And a member of the EU. It's difficult to fit Turkiye in the category of being a Western nation despite the technical reasons to do so.

My friends complain about the marina fees and haul-out fees. It sounds like an expensive hobby. Maybe not quite as bad as guitars though, where rational thought has completely evaporated.

I could use 40% less plastic. And pay more for the plastic I do use. which is how the economics shake out for this.

The interest rate on "financing" for a device that can't really be insured, can't be tracked by title, etc is going to be the same as a high interest credit card. Why do this to yourself?

At least put it on your own credit card and get some cashback or frequent flyer miles or something.

I paid $17k for a Jeep Renegade that was only 3 year old. Imagine if I bought a more obvious piece of crap with a lot more miles on it.

For that amount you can finance a really nice mountain bike or a really low-end motorcycle and experience reality instead of virtual reality.

But I guess everyone has different tastes and different ways to dispose of income. Hey, at least they didn't buy a boat or a classic car. Those can not only drain away 10X that amount of money, they also can take up all your free time too.

Imagine if shopping at Walmart was like signing onto Roblox? yikes!

I think I'd rather visit a Walmart in person, in the worst part of town and walk through a dark alley.

The pin a worse camera than a phone. But a neat idea.

I couldn't quite figured out if the Rabbit R1 is an independent device or if it was tethered to a smartphone like one of those useless watches people were briefly into owning.

How different history would be if they retained patents and trademarks on that!

I ask the same question about the Humane AI Pin. At least with the AI Pin it does something a phone cannot, be pinned to your shirt. But it's not actually comfortable to wear, oh well.

The problem with apps is they don't make a lot of money any more. You have to charge quite a bit for them as long as the app stores are taking 15% and with something like AI needing fair bit of R&D and backend equipment to keep going. But if it was an exception application/service then perhaps enough people would pay a decent amount ($30+ a month? more?) to make it a viable business.

I don't really get the obsession with creating new hardware interfaces for people to use. Smartphones won. They evolved from PDAs and cellphones. And there's decades of refinement on them now. I'm not saying you can't make something better than today's smartphones. But the general public is going to interact with devices more effectively under the smartphone paradigm, with incremental improvements possible. The time for a device revolution has passed. (and my computer closet is full of failed attempts)

The Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutritional Service employs 1,300 people. If it takes that many people to manage the services to 40 million. Then we're on the right track in firing the IRS's 95,000 employees that serve essentially 300 million people. We might only need 10k employees to handle prebates. That cuts 80k unneeded people from the federal government and saves a trivial amount of money.

Which goes back to my point:

There are details that we could hypothesis over. But the point stands that if you eliminate the IRS you still need someone to handle the Fairtax's prebate system. It's not a zero overhead endeavor.

For the most part the FairTax proposal is a series of new problems that it creates. It attempts to solve one perceived solution and inserts a lot of new problems and unknowns (such as its inability to process paymetns during one of our frequent shutdowns). I'm more for a complete overhaul of the current tax code, but still fundamentally an income-based tax. On top of the property tax and sales tax that local jurisdictions apply to most American households.

The FairTax proposal is a very regressive tax. And you'd still need an entity, not unlike the IRS, to manage a progressive program called a prebate. The prebate system that would apply to around 70 million households in the US, as it applies in vary degrees to people who are need assistance or otherwise receive a reduced tax bill today. (about 40% of households in some form or another). It's no small feat to issue checks, even electronically, to households every month. It's administratively complicated and you need staff to do the work.

They should have pivoted to payroll processing if they wanted to save their business.

Selective pressure on humans has been greatly blunted by technology and culture. In the near future, it's unlikely that natural selection will play a dominate role in human development. So CVD and poor eyesight and wisdom teeth and all sorts of other things are going to have to be solved by humans and not millennia of selection.

It might be the kind of noise and the stress that animals. Also Cicadas are not active at night, so hopefully baby birds can still get some sleep.