Because what amounts to a simple financial breach of contract is being enforced unilaterally and extra-judicially - And by parties traditionally known for being some of the sleaziest and least ethical bastards on the planet at that.

In a situation where the burden of proof is on the lender and the disruption to the customer's life severe, we should absolutely not be allowing ScumCo Lending to pull that trigger absent a court order.

To be clear, I'm not claiming there's no precedent for this (and when we're talking about microwaves and TVs, hey, pay up deadbeats!). But phones are unique in that it's virtually impossible to function in the modern world without one. Personally, I might get two calls a week and missing those wouldn't disrupt me much; but I literally can't even log in at work without an MFA app tied to my phone.

I was actually wondering exactly the opposite - If this only works for three satellites per launch, would it be overall cheaper and easier to just launch three new satellites? Not to mention, the tech on a new satellite is likely far better than was available ten+ years ago.

Sure, it's one launch vs three, but moving between different orbits and physically latching on to another satellite is delicate work. I wouldn't be surprised if, on average, one of those three attempts went catastrophically wrong.

As someone who demands my devices are my devices, this is complete unacceptable.

As an investor, though - Let's be serious. This is an extension of the "buy here pay here" model loved by used car scammers everywhere to prey on those who can't really afford it but need one anyway. And those are stupidly profitable, because what are people going to do, just not have a car / phone?

It's morally repugnant but fiscally a slam-dunk.

I might have agreed with you 20 years ago.

The rise of modern streaming all but ended music piracy because a cheap and easy legal option is available. We have proof of concept, this is effectively a settled issue.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People generally prefer to stay legal as long as the money is reasonable and the friction to use what you've fairly paid for is sufficiently low.

Meanwhile, we're talking about Microsoft "letting" us do something many of us are already doing via emulation. Gee, you bought a physical disc rather than a worthless digital entitlement? Sucks to be you, pay again... Except... Yeah, I really have no need for this new option when the old one is still superior.

And to be clear, I'm in no way talking about actual piracy. I've paid for a looot of media over my lifetime, and quite often I'll still use a "fixed" version because it's in every way the superior product.

You're proposing we hold kids responsible for violating laws created under the pretense of kids being too irresponsible to safely use social media.

You see the problem there, right?

we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Move further south, I guess. The rest of the country is much warmer, more livable, and doesn't freeze solid for three months out of the year. The fact that you have to change your clocks twice a year to cope with it isn't my problem.

Given your user ID # I think you know the reason(s)

It is like, $20 a month and far, far cheaper than cable or whatever. I don't like paying for services, but I don't like dealing with ads even more. If there's an option for an ad-free experience, I will always take that option.

Basically everyone who works in a regulated industry, or industry that should be does, yes.

I've been paying for Kagi ($10/mo?) now for over a year across both personal and work devices and I don't miss it at all. The only time I still use google is if I need to buy a product and want to see what is available besides what is on amazon, i'll seach "toaster oven" to get inundated with ads (and then 12-48 hours later see ads for toaster oven across all my social medias and youtube). Turning off the googs cold-turkey and then selectively using it, it's been very interesting to see what kind of targeted ads I see.

Jet fuel is set to skyrocket by August and I don't think jet travel will remain affordable for most of society. Looking at the proportion of the airplane that is Economy Plus, or Economy Plus-Plus, about 5%, I don't think there's enough demand for a tremendous amount of supersonic travel between any two cities besides perhaps NYC and LA, and NYC and Atlanta/Miami

Get paid to fight AI
 
Honestly, AI is going to slow hiring, and then companies will stop hiring new positions. I don't think it's going to be an obvious "we are laying off 20% of the company due to AI being amaze-balls". Yeah yeah like 30 very large companies are laying off employees saying it's due to AI but... if you look at their public finances they're flat growth whereas S&P 500 is up 999% (or whatever, it's a lot) so they're saying what they have to say to keep their job as CEO.
 
My prediction is 97% of "job replacement" by AI will simply be the slow march of progress as the one really talented guy on his team, slowly replaces his coworker's workstreams via automation, something that was going to happen anyways, just 10 years later than the current timeline. You can't really legislate that kind of slow motion trainwreck. It's very easy to do quarter after quarter of 499 employees reduction in workforce to avoid layoff public notices etc. And businesses will win in the courts under "public notices for less than 499 employees is excessive burden on businesses" etc etc.