IKEA stuff is usually decent quality, and being a big popular brand is usually well supported too. Using Matter means no internet connection needed, should work with Home Assistant.

Hopefully this shakes up the market a bit and drives down costs. Their air purifiers are good too, and are disrupting the market with their much lower prices.

Per capita is the only measure that matters, unless you are willing to suggest culling billions of people as a solution.

Even in the US it's a bit more complicated than that. Most jurisdictions only allow trademarks on common words in very narrow markets, so e.g. Microsoft's claim on "visual" only applies to development software products, and not other types of software, or anything that isn't software.

Lower wages were only a small part of it. The next logical step in mass production was to combine products from different brands. Why make socks for just one brand, when you can make socks for a hundred brands, mostly identical except for the logos and dye colours? And why ship the cotton from where it is grown to the US, and the re-export it to Europe for sales, when you can just have a factory next to the fields and then ship directly from there to retail?

Now we are into the next phase, which is the factories selling direct to consumers.

That was the official account belonging to the actual fucking White House.

Not just some fruitcake like MTG or Bobo, the people who are supposed to represent the entire US government. Let that sink in. The people that are supposed to be sober, truthful and respectful are quite literally shit-posting.

It's not just that, it's that too many industries don't want to modernize, and too many people don't want anything near them to change (NIMBYs).

Take the cheap energy issue. There is loads of cheap energy. We have a massive fusion reactor that is fuelled for billions of years, providing more power than we could ever use, and the technology to harvest it. Some countries are taking advantage of that, but many European and US ones are stuck with high energy costs because they refuse to. That's a choice, not an unfortunate reality we can do nothing about.

That wouldn't help with Cloudflare and similar CDNs. DNS just doesn't propagate fast enough to work with dynamic caching.

It's better we don't try to come up with a technical fix for what is a legal problem anyway. The issue is site blocking on copyright grounds, initiated by private corporations.

Also, it's not like the US manufacturers aren't heavily supported by the government either. Bailouts when things go wrong, favourable laws, tariffs and import bans, and of course the coal roller in chief helping to stifle competition and keep their legacy fossil vehicles popular.

If the US gives up on EVs, it will be the outlier in a world that is fast adopting them. There will be economic consequences as manufacturers fall even further behind on the technology, and US emissions from fossil fuel vehicles remain higher than rivals. The cost of transporting things is falling below the cost of fossil fuels that were previously needed. It's not great for the health of Americans either.

The fact that Ford can't seem to succeed here is yet another sign that Ford is a failure and only surviving with heavy government assistance.

China's emissions peaked at less than half those of Americans though. Somehow they are doing even more manufacturing, but without emitting so much greenhouse gas.

Sorry, but ruining your kid's future by sending them off to an unlicenced school where any nonsense could be taught as fact by entirely unqualified people, without even so much as basic child protection assurances is not a thing in any civilised society.

That's how child abuse happens, that's how religious indoctrination occurs, that's how kids get to adulthood and realise they have zero useful qualifications or skills and their best opportunity for education (and quite literally "learning how to learn") has been squandered through no fault of their own.

Yes, sure, what's wrong with a closeted billionaire running a unannounced secret school for children and not licencing, meeting child protection obligations, or even telling anyone that the school exists, let alone who's teaching it, and keeping the whole thing hush-hush and off the record books? Can't imagine THAT going wrong at all...

How bad is the American economy when twenty bucks an hour is an attractive offer to train not only your replacement, but the replacement of everybody else in the country who holds the same job? Hell, people are selling themselves out - along with lots of others - for a rate that's only $3.50 an hour above California's minimum wage!

I've been hearing rumors about the next Xbox functioning more like a PC. I don't know if that's wishful thinking bullshit or what but it could be a clever way to shoehorn Windows back into some people's lives that would otherwise switch to Linux at least for non-gaming purposes. There's lots of people out there who use a cheap PC to do PC stuff, and game mostly on console.