The fact they made it possible is impressive in itself. Sure it’s not competitive for the latest games or such, but society is more and more reliant on smartphones, so having a local option is valuable in itself.

It’s a bit like countries making their own planes instead of buying the F-35, which is better and cheaper. They looked stupid at the time, until Trump came back and it turned out strategic autonomy had value.

As for the price, probably it is due to small production ; but also simply underlines how we got used to not paying the “true” price of things, by moving production to places with cheaper costs & labor.

You’re missing their point, they’re saying from the point of view of those in power millionaires are middle class.

Although there are some that distinguish a “managerial class” that is in-between the middle class and the billionaires : people like CEOs and such, with net worth in the tens of millions but who are not those who benefit the most from the system and are culturally distinct. I think it’s a useful concept personally, as their interests aren’t necessarily the same as the owner class but they still have a lot of political power.

Most of Europe does not put fluor in the drinking water though.

Loads of fossil power use gas turbines that do not involve steam :x

My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.

I wonder the same, my theory is that this gesture is used both as a loyalty test and a way to further polarize society.

Making this gesture draws clear lines in society: those who say it was fine, those who say it wasn’t, those who don’t take a stance (ie the media calling it a “controversial gesture” or similar). So Musk & al now have a clearer idea of who stand where. It also cleaves those “for” and those “against” further away, solidifying their base.

Another explanation is this is part of the normalization of extreme rethoric and symbols. I doubt he could have gotten away with it ten years ago; who knows what they’ll be able to do and say in 2035?

Yet another possibility, he did it on a whim and the neo-nazis like Bannon are now seizing the opportunity. It’s unclear how planned this was and how intentional the consequences were.

(And all might be true at once)

I choose to believe this is brilliant trolling

Even going as far as calling her husband an asshole (might be true, I’m not married to the dude).

You misunderstood the text, the sentence is :

If only I got a penny for every time someone said: you don’t look like a computer scientist, I could be Mackenzie Scott without having to marry an asshole.

She’s calling Jeff Bezos an asshole, not her own husband.

You think people shouldn’t be allowed to… file lawsuits? This is all that has happened so far, there is no court decision yet.

“4 chords” is a cool mashup but it’s not really a valid point in this conversation.

The songs in “4 chords” don’t use the same 4 chords, because they are higher and lower than that. So you might say they use the same progression, but that’s not true either, because they’re not always constantly in the same order. So the best you can say is “it’s possible to interpret pitch- and tempo-adjusted excerpts of these songs back-to-back”, which isn’t a very strong claim.

In fact there’s a lot of things separating the songs in “4 chords”; such as structure, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics, or production. Another fact is that it’s perfectly possible to use these four chords in a way that you’ve never heard before and would likely find bizarre – it’s a bit of meme, but limitation really can breed creativity.

This isn’t to defend the lack of creativity in the big music industry. But there’s more to it than just saying “4 chords” to imply all musicians do is follow an established grid.