If your skills are in demand, being in the office demands a premium. I'd expect to be paid for the time commuting, and the cost of commuting, and some on top for the hassle. I don't really want to work more than 37.5 hours a week, so that costs a lot extra.

While some companies allowed employees more ability to work remote due to Covid, some companies had those policies before Covid as they did not have enough office space for their employees. Now those companies are mandating workers make long commutes just to fight for desks.

They build houses like that too in some countries. Everything fabricated in a factory, large parts taken to site and assembled. Not quite the whole house on the back of a truck, but similar benefits for quality and rapid on-site assembly.

It's great because you can customize the house extensively and the CNC machines make it for you, where as the way we build them in the UK by hand means that every change is expensive and often goes wrong anyway.

It's a bit more serious for Apple, because their RAM is tightly coupled with the CPU, on the same substrate. It has to have very specific parameters to operate at the high speeds they need to make their ARM CPU cores competitive, and for their GPUs to perform half decently with unified memory. They need a lot of bandwidth and their CPUs have massive caches, because the ARM ABI is just not very space efficient compared to x86 and CISC.

That means they are more limited in terms of being able to find alternative suppliers for the RAM they need, and they are going to have to pay top dollar to out-bid AI for it. Without the RAM, they can't even make the CPUs. They lack the flexibility of having a separate CPU/GPU and RAM, both are required to make an M series part.

I do wonder about the hardware RNG on the STM32. They say it passes various randomness tests, and I'm sure they are right, but those tests aren't the be-all and end-all. I'd want to mix it with other sources of entropy.

It's being promoted by the President of the United States and by Federal agencies. It's mainstream and something that lay people will be interacting with. You can justifiably call them blithering idiots for trusting anything POTUS says, but it's definitely relevant news.

Something like an MG S5, for example. CUV shape with plenty of space and a decent boot, 250 miles even in winter at motorway speeds, charges faster than your bladder discharges, autopilot and a nice interior, and while the list price is about 33k with tax, they are actually sold for about 23k with tax for the long range top spec model. That's GBP so convert to USD and it's about 30k, depending on the exchange rate today.

This is the problem with letting these things get out of handle. Crypto and Bitcoin are large enough that they could potentially have an impact on the broader economy when people lose money in them.

You can't just wash your hands of things. Not in a modern economy. Everything is interconnected and sooner or later shit rains down on everybody.

Because Tesla only makes a few models, and I think only the Y and 3 are available in China. With Chinese batteries, BTW.

Also because they are aspirational. A lot of Audis are crap, they charge a subscription for heated seats. Range Rovers are unreliable and uninsurable, but people think they compensate for their micro penis.

Because we are locking up trillions of dollars of money for use by about 2,000 or 3,000 people. We have levels of wealth inequality that are worse than the gilded age right before the Great depression.

You're mixing up should and is. This is a common mistake people make.

There should be plenty of money. There isn't. Because a very tiny handful of people have taken it all for themselves and are grinding civilization to a halt. Money is no longer properly circulating in the economy because so much of it is being pushed to the top. This means that the share left over after Elon Musk launches his rockets and becomes a trillionaire is too small to sustain a functioning economy. And as it gets worse it'll become too small to sustain a functioning civilization.

The basic problem here is there's a finite amount of resources in the world and there are a near infinite number of psychopathic assholes who want to be trillionaires. The supply cannot meet the demand. And try as anyone might you can't convince the 12 year olds in adult bodies that you can't have a functioning civilization and billionaires let alone trillionaires...

You are getting shafted by the lack of competition from Chinese manufactures. Here we can buy a brand new long range EV for around $30k before tax, and it's better than a Tesla.

You greatly underestimate the EU. I know it's hard to imagine politicians that aren't working for corporations first, but the way the EU is set up it's very difficult for them to gain traction. Look at all the pissing and moaning about GDPR, RoHS and so forth. The EU made it happen anyway.

So at least for Europeans that option to side-load any app we want isn't going away. What's more, Google is now required to allow third party app stores on Google Play, and I think it's only a matter of time until those stores are allowed to certify apps themselves.

At least for the time being there's a weird thing where you go deep into the settings hit a button and then wait 24 hours and you can install whatever you want. It's clearly there because they are afraid of antitrust law enforcement from Europe.

Eventually assuming all goes as planned they will take that feature away once they get Europe under control and get their people in charge over there. Europe can see that coming but it's going to be hard to stop it because frankly America just has too much money and power and we keep interfering with people's politics. Europe could stop letting the Russians fuck with us over here in the US but their billionaires are hoping that America will collapse so that they can become trillionaires themselves. So that's not on the table.

So there is less inventory hitting the market. This is been a consistent problem with the car market for some time. Our entire transportation network is built around cheap affordable automobiles. Better off people sell their cars and then struggling people can buy them for cheap. I'm pretty damn sure people around here are old enough to remember driving a beater that cost you a summers worth of minimum wage pay throughout your entire College life.

You can't do that anymore. A buddy of mine who has much better off relatives just got gifted a 2014 Toyota with relatively low mileage and I was shocked how expensive the damn thing was worth.

And my kid is still driving the same Toyota that I bought them 8 years ago or so and their sophomore year of college. That will change when they get out of grad school I'm sure but you're talking a viable used car with somebody who has been making what is good money for an American for about 8 years off the market.

It's all well and good the wax poetic about how great it is to be frugal but our economic system can't function with frugality. It'll break down just like it would in 1930. When the boomers die studies show that they are going to take around 75% of the money with them. It's all going to get spent on survival and healthcare. And thanks to wealth inequality the remaining 25% is going to be given disproportionately to a tiny number of people.

This is a major economic crisis literally nobody is talking about. Because the baby boomers are the only ones who were allowed to have good paying jobs. They are the ones keeping the economy going because they're the only ones who have any discretionary spending.

So when they drop dead in about 5 or 10 years all that money gets hoovered up by our healthcare system and goes away. If you're not planning on being dead of old age by then then congratulations you're looking at an economic collapse. And with all the automation going on even more so.

But hey how about them trans girls in sports am I right? Look over there be distracted! They're going to take your cookies! Excuse me cookie, singular.

So even those countries tend to have systems that lend themselves to winner take all. For example the UK still has you only casting one vote per politician. That's the basic problem. You need something like ranked choice voting where you're able to cast a vote for someone you want to win but if they don't you're not throwing your vote away. That's the problem with winner take all voting. It forces you into binary choices and then the billionaires, now trillionaires, can exploit that.

To be fair America's voting system is uniquely vulnerable to these kind of attacks from billionaires because it was set up that way on purpose by the wealthy landowners who created our government. Just like how they didn't do away with slavery they put all sorts of nastiness in our systems to protect their wealth and power. They knew what they were doing was wrong but they did it anyway and they were expecting and hoping future generations would fix it for them. At least the ones who want just bastards there were plenty of those.

There's an old saying, history is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable