Oh, absolutely. These days, I spend so much time checking the output from computers, it would normally have been quicker to do searches by hand. This is... not useful.

I can fully understand that.

Which is pants on head retarded.

Both from a moral level, keeping people in debt to ensure they're indentured to someone and from a business perspective as it's a imperial shitton (about 1.8 Metric fuckloads) of risk. In case you don't remember the last time the banks over-leveraged on risky customers, it was only 2008, there was a massive collapse we're still feeling the effects of.

I'm glad my country doesn't have anything of the sort. Experian are trying to "sell" their credit score system but no-one is buying. When you apply for credit here (I.E. home or car loan) your existing credit obligations including potential ones (like a credit card or phone contract) are listed as risks and detract from the amount you can borrow.

I think everyone is over thinking this. NVidia need to do something with that money they're drowning in and there's only so much that can be syphoned off to tax havens before everyone starts asking questions. If they kept it, they'd need to pay tax on it and we can't have that.

What's surprised me in the processor market is AMD making inroads in the laptop space that Intel owned for decades, even when AMD were dominating on the desktop and had very strong server offerings (the Athlon 64/Opteron days, for those who's memories stretch back that far). 15% of laptops are now AMD.

Upgrading budget laptops is how you save.

I have a cheap Asus gaming laptop for travel. It cost me £550 and most of that was for the RTX3050. I was able to pop the back off, add in another 8 GB of RAM, doubling the original and replace the 512 GB SSD with a faster 1TB for less than £100, the next model up that had the same amount of RAM was over £200 more expensive (but it did have a 3060 to be fair).

A lot of budget laptops are deliberately underspec'd to force people afraid to upgrade to buying a far more expensive laptop.

All of this is a moot point anyway, Apple have been hostile to upgrades and repairs for decades, they already spend extra to solder in the hard drives and ram modules. Also anyone who didn't predict that they'd be killing off the Mac line for phone based ones? Anyone still denying that? Mac OS being killed off is next.

That's still 3 million people of the ext. 300 million laptops that get sold each year.

And I'm willing to bet a lot of people are like me who buy a lower spec'd model where I can upgrade the RAM and SSD on the cheap saving a hundred quid off the more expensive one.

However that's besides the point, Apple have been openly hostile to people who want to upgrade (and consumers in general) for years. Plenty of other manufacturers to choose from though.

As a side effect, they're going to become a huge vector for malware.

A fridge will last for a decade or more, they'll stop doing software updates after 7 years maximum, maybe even as low as 2. In fact some may never receive a software update.

They'll just put in defences they will put in place to prevent it.

"Your fridge will shut down in 20 hours unless we're able to reach the Enrichment server" which is also the advertising server.

What needs to happen is laws need to be passed making this shit illegal. There's a reason they're starting in the US, even before their government was more corrupt that all the other tin pot dictatorships put together, there were enough people who were irrationally afraid of competent governance that they'd willingly prevent laws against this kind of thing.

I can see no reason a fridge should ever need to be connected to the internet.

All that does is requires a beeper.

The idiots who leave it open are the kind that want these beepers removed because they find them annoying (erm... it's kind of the point, to get your attention). They're the same kind of people who openly invite being bombarded with ads because they think "they're not affected by them" which is evidenced by the amount of branded crap they don't need strewn around their dwelling.

I want my fridge to reliably keep things cold. Efficiently would be nice, doing so without releasing harmful chemicals would just be a bonus the way things are going.

Consumers don't get a choice.

They don't give a shit either. Try finding a non "smart" TV in the UK because you just want a TV that doesn't have a long boot time or requires network connectivity as you simply want to use it as a display unit for other devices.

People need to petition to make laws to make this kind of shit well and truly illegal. That is unlikely to happen in the US however as making this illegal is "government overreach" and being bombarded with advertisements is "freeze peach". Not likely to fly in the UK though. At least not yet, who knows what will happen after the 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement thanks to Fuhrer Farage.

And of course the MAGA faithful don't want to see this, so they attempt to suppress it.

I have to wonder, when does it finally dawn on some people that they're on the wrong side of history? I guess for some the realisation never comes, I'm willing to bet some died in the wool German and Italian fascists went to their graves still believing they made the right choice supporting Hitler and Mussolini long after their downfalls.

Without a minimum wage the floor drops out of your next-best-choices and large chunks of the population end up on starvation wages. This isn't a theoretical issue you need to estimate with graphs, it can be seen in practice in jurisdictions with extremely low or nonexistent minimum wages, or even in first-world gig work.

That makes sense, you don't believe that's the case because you just voluntarily and uncritically filled your head with a warm load of grifty bullshit "documented" by a couple of right-wing lobbyists. If you'd ever read a real history book focusing on workers' standards of living in that period, the way that the propaganda book you hopefully didn't pay for flew in the face of it would've set off some alarm bells. Here's something to get you started: https://www.crei.cat/wp-conten...

Look at the median home price vs. median salary in the '70s vs. now and the homeless guy might look like the only person who hasn't been totally hosed. It's the same for education costs, two things conveniently left out of inflation measures. Accounting for transfer payments doesn't change the picture either:

https://equitablegrowth.org/sl...

So you know, and at the same time think that most anyone who wants a job has one right now? How does that work?

People were often forced into the earliest mills because the (once popular) alternative, farming the commons and telling business owners to fuck off with their hellhole factories, was conveniently taken away. The alternative that people are choosing work over is usually not a lower-paying job but the threat of homelessness and starvation often worsened by the very business interests they're forced to work for.

Productivity alone won't do anything for workers, both the industrial revolution and the last half-century in the first world are proof of that. If you're worried about employers leaving for cheaper labor costs, good luck competing with every Chinese political prisoner.

Erm... Citation needed on that ban sparky.

Gas stoves are still commonplace here in the UK and in many other nations... We just have standards on installation and maintenance so that houses don't catch fire and guess what, houses aren't burning down left, right and centre over here.

We also have this thing called "reliable power"... That means you don't need to keep a portable stove or lamp for a time where there is a prolonged power outage because we don't have regular prolonged power outages. Now before you rush off and find that time where parts of Spain were without power for several days last year (or was it the year before) the fact you can so easily find articles for it, is proof that it is a very rare event, not a regular occurance (also in the UK, the gas network is independent of the power network, so in the event of an outage my gas stove will still work).

That being said, I prefer electric for cooking as it gives you much more fine grained and accurate temperature control. It's a shame it's more expensive than gas, but thems the breaks. Electricity is really one of the worst ways to provide heating or cooling.