They would be happy to have a ‘low volume, high value economy’. Only trinkets for them to trade among themselves at relatively high price, while they have no use for and therefore no interest in the bulk of the population. There is a reason they are very keen on surveillance and “law enforcement” because they think that might keep the rabble away from them cheaper than trying to appease the rabble.

Hell, they would be even happier to ignore the ‘rabble’ altogether. You at least had to keep the slaves vaguely alive.

There’s a reason Larry Ellison said "“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”, they want to contain the “unwanted” and keep them from being a risk while excluding them from the ‘economy’ to the extent feasible

Sure, those are premium things, but don’t actually drive the manufacturer’s cost as those come mostly for free.

So it drives bigger margin for them instead, but at the expense of people perceiving EV as somehow fundamentally too expensive.

You have a rough point, but a $20k delta is too much. Thankfully, the comparison is between a “special” car and a boring workhorse, so the price delta isn’t reflective of the practical choices. 7-passenger PV5 looks to be about $50k, so less than $10k delta between a Sienna and a comparable EV van. Still a pretty big gap, especially to take up front, but closer to reasonable given your reasons. We are seeing the gap close more aggressively in the 5-passenger segment, but 3-row still has been focused on EV only for ‘premium’ experience.

People talk about that topic all the time.

The drive train generally doesn’t need service. You don’t have to change oil, you don’t have to change transmission fluid, your transmission probably won’t grind itself into metallic dust because the transmission is a single speed and it’s certainly not a CVT. You don’t have a timing belt to change, or a serpentine belt to change, or an air filter to change. You don’t have to sweat an emissions problem, you don’t have to worry about error codes about running too rich or too lean. You don’t have to worry about your headgasket leaking. You don’t have a bay of stuff heated to around water’s boiling point for extended durations accelerating wear on various hoses. You aren’t going to have a belt tensioner go south, the DC/DC converter is less likely to lose it than an alternator. You won’t need to replace spark plugs, you aren’t going to have a turbo that screws you over.

Instead of all of that, you have a pretty bullet proof drive train except that the battery will chemically wear, but even that seems to be not as bad as believed with battery management systems babying the batteries. The car almost certainly weighs too much, which will manifest in handling and tire wear.

And of course, there’s gas v. electric. If (and sadly only if) you charge at home, an EV in my area is roughly like having a hybrid and $1.00/gallon gas. If you charge publicly… yeah that’s priced really high.

So at one point, there will likely be a huge single expense for the battery. However, that is instead of frequent oil and air filter changes, occasional belt replacement, and a host of likely repairs that a gas car generally incurs over that sime time. One very big expense at once instead of tons of little expenses and a few big expenses.

If the initial cost of the vehicle were competitive, hands down the EV is going to be the right choice if you can charge at home. Trickier question in an apartment or renter’s scenario.

It’s also because of the scrapers.

Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.

Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.

The paradox of a good company and product.

Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?

Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.

Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.

The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro’s need replacement, then they won’t have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can’t compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.

The USA has great data infrastructure and comparitively cheap power compared to anywhere else that has a vaguely credible grid.

Staff barely matters, the handful of folks they need is a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Real estate in rural America is pretty cheap too. Since they don’t care about proximity to anything day to day, they just need to make sure there’s credible access to power, data, and water.

Meanwhile, they have a government that varies through different degrees of support and pretty much never wavering toward the side of making life difficult so long as they stay at home, but will make things more complicated.

If they did build somewhere that was cheaper, it would be unreliable for their customer base due to network connectivity, and they’d probably have a problem keeping their datacenter suitably powered, and some the US would get pissy about exporting that much compute.

Sadly, the strategy tends to work. Just like slop and clickbait by any sane world should not be rewarded, it rakes it in for the people who do it.

Because in this scenario, taxpayer money has been tied into the “winners” already. So that company eager to take his place? Well, that’s bad news because the taxpayer fund already picked his company to be the right answer. So we want to prop up Altman and discourage that upstart that might disrupt this theoretical fund.

Same reason why OpenAI was pushing for regulation that they get to shape. Easy for OpenAI to navigate, hard for newcomers to get going.

Serve, but more critically be readily available scapegoats to discard.

Doesn’t really create symmetry for risk/reward, because, for example, the corporate leadership decides how much to pay out to investors versus how much they spend including a lot of their own compensation.

So they can carve out the reward as they see fit, but if things go bad they can lean on the public investment as leverage to get bailouts.

Feeling this at my company.

The amount of time I have spent working with European customers has dropped a lot. They are doing whatever they can to buy European instead.

Crazy compared to how freely things worked out years ago. Early 2000s I worked at a company basically doing stuff with all sorts of folks from USA to Europe to Russia to China.

tomorrow morning

You should have got a lottery ticket as long as you were in tomorrow.

It is, but unintended consequences.

With this, then we couldn’t afford Sam Altman to experience failure because he will drag folks down with him. So the companies invested become too big to fall, and the still private leadership gets to run things however they wish knowing the government will cover for any mistakes.

It’s bad enough as the government will panic about retirement accounts when they falter, this exacerbates it.

It’s a risky form of private-public partnership, with a lot of ways the company can privatize rewards but socialize the risk.

Indeed.

I know “Well, you don’t get to decide on the response” certainly aged like milk, but I think folks in 2023 could be forgiven to be thinking “IDF is going to strike Hamas and Hamas brought them on themselves” as the wanton collateral harm largely wasn’t on folks radar at the time. Some folks with more nuanced understandings sounded alarms and were dismissed, but having to respond to that situation mere weeks after October 7th… That’s going to be a tough scenario for most people to come out looking ok.

That’s the fun part, in that time, cubicles were seen as terrible, dystopian, cheapass things because folks used to have offices, and how much cheaper could it really get than some flimsy modular furniture for you to sit at?

Then the companies gestured to just some tables in a room and said “figure it out, and no assigned seating, so just figure it out each day” to show how cheap and how little regard they have for the employees.

At this rate, I fully expect in the next few years for the next wave in office space optimization:

One, as many point out, insurance is about covering the extremes. Most people won’t use as much money as the premium, but others…

For example, a relative of mine got a rare cancer, that is pretty treatable, but the medicine alone would have cost 10k a month, ignoring the frequent oncologist appointments. No amount of savings would have covered that. Even a single visit to an ER could more than wipe out a couple of years of premiums.

The other thing is the discounts are no joke. Now if you are truly uninsured, many of the providers will upon negotiation give you some severe “break”, but you have to fight every time and your results are unpredictable. The insurance companies have lots of leverage, and the providers jack up prices to make the negotiated rates look good compared to their alleged list prices.

Why should misgendering be treated with more respect than the respect given?

You imply they intended some disrespect. They used a default pronoun and when asked to do otherwise they obliged, despite being immediately accused of doing a shitty thing. Folks are being offended on behalf of a person that hasn’t said anything about how that person feels one way or another.

A “could you use a non-specific pronoun instead of masculine when you don’t know” might have gone a long way, but implying some mundane default use of a pronoun is malicious and shitty is just a really excessive amount of vitriol when absolutely nothing was meant by any of it.

I know about singular they, but I don’t like it. Perhaps because there was a movement in my childhood education to “correct” the use of singular they, as noted in that wikipedia article there was significant pressure for hundreds of years to make people not use plural pronouns singularly. I for one wish that a singular, human appropriate, non-specific personal pronoun emerged because singular “they” just grates my nerves.