Yea, when the market has stupid prices for stupid reasons this is the likely response. People will only replace phones, tablets and PC that actually fail, not just to get a trendy newer model. Fortunately there is little reason upgrade as the only difference with older models is the addition of AI features that few buyers actually care about, and, with exception of live translation, are not needed on the device itself.

My first computer had 128B of RAM (MC6802) and 2KB EPROM. When programing in machine code using a hex keypad it felt like a reasonable amount of RAM. Now this machine is using 59GB of it's 64GB, mostly due to Firefox and it's web extensions to block ads etc. While some of the demand makes sense I can't help but wonder how much waste there is with layer upon layer of code that assumes RAM is cheap.

Given that a large percentage of the current AI investment is "me too" investment that will fail, then hopefully there will be a healthy drop in price from the oversupply for the real AI needs.

You do know that FAFO means "Fuck Around and Find Out"? What has the USA's allies done to the USA? What fucking around have they done? It is the USA is which is threatening it's allies.

Traditionally part of the USA's power has been the solidarity of it's allies. Many New Zealanders have lost the lives in wars started by the USA. As you pull inwards, threatening allies and talking of dissolving alliances, you lose power by not being able to call on those allies. Already your power is less than a before trump. Today allies withhold some intelligence information from the USA because they know trump may chose to post it on X. Ukraine is now the world's leader in drone technology and who are they sharing it with? Europe and the UK, not the USA.

I suspect the "10% of total Australian expenditure" would be trivial for their accountants to fudge. However the "7.5% of revenues" might be harder for them to mess with, so maybe there is hope. Still what is 'revenue'? One would hope it is what is actually taken from Australian's credit card without offset, fees, adjustments or magic thinking.

I'm reminded of the joke; A mathematician, engineer and account were asked what "2 + 2" is:
The mathematician answered "It can generally be assumed to be 4 in normal use".
The engineer answered "4.0 is a reasonable assumption".
The accountant answered "What do you want it to be?".

I did qualify it with "That is just how it looks to me", based on they have a reasonably functional democracy and fairly strong consumer protection laws. To be fair to you retort the 'Value' part is probably more the value of people's votes than the people themselves.

AI is such a generic term it is probably misleading this case. When people talk about AI they usually mean LLM like ChatGPT but I doubt that this is the AI that is actually having effect here. I suspect the AI they are actually using is ML when it is trained on the input and output data of the factory systems until it can control them, after which it continues the fine tune things for better numbers.

The streaming services won't need to spend much as creative accounting means they show little actual profit in Australia. The profit is all seen off shore in places like Ireland. I recall there was a time several years ago when my one man company was paying more taxes in New Zealand that Google, even though they were hauling in a lot of money globally. They were simply fudging the numbers to move their tax obligations away from here to a country where it was cheaper.

You can bet they will do the same in Australia, manipulate the numbers to maximise their profit. I think the important thing is the Australians are only asking for action on the parts of the business that these companies do locally, not basing it on the total operations, making it a reasonable demand.

If you compare the attitude of the great powers to their people it is interesting. In alphabetical order the way it looks to me is:

China: Controls it's people but is wary of them so tries to keep them happy.
Europe: Values it's people so tries to keep them happy.
Russia: People are a resource to manipulate and use.
USA: People exist to provide resources to make corporations and the rich more profitable.

In that light:

China: Their power continues to grow steady.
Europe: Has realise the USA is no longer there for them and is actively trying to improve.
Russia: Has over played its hand and is paying the price, a reduced power.
USA: Becoming increasing inward focused and chaotic is giving away power rapidly.

That is just how it looks to me, not being from any of the those powers. I'm sure others will see it differently.

I don't see how that helps if it can't solve my problem. Will it escalate to a person with the skill to investigate and resolve my problem? As far as I am aware AI can't solve problems that haven't already been solved or can be extrapolated from existing information without doing research.

Therefore I disagree, my original point stands.

My experience with HP support is the staff are unable to understand questions with any technical depth and won't pas them on to staff who could. You get lip service generic answers which are useless. I assume the AI will be just as useless, but faster.

While I'm sure you are right that USA car makers are likely doing that same thing, that link was not a great example. At least they are honest after the click bait head line.

Tesla do get a lot of hit jobs from media, particularly automotive media, because they refuse to pay for adverts. It does seem to have died down in recent times as most people now know the pros and cons of a Tesla, so the FUD is less effective and hurts their credibility.

Worth a read of the about page at https://kawaiicon.org/about/. Maybe I will go to the next one.

The most interesting thing is JMAP support, but it does fell weird given JMAP support hasn't even been started on the normal Thunderbird email client.

Make the 'location' such that the correction sends it back into Russia.

They may risk creating a viable competitor but they have to balance that with losing customers by complying with governments. They earn their income from keeping customers happy, not governments.