Indeed, most oversubscribed events are by lottery in Japan. You sign up, and if you are lucky you get the opportunity to buy a ticket. The prices are flat, there is no demand pricing or any of that bullshit.

A lot of kids already have a Chromebook for school though. If they want to play Roblox their parents can spend an extra hundred or two on a premium model. It's going to be hard for Apple to break into that.

They published a paper, you can reproduce their results yourself if you want. Probably on a smaller scale if you aren't willing to able to throw that kind of money at it, but it's not really clear what more they could do to prove their claim. Except for not being Chinese, of course.

The US, like many strongly capitalist countries, needs cheap food to maintain the supply of cheap labour for other industries. When food prices rise, people either need to be paid more or are too malnourished to work efficiently.

High calorie junk food offsets it a bit, but also leads to other health problems. Someone who is obese is not going to make an ideal Amazon warehouse worker.

This is all ignoring things like quality of life that tend not to matter in such societies.

As TFS points out, courts have ruled in their favour and you can expect that it won't be long before the government steps in to assist if the employers don't.

That's the secret to the Chinese government's success - they give a shit about the citizens and work to improve their lives, instead of trying to maintain the supply of cheap labour for corporations. As such Chinese citizens are mostly happy with how their lives keep improving, and feel that the government is on their side. I know it's hard to imagine.

That sort of thing can be done with Matter, local only, no cloud or internet needed. You can even DIY it with a little effort.

If it can't get ads from the internet it will show built in ads, probably for Samsung stuff.

But that's crippling the product. You don't buy a fridge with a screen if you don't want that functionality, and it's bound to only work when online.

This is an attempt to get into the Chromebook market, particularly education. Schools aren't going to tell parents that they need to buy a $1,500 Macbook, but a $250 Chromebook isn't out of the question.

It will be interesting to see how badly crippled it is by software lockdowns. Mac App Store only? Or even iPad OS.

Either way it shows just how far ahead they are, and how ineffective the export ban on Nvidia chips is. Even if a domestic chip is only half as efficient as an Nvidia one, it's not going to raise the cost of training AI models enough to matter.

This also makes the Chinese tech much more attractive to other countries as it's not such a huge environmental disaster.

Consumers need to reject it. Return the fridge if an update brings ads.

In countries with stronger consumer rights there is little question that this kind of enshittification would be a refund issue. It fundamentally changes the product, intrudes into your private space with unwanted and obnoxious ads, and it cannot be repaired.

Facebook is designed to take old people and radicalize them. 60+ and on Facebook is practically guaranteed to be an extremist.

Trumpflation. We have to resist this.

The makers of some medications are jacking up prices too. Trump demanded that the US stop paying more for drugs, so instead of lowering prices there, they raised prices in Europe.

We have to say no. Switch to a different medication if you can. Trump's taxes must be paid by Americans, and if companies try to shift some of the burden onto us, we have to stop buying their stuff.

None of which is true. Labour costs in China are rising as their society comes up to Western standards of living and incomes, and besides labour costs are only a small component of the overall manufacturing cost. They have quite strict environmental protection laws too, at a time when the US is weakening its. You can't even build a factory within X km of a protected river now, no matter how much you promise not to release any pollution.

No, the reason the Chinese are able to keep costs down is simple: economy of scale. They have a huge domestic market, and when it comes to EVs they supply the rest of the world with batteries and components, even whole cars that get re-badged.

That and long, very agile supply chains.

All the stuff about ghost cities and subways to nowhere was false. They were simply build ahead of expected, planned migrations from rural areas to cities, which sure enough happened.

The real-estate market has overheated a bit in China, but you have to remember that the government's goal is to provide housing for its citizens, not to enable private companies to make huge profits. I know it's very hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but low real-estate prices are considered a good thing as long as they are properly managed.