Right to repair laws would help things so much. If you didn’t like the firmware that came with the car, you could install alternative firmware. If the dealer sold a car that was known to have some terrible components, there would be a business opportunity for a car modder who would buy factory vehicles from the dealer and replace the most trouble-prone parts, then re-sell the car with a slight mark-up.

It used to be that when it came to high performance cars, there were groups like Alpine, AMG, Abarth, Shelby, Saleen, etc. They were often race teams, or associated with race teams. Sometimes they would buy stock cars and modify them for racing, or at least modify them for high performance. But, most of those have now been brought into the company most associated with them. Mercedes owns AMG, Alpine is part of Renault, etc. I would bet one reason that this is not as common anymore is that cars are heavily computerized, and the computers can use DRM to restrict anybody but the original manufacturer from modifying them.

That’s the difficult thing about reviewing the durability of things. If you want to talk about whether something will last for years and years, you have to wait years to publish the review. By the time the review is out, they might no longer sell the model that was being reviewed. In some cases, the company might have been sold to a private equity investor who is just milking the brand’s goodwill before the value tanks.

How much is that going to cost you? I know long term it will probably save you money, but I would bet that the cost is triple the stuff you buy in a big box store.

There are probably times when the way restaurants do things isn’t appropriate for home cooking. For example, I read about commercial woks vs woks for home use. Woks used in restaurants tend to be thin and lightweight. They’re meant to be used with immensely powerful wok burners used in restaurants, and are light partially because a chef using a wok for hours and hours wants something as light as possible. If you’re a home cook, a heavier wok with a flatter bottom might work better because your stove probably can’t get as hot as a commercial wok burner. The flatter bottom means it heats better on the kinds of stove used at home, and is more steady when set down. The thickness helps it retain heat when it’s removed from the stove or when ingredients are added. A home chef doesn’t have to keep lifting the thing hour after hour, so the extra weight is ok.

A commercial fridge and commercial freezer sound great though. They seem to be built more and more delicately these days.

computer networking hardware which will eventually be outdated and no longer get security updates

I don’t think that means that the correct approach is for the manufacturer to build in obsolescence. Sometimes the security threats don’t matter to some users, so they should be allowed to accept the risk and keep using the item. Or, there could be a rule in place that if the company no longer wants to maintain something, it is required to release the source to maintain it.

There’s no comma there. They use it as punctuation at the end of a sentence:

e.g.: “I heard your mother died I’m sorry lol”

That depends on the wording.

Ooh, I like before and benign because at first there doesn’t seem to be anything tricky going on there.

Can you imagine? A modern day oracle. Scientists would be lining up to ask questions about how the world worked and everything you said would be true.

It would be great for just confirming things that science suspected were true. Like, all the rare particles they’re trying to find with the Large Hadron Collider. They could just ask the oracle and learn all the particles they were missing, along with all the important data about them.

Best of all, if you couldn’t lie, and couldn’t be wrong (even if you didn’t know the answer) it could be used to “discover” things without ever having to go down blind alleys, or waste time with research that won’t bear fruit. For example, you could ask “is it possible for something like a spaceship to move faster than the speed of light?” If the answer is no, then you can write off working on that forever. If it’s yes, you could progressively ask questions to learn the theory you’d need to know to build a FTL ship. It could also finally put to bed whether time travel is possible, and how the paradoxes involved are resolved.

If FTL travel is possible, you could just ask the oracle where all the various aliens are, making it really easy to contact them (plus the oracle can tell you if it’s unsafe to contact them).

Also, since it was obviously possible to transform someone into an oracle, it should be possible to do that again. You can just ask the oracle the right questions needed to create a second, third, tenth, 1000th oracle. That way the one oracle isn’t always so busy, and if the first oracle dies, there are still many more.

Too bad all the (common) silent b words are words with b in the middle, not at the beginning. Bdellium would work, but that’s something I think 99.9% of the planet has never heard of. If that were allowed, I bet you could find extremely rare names for every other letter.

• E: Ewe
• H: Hugh
• U: Uyghur
• Y: Yew

X: how bout either “Xenophobia” or even better, the 14th letter of the greek alphabet, as it’s written in English: Xi.

Better suggestions for B:

• Breath: Half the people would say “breathe” instead.
• Boatswain: most people would have no idea how that’s pronounced
• Bury: a word with lots of different regional pronunciations

The original version of the comment said, I believe “So there is precedence”. That could be fixed as “there is a precedent” or “there are precedents”. I suggested “precedents” because it seems like OP used the homophone for that one. So, “precedents” is correct, “precedence” is not.

There was fuck all need for that. I actually mostly backed you up in another comment.

Bruh, you said “Bruh. If you’re going to correct, be sure you’re correct.”, when I was correct and OP was incorrect.

Note that the original has been edited. It used to say “precedence”.

Before OP edited the comment it used “precedence”. They mean different things.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-of-precedent-vs-precedence

https://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/precedence_precedent.htm

https://languagetool.org/insights/post/precedence-or-precedent/

https://www.thoughtco.com/precedence-precedents-and-presidents-1689468

What’s next, are you going to claim “presidents” is another alternative spelling that means the same thing?

I am.

They mean different things.

precedents

We don’t know if this bubble is going to be more like the dot-com bubble where the bubble burst but left useful things behind, or if it’s going to be like the NFT bubble that left nothing useful behind.

As for whether the companies see this or not, of course they do. But, what are they going to do, go out of business intentionally before the bubble pops? It’s really the investors who don’t seem to see it. Why do they keep pumping money into the companies that are obviously ridiculously overvalued?

The human-looking part is probably just a lure, like those deep-sea lantern fish. A human gets close enough to investigate and the insect pounces.