Buy they can make an 11-inch ipad and sell it for $350. Are you really suggesting that they can't put that into a clamshell form factor for $600?

I live in semi-rural eastern Tennessee and our schools have 1:1 laptop policies with district provided and managed equipment. What school district out there is requiring parents to buy devices like that in this day and age?

I mean, Thunderbolt in phones isn't a thing, but the rest? iPhone 17's SSD is 256GB which is the same size as our standard corporate laptops (and without the 100GB of Windows bloat) so claiming "SSD is too small" is an odd claim to make. If you're docked to external peripherals, "screen too small, shitty on screen keyboard" is similarly a strange complaint. "Wrong OS" is only applicable if you have some specific application stack you need to run. If it's just "I sent email and push spreadsheets around" then ios and android are totally fine.

There is a very large swath of office type workers who "dock your phone" would work fine for.

They'd better be giving these refrigerators out for free, or at an insane discount that they plan to make up for via ad revenue. Otherwise, there's no reason for that feature to exist.

If you were dumb enough to buy one of these "smart" refrigerators, you get what you deserve. There is absolutely no reason to have a "smart" refrigerator. It's a refrigerator. It should only do two things: keep the stuff in the fridge cool and the stuff in the freezer frozen.

Anything else is a waste of money.

But they have no problem paying $50 to have a Big Mac delivered to them.

Perhaps a rethinking is in order.

Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.

For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.

... this year. And next year, the same logic will have us getting rid of all of the entry-level employees, and the year after that, the mid-level employees, and some years from now, all employees. Yay, progress?

Comedians will do anything that works to get a laugh, but sourcing jokes from ChatGPT (or similar) is not an effective way to get a laugh. Comedy is based on surprise, and LLMs are based on summarizing old material, so there's a bit of a mismatch there.

Well, sure, in the same way a 747 is just a fancy mechanical bird. Which is to say, yes, but no.

You missed the best part and directly related to this story. Texas got rid of the mandate that construction companies provide breaks for their workers in high heat.

This doesn't mean the company can't give their workers breaks, just that it is no longer mandated. How many do you think no longer give these breaks?

This is one of the oldest rationalizations for shitty behavior: "if I won't do it, somebody else will anyway".

Yup, and it's used to this day to justify genocide.

This is no different than requiring the manufacturer to include a warning about the stove tipping over if there is no anti-tipping bracket installed. Consumers are being warned of the issue.

If they're going to whine about this, might as well whine about every other warning they are required to provide with their product.

That's an interesting link, thank you.
The "nuances or causal factors" do show up -- somewhat -- farther down that report:

Because people aren't solitary islands whose deaths harm only themselves. Anyone who has lived on Earth for more than a few days has formed relationships with other people, and suicide is the murder of a person those people have a relationship with. Suicide harms everyone who interacts with or depends on that suicider for anything, in much the same way that the murder of that person would.

Yes, that is precisely the problem.