I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Coitus interruptus

If amazon pays the tarrifs they can deduct them from their taxes.

If they pass along the tarrifs then the consumer can deduct them

So
1. They have to do this if they are not deducting them

2. And there is no net revenue to the us government on any tax deductible tarrif collected

If amazon passes along the excise tax on a good for resale then they have to provide this to consumers who can deduct it.

If they don't pass it on then they can deduct it.

Either way there is no net revenue to the us government from any deductible tarrif

I thought best buy already served as Amazon's showroom ?

Altairs had a little as 1K memory and you entered the boot loader by hand using binary switches. I got a lot of practice with octal using that very Altair computer that bill gates gifted my high school.

Why octal you might ask and not hex. The importance of hex only emerged after we started trying programs. But when you had to enter machine code by hand using 16 dip switches in a row octal could be done using three fingers on each hand. Try to slap four switches at the same time is two spastic a movement for most people's hands. You could go wickedly fast in octal

With the Altair there was no overriding operating system at all so comparing it to Linux is weird. No hard or floppy drives. To write a program you keyed in the boot loader that had enough brains to read something off cassette tape which was a more sophisticated loader that then could read in the 2K basic. The basic could then accept input from a teletype.
If you wanted a file manager for your cassette tape then you write one in basic and ran it.

For me the phone is an appliance. I don't seek crazy standout features if it an anyway degrades my legacy knowledge and expectations in operating my appliance. I don't like relearning how to use a different microwave oven. A toaster is simple and all that matters is that it's a good toaster that cooks evenly and reproducibly.
But I like new features so I don't just want to keep my old phone. I just want an ecosystem that has tamed new innovations and integrates those across my existing apps well.
Getting the cheapest phone is never of interest. Anything you touch more times per day than your wife should be a graceful pleasant experience and so paying a dollar or even two per day for the best experience phone is a no brainer.

You may note I did not say the word Apple. If that sounds like I just described the Apple experience that is your imputation. But you'd not be wrong that Apple serves that customer better than any other

The competition has had years to study Apple, and even hire away their engineers but no one has such a user centric experience as Apple,

I don't need to care what processor I have inside. My privacy is as protected as much as possible. Devices last years. Everything works together. Apple saves time rather worrying about flash.

Apple has been creating its own processor and bus architecture letting it make fan free high performance long battery life computers. It may not be a new product category per se but it sure is innovative as it has let them create awesome performance systems.

You may recall Microsoft spent years failing at moving its OS to arm. Abysmal failure. Surfaces are still playing catchup.

I also like the expansion of my privacy on sppple with things like private relay and on board AI task specific entiiies rather than external servers.

The Apple AR system was sure shell of a lot better than anything Zuckerberg produced. Just because AR isn't being adopted fast doesn't change that they smoked Zuckerbergs
passion project

And the Apple ecosystem still "just works" better than the competition. The creation of a secure privacy centered seamless integration of long lived products is very satisfying to any user that values their time

Apple has been creating its own processor and bus architecture letting it make fan free high performance long battery life computers. It may not be a new product category per se but it sure is innovative as it has let them create awesome performance systems.

You may recall Microsoft spent years failing at moving its OS to arm. Abysmal failure. Surfaces are still playing catchup.

I also like the expansion of my privacy on sppple with things like private relay and on board AI task specific entiiies rather than external servers.

The Apple AR system was sure shell of a lot better than anything Zuckerberg produced. Just because AR isn't being adopted fast doesn't change that they smoked Zuckerbergs
passion project

And the Apple ecosystem still "just works" better than the competition. The creation of a secure privacy centered seamless integration of long lived products is very satisfying to any user that values their time

You literally touch your iPhone more times per day than your wife. You spend more time concentrating on it than your wife. These things are part of your life. Paying less than a dollar a day for a fondle slab you will have a few years is good value. You'd have to be nuts not to buy the top of the line when it's so cheap and such high interactivity in your life. I'd like to say that wasn't true but sadly(?) it is.

So the big question is if waymo vehicles travel safer routes than general driving. At least this is broken down by zip code . But one could probably come up with a different measure comparing accidents on similar paths. The data may not be dense enough for that though

Anyone who has flown in Europe lately knows that baggage fees are more lucrative than passenger seats!

It does it in 8 parsnips

Clippy: it looks like you are trying for a cute punny memorable name. Can I help?