In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.

Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.

I have a Motorola Edge 60 Neo, it was a reasonably cheap phone at £300 when it was relatively new (I think it's around £250 now. I'm yet to find all that bundled crapware the GP speaks of... hell it didn't even come with Facebook. I've gone and disabled all the AI stuff so it's now a decent phone with quite good hardware for the 300 quid category.

I bought my mum a G56 and it was largely the same story, except no AI as that was an older and even cheaper model (about £150). She loved it as it weighed half as much as the ancient Samsung she was lugging around.

I'm not particularly brand loyal though, I previously bought Nokias (HMD Global) but nothing they make is remotely good any more.

What people forget is that hardware isn't particularly expensive when you're buying it in bulk, especially before the recent RAMAGEDDON (which makes the full 8GB in my 60 Neo even more amazing). So production of cheap and mid range phones isn't that expensive especially when you're not customising the software to the Nth degree to preserve your brand. Margins are probably razr thin on a sub £400 phone but they're not being sold as loss leaders in the hopes of selling £800 phones to people who want £200 phones... You deserve to go out of business if you think that'll happen.

And this is just how much power the US has lost due to the Republicans. 25 years ago, just after Clinton the idea that you'd say no to the US was absolutely unthinkable for a nation like Canada, Australia, Mexico, et al. anyone who was an ally of the west. The US used to literally put laws on the books of foreign countries via trade treaties, even the EU wasn't powerful enough to give an outright "no". This is how US drug laws and US copyright laws became "international". I watched it happen to Australia in the 90s and early 2000s but then the US elected Bush and that power began to wane. The Australian and UK prime ministers followed Bush into Iraq with tails wagging like the sycophantic little lap dogs they were. This was when the US started losing it's power because it became embroiled in a war it couldn't win despite Bush declaring it won (TBF he didn't do it 17 times).

Now Bush, to his credit, what little there is didn't abuse this power too much but countries were finding the new copyright laws to be... well, frankly retarded as the MPIAA tried to do speculative invoicing in Australia and constantly running up against judges who would actually apply the laws fairly and justly (you know, "activist" judges as they like to call them). This was the late 00s. Obama came in and realised he'd have to start negotiating because the power the US had lessened. Started building up good will. Then you had Trump that pissed all that away... the Republicans kept doing damage as best they could through Biden and now you've got Trump 2, you've got nations that were once willing lapdogs telling you to go do one.

The Canadians, one of the, if not the nicest nations on the planet is telling you to fuck right off... if a British politician had done this we'd have quietly shuffled him off to the Svalbard consulate with an Apology to the Norwegians made on a copious quantity British vodka so that the worst he could do is offend Pingu.

American history is filled with such moments, trail of tears, Wounded Knee, et al. up to Mai Lai.

Kiwi history only has a few smudges in comparison.

Covering up such crimes is as American as selling beads to natives and then force marching them.

Braaaains, grrr, argh.

Is that a rubber duck and a doughnut?

I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.

Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949

The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99

I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.

At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.

Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.

Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.... You think Trump is fixing this?

Nope, as per usual this will be ignored if you make a generous tithe... erm... donation... erm... gratuity in advance to the Trumpublican party.

It's a law that won't ever be enforced... unless you're a company the tangerine thundercunt doesn't like.

The end game is not to protect US workers, but strip what few rights they have down so that they're as cheap as the Indian workers.

First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.

Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.

This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.

So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.

It still is if you do it yourself and don't have ChatGPT do it for you. But it isn't a useful indication for parents or teachers, because the kids can just have ChatGPT do it for them, and moreover are encouraged to do so by the pressure to get good grades. By making the homework be graded only on adequate participation (which may be per-student) rather than on correctness, you shift the focus back to the homework being a way for students to get ready for the test and make it clear that having an AI do the work will prevent the teacher from knowing how well the student is doing, and will likely result in a lower grade on the test. Once the motivating factor of grades is eliminated and, in fact, reversed, they'll stop doing it, or will use it only to help them understand or to check their work, rather than using it as a crutch to actually do the work.

Any child gifted with high motivation and broad interests wants to practice stuff they already understand less so that they can do other things and learn other things. A child's time is a zero-sum game. The more time they spend doing things that are less useful, the less time they have for doing things that are more useful.

The ones who mindlessly work more problems because they are motivated to get good grades are the ones who aren't doing band, orchestra, chorus, or theater, who aren't going on field trips to learn about the world, who aren't getting the breadth of education that will prepare them for the real world, and will mostly end up in boring (but probably reasonably well-paying) jobs for the rest of their lives. They won't ever be the rockstar in their field, but they probably won't fail horribly. And I guess that's okay, but IMO it's not what we should try to inspire kids to become. The motivation should be to learn for learning's sake, and excess repetition is the opposite of that.

Meh. If that's your experience, then there's no hope for improving anything, because the kids who don't do well are going to pass anyway. This is how we end up with a bunch of graduates who can't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're right, then it's critical to fix that at the same time.

They're overlapping, but not the same group. Some smart kids are hard-working and eager to learn. Some are rule-following. Some are both. Some are neither. What I think you meant is that they are not dependent variables.

The effect of this would be that the teacher would quickly intervene and tell the kid that they need to do more of the work, because they don't seem to have fully grasped the concepts. If the kids ignore this, then at the parent-teacher conference after the first six-weeks period, the teacher would encourage the parents to either make their kids do more work or put their kids in an after-school program that would do so.

And if that doesn't work, you can also make the participation points be contingent on whether they are grasping the concepts, where if it is clear that they're not getting it and aren't doing enough work to learn it, you tell them that they won't get participation points unless they do more of the problems.

The thing is, the UK are looking for anything terrorism related... Anything else is fine even if it technically violates another law and even if Border Force enforces that law. In the US they're on the look out for anything, drugs, sex, anything that can be used to hang you with.

Beyond that, anything they do needs to stand up in court and British judges don't give LEOs carte blanche in fact it's quite the opposite. There is a burden of evidence on the prosecution, the whole "I smelled liquor on his breath, I swear it" won't fly in a British court. An accusation requires evidence.

The problem in the US isn't with the written law, it's the immunity given to the enforcers. There's a saying Expats in the Philippines have, "the Philippines has an excellent legal system but a terrible justice system", this means the laws are sound as they were pretty much copied from developed countries back in the 50s and 60s but the courts and police are so corrupt that they never get applied with any kind of fairness. The US is descending into this.

Aslo having your phone searched by border force is rare, never even heard of it happening. In fact it's been years since I've even had to talk to someone whilst entering the UK, ever since they allowed Australian passports to use the E-Gates. there's been absolutely no need for me to interact with them at all and I'm usually kerbside within 30 mins of landing at Heathrow and that includes getting my luggage. You really should travel outside the US to see just how wrong the US has done air travel.

If this was in the EU, it never would have gotten this far... in fact it probably wouldn't have happened in the first place.

I wouldn't take bets on him winning in the US. Their legal system is set up to service the rich and powerful and this guy sounds like he's neither.

Economists have predicted 15 of the last 4 recession.

Regardless of what they're on about or who's paying them I'd take it with a huge grain of salt.