From a fundamental standpoint, I 100% agree with this level of fee on H1B visas. It was intended for bringing in people who had specializations that didn't exist locally, not for bringing in people who would simply do the work cheaper then the local labor pool. This has led to all kinds of stagnation in compensation especially when there was high demand for the jobs as well as rising cost of living.

That being said, remote work has shown that some of this can be done without being at the office anymore. I think some businesses will look at this again and review their recent back to the office policies, and the need to have workers live/reside near certain tech hubs/centers, and will use it as an excuse to then pay the going rate of where the person resides, not the rate of compensation for the work itself....

I mean seriously, how important can they be if they don't even bother releasing them in the USA or Europe....

Pretty sure the opposing lawyer caught it and brought it up, which is why it was in the appeal in the first place. They just were not able to convince the judge in time for the original claim. Many of these kinds of things were probably cited in various fillings with limited time to respond (some things have less than 7 days to respond, which does not give enough time to dig down to all the citations, and may only provoke a more generic response that they could not find the case/reference).

Everyone gets a tracker!!!!

I mean, really? Really? The government's own policy is to not wear health and fitness trackers because they can and are being used to track people's locations and exposed quite a few "secret" locations around the world where there happened to be concentrations of people doing workouts and training in remote bases and small camps of soldiers/special ops units who were maintaining their fitness and readiness.

More of the do what I say, not what I do....

Games are $80 not $90. And that is still a huge discount from what games cost back in the 80's, 90's, 2000's when adjusted for inflation. NES games in the 80's were either $55 or $39.95 at discount. Inflation adjusted that puts the games at between $120 - $165 for the NES at launch.

The SNES games were $59.95 at launch, which inflation adjusted would be $140. Even PS2 games which were DVD based stamps (i.e. much cheaper to make than NES/SNES/N64 cartridge style) were $50 - $59 at launch, which is still $90 - 108 inflation adjusted.

So yes, games are still not as expensive when adjusted for inflation as they were back in the 80's, 90's, or 2000's.

So much wrong with your statements. Just to start, the original NES was released in 1985 at the price of $179.99, which inflation adjusted to today would be over $530. The SNES in the USA was released for $199.99 in August 1991, which inflation adjusted to today's price would be $470....

Show me a single modern phone that will use 20W of power using it's CPU+GPU capabilities. They are all much lower power, lower performance chips that will typically at most use 8W (think about this logically, you don't have a phone that has a heatsink and fan capable of dissipating that heat of the high performance parts used in the Switch 2).

I mean, seriously, this is not that surprising. It seems like Nintendo delayed the hardware 1-2 quarters to allow for more time to produce more of them ahead of release, and even imported many of them to the USA at least two or so months in advance to avoid all the tariff uncertainty.

I guess the only surprising things might be how quickly it sold out in the USA. Japan was almost certain to sell out, given the pre-order "disasters". But the USA selling out typically being Nintendo's largest market was not as certain. That said, the backwards compatibility and essentially upgrades to 4K+HDR capabilities, was pretty certain that it would be a good seller, even at the higher price point than people had been originally anticipating (I believe fans were hoping for a $350-400 range, but given that it has essentially sold out within 2-3 days of launch across the country at $450, it shows the market could support that price).

And on top of the flag on your Credit Card account, it will also put a flag on your Ubisoft/Steam/etc., account and they may also simply terminate your account causing you to lose access to all the content you have "purchased". You might want to read the terms of service you signed on those accounts, a credit card charge back is many times specifically spelled out as being a breach of terms of service which they can then terminate your service entirely.

It's hard to say with this one. I agree that at least this appointment has some enthusiasm about the overall subject. I'm not sure of the "business" side of it though. Trump still has the mindset of running government like a private business, when it is far from it. Hopefully this appointment recognizes the difference. Heck, I think it will slam him right in the face day one when he realizes that they don't have a budgetary plan that can survive more than 1 year, which makes dealing with things that take multiple years pretty hard to do....

My parents needed me to explain what I was laughing my @$$ off.

Account for inflation and a $600 or $700 console today is not much different than earlier consoles. For instance, Nintendo, the 1985 NES was $150 (inflation adjusted to today it is $440), the SNES in 1990 was $200 (inflation adjusted to today of $480). The Nintendo Switch OLED today is $350.
Sony Playstation release in 1994 was $299, which is $633 in today's dollars...

I can go on and on, but consoles themselves have not really increased in price, the value of the currency has simply changed over time. And now that you see the difference in the consoles, just realize the difference in the game prices over that time. In 1985 it was $39 or $49 for the latest games, which equates to $114 or $143 in today's dollars, but our games are still in the $59 - $69 range for most latest titles, which is a huge savings (and partly due to the costs of physical cartridge with PCB's, EEPROMs, RAM, and other chips, vs DVD/Blu-ray/digital download of today).

To an extent, I agree with you. But lets not for the moment believe that a 3D printer might be a means to produce this item. 3D printers can easily be used to quickly make roughed out metal components by creating castings for use in "investment casting" or "lost-wax casting". This is very often used in jeweler and other small/intricate metal casting work, where a 3d printed polymer is created used in a sand mold, where the printed part holds the shape in the sand mold and is melted by the molten metal that is poured into the mold, leaving the molten metal to take the shape of the 3d printed part. This can very quickly create a complex metal part to a fairly high degree of completion, needing just a few minutes of work to polish up and remove any spurs/sprews from the part.

But, yes, I agree, the part was probably not actually 3d printed. That doesn't mean a 3d printer can not be used to create it.

Go look online for an old and/or refurbished Supermicro CS846 system/case. It can be typically found for anywhere from $200-2000 (or more). Try and find an old barebones system, something like a dual Intel E5-2620v2 with 128GB RAM can usually be found for like $500-550. It has storage for 24 hot swap SAS hard drives (you will need to check your version, but you should be able to get SAS 3 speeds, with at most swapping out the backplane, but the most common backplane will support SAS 3). Just need to go grab yourself some 14-24TB hard drives (I suggest starting with a set of 6), and install TrueNAS (or as most people suggest, put a hypervisor as the barebones OS such as Proxmox or XCP-NG and run TrueNAS as a VM with passthrough of the SAS controller(s) to the VM).

You can easily mod the chassis, and get replacement parts fairly easily as Supermicro is still making some variants of it and has made tens of thousands of them in the past with plenty of supply of replacement fans, controller boards, cable harnesses, power supplies, etc...

Two modifications I would highly suggest are ensuring you have power supplies that end in SQ (which meant quiet). And I suggest pulling the internal fans and fan wall from behind the disk drive backplane and instead zip tie 3x 120mm fans together like the Nocta NF-F12 iPPC-3000 and stuff a little closed cell foam on the bottom and top of them, three across, which will fill the space of the fan wall and let cables pass below (as the closed cell foam strip at the bottom will simply conform around the cables). You can then zip tie it in place to hold securely and will not only have fans that are capable of moving 2x the CFM, but will do it 12db quieter than the original fans.

With the 6 data disks, place them all in a single column in the front, and make a RAIDZ2 vdev/disk pool. You are now protected from a double disk failure, and can either expand the disk pool with three more sets of 6 disks, or create new disk pools with the new disks. If you still need more space after that, I recommend just getting an expansion chassis such as a 846JBOD (essentially a 846 chassis stripped of everything but the disk drives, power supplies for the drives and fans) or if you really need lots of disks a 946JBOD which will fit 60 disks loaded from the top. Hard to beat these from the consumer "NAS" space with some of the largest setups only getting you 6-9 disks and will cost as much or more than one of these.

Cloud pricing was based on the idea that things only ran during the 8 hour working day/40 hour work week. If you needed to run something longer than that, it was always cheaper to do it in house on purchased hardware.

The problem was that the marketing campaigns made it such that all the management and upper management bought hook-line-and-sinker that it would save them money. Anyone with a brain could run the math and show that it didn't in a 24hr production shop for anything other than a short term need. The few use cases where it makes sense also tended to be the last places cloud was implemented (i.e. new projects/programs that were in experimental stages, and services that were only needed temporarily). I really don't know why this was always the case, but I can guess, because new products don't yet have a revenue stream, and thus draining money by putting them on the cloud was something that a manager immediately notice, so they would put it on old or shared resources, often times to the detriment of the project as they would not see the performance/benefit of it due to the limited resources, and it might be shutdown.

Without a very strict usage policy and meticulous accounting and monitoring, cloud can and does very quickly go over budget to the point that purchasing the hardware would have been the better solution.

I think you are missing the point of the "RIght to Repair". In almost all the cases of some broken electronics (especially LCD/OLED screens for phones, and other devices), the parts are a LOT cheaper than you think. You are being quoted exorbitantly marked up prices from Samsung, to which you then in your mind simply say, "for that price I might as well buy a new one", and that is the entire point. Samsung and these other businesses want you to simply buy another one since it drives up sales, and sales are what drives up stock prices.

Go watch some of the youtube videos of various electronics repair techs, and some of the right to repair advocates. Louis Rossmann comes to mind as he even tells you what that new replacement apple iphone screen actually costs in a few of his videos and testimonials. He would order replacement screens from the OEM that Apple uses and would get them for like $40 or less in many cases, but it didn't matter because Apple started adding identity certificates embedded into the phones such that the phone would not recognize the replacement screen since it didn't match the identity cert for the screen originally installed on the phone....