One person has little incentive. A trucking company does, because they drive millions of miles a year and little things add up.

Buy now, before they can afford to throw a cellular connection in there. I have a TCL TV. It’s technically smart, but it has no network connection (my guest WLAN is password-protected), so it’s just a display for my TiVO and my AppleTV. Picture is good. Sound has a strange bug that causes it to go quiet or even silent every once in a while, but a reboot fixes that. I could get a dumb commercial display for 4-5x the cost, but I don’t need commercial durability, just the dumb part.

It would take the willingness of a human being to vouch for it and take legal responsibility for any wrong answers that it gave.

The white noise sound is much easier for human ears to localize and much less audible at a distance.

Tomato is an amazing piece of software. Even going back to the original, it was just so well designed as a UI. I don't use consumer stuff anymore; I've got an SMB router and AP's. But man, did that thing unlock so many possibilities of the hardware that the factory software just wouldn't do...

I've got a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 and probably 2-3 Asus models sitting in closets gathering dust that have it on board.

Adapters are cheap. Buy several. I’ve got a fat stack of cables that are USB-C on both ends with captive adapters for USB-A on the power end and micro and Lightning on the device end. $12 each and if you use the USB-C plug on the power end, you get 65W power delivery. They’re great and I just buy a bunch. When I lose some, I lose some. I give them out as impromptu gifts.

At the power consumption levels we are talking about, a sleeping computer is barely more than a sleeping TV. If there’s a power button on the remote, something is watching for that signal. Back in the 80s, when TVs still had physical power switches, many cable boxes had a switched outlet on the back for the TV. “Power” turned that relay on or off, but the cable box was drawing power all the time to watch for the remote. My current TV has a strange software bug that occasionally drops out all the bass from the audio; rebooting it fixes this, but it’s not fast. Thirty seconds minimum. So it’s maintaining some kind of state while it’s “off” (usually responsive in 3-5 seconds).

I’m impressed that in fourteen years since introduction you’ve managed somehow to never use the most popular single tablet brand on the market. Or is this just the first you have set up?

I get the concept you’re arguing here, but my wife has owned four iPhones and I’ve had two. The only problem we have had is that her 8 Plus had one of the haptic vibrators break loose a little inside, so every vibration turned into a buzzing noise from the case. It was about four years old.

By contrast, my Nexus 6P I had before switching had its battery go from great to worthless literally overnight when it was not yet two years old. And her dumbphones before the first iPhone she had were practically sacrificial lambs. We have broken several iPad screens over the years, but neither of us has ever cracked a smartphone screen. And only one has been in an Otterbox. The rest were in cheap cases, in my case whatever TPU case was on sale, and all survived multiple drops onto concrete.

UBI is, like libertarianism, an interesting ideal. Sometimes achievable, usually admirable. But, ultimately, not likely to work. Taxes don't fall on the upper class because there aren't enough of them - you could bankrupt every wealthy family in the world to run the US for a few months. Then you're back to taxing the middle class, because that's where the money is.

Yeah, my FIL is a clothing salesman. He sells five states, about twelve lines of clothes, to women's boutiques. The boutiques pay about half of "retail" cost for their clothes, and people say, "well, that's all they cost, why do you charge double?" Because they have rent, they have employees, they have to have stock. You can run it really cheap - if you order by the truckload. But I don't think anyone wants 1000 of any shirt, especially if they can't return it.

The whole distribution process isn't free. You're paying for just this size, just this amount, just this color... the manufacturer has to guess that months in advance. Retailers take their own gambles, and in that market, a lot of them don't even make much money - they are vanity projects for businessmen's wives. Running a retail business that nets $50k/yr is dumb. If you have the skills to do that, you can make far more working for someone else if you need money.

My wife is a doctor. She has a nurse (LPN) who is, generally, pretty good at her job. Let's call her Kelly (not, in any way, close to her name).

Kelly is a single, divorced mom. She fretted around Christmas one year about being able to buy her kids presents, so my wife gave her a $1000 bonus from our personal (after-tax) income. Kelly showed up in January with some new, elaborate tattoos on herself. She has not gotten a bonus again from our income. If you have money for ink, it isn't the system that's keeping you from buying your kids gifts.

Which is great! We can strike EULA's out of law, as they should be. A contract you can't negotiate isn't a contract.

I don’t recall that being a smartphone selling point. The kids wanted what rich kids had. For emergencies, dumb phones work just fine.

My parents offered to get me a cell phone in the mid 90s when I was a college student. I said no, I don’t need it most of the time, and when I really might need one, the CB radio I had would be of more use in the rural areas I traveled through (US 11 corridor - New Orleans to Syracuse, though I didn’t drive the whole way, it’s full of trucks staying off I-85/95).

I mean, you can get by without them. Those rain-shedding compounds for your windshield really do work, although you have to reapply them every few weeks.