs; easily 5-10k GBP per year for 'commutable to London' towns in the countryside.
There are more people in single 2nd tier city metro areas in other European countries than in the whole of Ireland.
But beyond that, this whole backyard/balcony power generation stuff makes me think of Chairman Mao's great leap forward; 'everyone should smelt iron in their back yard' programme. Just so many levels of inefficiency, ignored safety protocols and wasted opportunity to do this at a building, city block, city wide or national level that would actually provide some benefit.
If you live in the sticks, solar and a battery system is maybe worthwhile for redundancy, but all of this is just a waste. Most of these units will be in landfills in a few years, and the production cost in pollution is magically handwaved away.
If anything you should be building a nice home Nvidia AI cluster to take advantage of that free power.
You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.
But it's not magical, and not much different to injection moulding or something in concept.
Almost everything created with home level 3d printers is plastic junk you can buy for a few dollars on aliexpress (without weird rough edges).
This is closely coupled to the whole 'grandfathered in to very low property taxes from 50 years ago' problem.
I've found myself not even considering brands where I've found inconsistent sizing, but going back again and again to ones I can reliably pick a size and know it'll fit, no returns.
It'd be interesting to see this study repeated after a decade of GLP-1 drugs being available (and cheaper).
It's common for clothing producers (Designers were in the UK in this case, clothes made in china or otherwise) to just pick whoever is in the design office that's about the right size and use them as the basis of all sizing measurements for a given size.
I've even heard of a petite woman being used as the size model for boys 11-12 age supermarket clothes. There's very little thought involved, it's just convenience to be able to tailor the template garment to a real person who's nearby.