I'm having a hard time seeing this as a problem with Kindle (as opposed to e.g. ownership of bought content).

Kindles have a long battery lifetime, measured in weeks. If it has run out, connect it to a powerbank and you've solved the problem for days. Content that you are reading or have read on the device is available, and if you have to get a new book - just connect it to your phone hotspot and download it. They're tiny.

Not necessarily - if they ask for and get consent they can store it. There's no sensitive data in what is listed.

However, what the app does - "let women anonymously share and search for information, advice, and photos of men they say they have dates with or are looking to date" - would be strictly illegal as they haven't gotten consent from the men in the database, The data would also contain information on the data subject's sexual life, which is a protected category of data. They'd also run afoul of the data subject's right to rectification of the information in the database.

It's strange that they don't separate investment in AI vs operating expenses in the rest of the company to keep and expand the markets they have. It's not like they're financially unable to do both - both AI and keeping the resources they need for operations(*). That said, buybacks are better for some than dividends because you pay taxes immediately on dividends while if the same money goes via buybacks you don't have to pay taxes before you realize the profits by selling the stock. Of course, if like most people you have mutual funds it doesn't matter.

(*) Which means more of a constant optimization up or down in the actual units, rather than large cuts everywhere.

Well, then it should be easy - if it no longer works and it's covered by a three year warranty they'll have to fix it somehow, Or, failing that, they will probably think a refund is easier,

You shouldn't buy that. Not only is it worse by almost every spec (cpu speed, graphics, memory, cameras, battery lifetime, external display support, wifi standard), but it will also have approximately 3-4 years less of updates from today. Per year, it will probably be more expensive than the cheapest M4 air.

Price discrimination is a common strategy. Not only between countries, but also between different customer segments. "Student discounts" and "senior discounts" are other examples.

The tactic is especially useful for products where you have a large fixed cost and a lower marginal cost - e.g. software. Take one example, Matlab. The normal cost of a software seems to be above $2000. Obviously, the marginal cost is close to zero but they have large fixed costs - so if you can sell it to home users for a much lower cost, you're still getting more money total even if that price if applied to business customers would bankrupt the company.

Ah, correction fluid. Nice flashback. It also reminded me of an old joke: "Q: How do you know a Swede has been using the computer? A: There's correction fluid on the display."

Actually, the healthcare in most of those countries has far better outcomes than the US. They also spend far less of their GDP doing so.

While I'm pro free market, I see that in this particular case - health care - it doesn't work. It's better to pay 10% of GDP in taxes for better healthcare than 15% of GDP through a mix of taxes (elderly), insurance, and out of pocket for worse outcomes.

Reasons for this might include that the buyers aren't rational (doh), that there are monopolies (patents, location, urgency), and that the costs are such that the large majority of the population needs insurance of some kind. The specifics of the market also means there are a lot of very bad incentives for the insurance companies to use pre-existing conditions or trying to deny coverage after the fact, and very strange and weird price/discount structures.

To be fair, having merit in the US is easy when the best the US can offer - the brightest minds, sharpest intellects, and most honest of people - are Trump, Kennedy,Hegseth, and Greene.

The problem with these old codebases is usually not the language as such, it's the byzantine specs - and usually partial lack thereof. And all the special cases hiding therein. Writing something you don't understand into a different language is a time consuming challenge, and for these systems breaking stuff often has severe consequences.

This is not how OS support in the Mac world works. Every OS is just supported for 3 years - 1 year of full support including feature upgrades and improvements, and 2 years of security updates. However, Mac gets news major OS versions for free - and a system will get these new major releases for 5-6 years, before they get 2 years of security updates on the final one. So a total of 7-8 years of support. They use the same scheme for both MacOS and iOS. Great for phones, not so great for computers. Microsoft is far superior there, and also in backwards compatibility for applications running on that platform.

That's not how OS releases in the Apple world work. You get a new major OS release for free every year for 5-6 years, and then the final one gets security updates for two more years. Thus, the hardware is supported by Apple for 6-8 years. Which is great for a phone, and a bit behind Windows for PCs and laptops.

If DOGE was actually doing anything useful rather than dismantling the US, they would have seen "how come the US as a nation spends so much more of our GDP on healthcare, but with so bad results compared to other developed countries?". There seems to be plenty of evidence that public healthcare works better than the US system - and if the total paid via taxes would be much less than the sum insurance + tax of today, that'd be a big win. Real world efficiency.

A well functioning market needs rational and informed consumers - neither of which you will have in healthcare. Also, the old adage "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is much more of an incentive in a public healthcare system.

That's not correct. Apple provides full MacOS updates for 6-7 years - the current release, Sequioa supports a lot of hardware from 2018 and 2019. When they no longer release new OS versions for the hardware, they still supply security updates for a couple of years more. Similar for iOS - it also supports 2018 phones, and if they no longer support that with the next release it'll have security updates until 2027 or so. 9 years is a pretty good lifespan for a phone.

What Apple is pretty bad at is software backwards compatibility - 32 bits software hasn't run for years, leaving a lot of software behind. And when they drop Intel backwards compatibility, it'll be even worse.

Microsoft - evil as they are - are much better on these aspects of computers. Games from the 90s still run - as do my old games on my Xbox.

These cameras all save in open formats like jpeg as well, and you can also get them to save both. RAW files are (at least initially) pretty much sensor dumps - the data isn't lossily compressed or processed (or at least minimially processed). This typically allows you do processing yourself before you "develop" a jpeg - things like tinker with the exposure, noise reduction etc in the image, or parts of it. If you're looking for an open source competitor to Lightroom and Capture One, darktable is more up that alley than Gimp.