Car companies could sell midrange, mid-size cars, toyota sells these in pretty much every country on the planet, but they're nowhere as profitable as selling a $12,000 truck with a lift kit and leather interior for $55,000. Those vehicles exist but they've stopped selling them in the us because theyve found they can just exclusively sell high margin cars instead and maximize shareholder value

We would certainly be at a disadvantage if Russia was able to copy rockets that constantly blew up shortly after launch.

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name. But once again our language has been co-opted by marketing BS and now here we are trying to set the record straight so people aren't confused or deceived.

My roof gets ~150-250F for 8 hours a day direct UV exposure and we regularly go 9 months without rain here. There's no atmosphere to filter the UV and the ISS can reach 300F worst case so it's worse but not an order of magnitude worse. ISS has a true vacuum but i'm not sure if that helps or hurts above water's boiling point. Every winter before the rainy season comes I have to go on the roof and brush off the thick carpet of moss that has started forming in the shadiest parts. So clearly nature is working as intended.

Gemini is one of if not the top model, but I intentionally avoid using it as the other models are within a few percent as good as it, and I'm not at all eager to feed the google machine this time around. Now that google search is irrelevant I have no incentive to "help" google along. Goodbye and good riddance.

Thanks for being the token doomer in the comments section, somebody had to do it.

There are no good android tablets. As an android user I have an iPad for tablet-y tasks, it doesn't get used much, but the iPad is the superior tablet for the average or power user android user. If there was a better option out there, I'd use it.
 
The fact that the iPad finally uses the USB-C standard has been really helpful, when my wife's iphone finally dropped the "lightning" connector we've been able to drop the number of charging cables in the house/car to 1, and drastically simplifies travel logistics.

The number of times I've needed a waterproof phone is zero and I spend a fair amount of time on boats

The most useful feature for the same people who use text messaging and emergency services when they are outside of a cell coverage area is a local weather forecast. Something that the Garmin In-Reach family of devices do, and really the only thing an avid hiker / paddler / outdoors person is missing from the Apple service that can be a matter of life or death.

the security guard at the door wears a stab proof vest and is 6'5" tall. this is not like your neighborhood grocery store, this is downtown literally across the street from a major train station

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.

Anybody could vibe code an online video game store backed by s3 in about 20 minutes, where is the monopoly? Before steam existed people distributed games on floppies and CD/DVD. Nobody is stopping you from selling your video games mail order, or on your own squarespace store or whatever. There's zero economic moat here. I routinely pay a premium to buy my games on steam because I don't trust the developer to keep track of my account or even keep their store up in 90 days.

A direct line between County Cork and Loudon VA does not go through the east coast of Maryland on a spherical earth, that was the only point I addressed. Even if you wanted to maximize how much is laid in the ocean as opposed to land, there are still shorter distances that would land you on at least in Delaware. While I am sure there are logistical reasons to do it where they are doing, that is irrelevant to my point.

Yeah that sounds off. Probably mean digging at coastal shallower waters then just having it lay on the floor elsewhere, that's the standard.

That's assuming we live on a flat earth. A shorter line between County Cork and the US would have the US terminus much further north.