I'm going to assume the adage about medication manufacturing applies here:

The first chip costs $29,500,000,000 in R&D and capital investment. The remaining 14,999,999 cost $30 each. And then you keep making them at that rate at the lower price.

Serious response to a jokey question: they don't. You can buy Doritos and Pringles in pretty much any European country. They're manufactured locally with recipes tweaked to meet EU requirements and local palates. I've had both the American and the European version of both and couldn't tell the difference (though I'll admit that I'm not a snack food connoisseur).

Twinkies are trickier. I believe the only places they're commonly available are the UK and Ireland.

How does that all square with the petitioner's finding that PFAS were found in a number of food products, including "extremely high" levels in some milk brands, which presumably weren't first scalded in a consumer's non-stick skillet?

That seems like a benefit of relying on satellite communication rather than a benefit of putting the data center in space.

What's the benefit over running the computation on the ground in a "normal" data center, beaming the results up to a satellite constellation, and then beaming them back down to those who need it? Starlink/Starshield already enable that.

I recommend the Apple TV even to those who aren't otherwise invested in the Apple ecosystem. You'll pay 5x more for it than a Roku or Firestick, but I've had an Apple TV for over a decade that's as snappy and responsive as the day it was new.

I don't dispute that, but it's a meaningless figure unless compared against the societal benefit of having those guns in the first place (and I admittedly don't know whether anyone has actually tried to quantify that and don't have the energy to find out right now).

To use an analogy, if there was a drug/supplement on the market that a million people were taking and it led to a negative health outcome for 5 people, you could justifiably say that it's pretty low risk. But, if the drug/supplement only actually made a positive difference for 1 of those million people, it'd get pulled from the market because the costs outweigh the benefits.

The EU being overregulated and the US having a capricious government with a questionable commitment to the law are two separate problems.

Those who claim that the EU is over-regulated would point out that the cutting edge models are now coming from the US, with the AI Framework having scared the big players out of the EU (or in reality, preventing them from coming to existence in the EU in the first place). The EU now has access to those technologies only at the whim of said capricious government.

You must run with a weird crowd. I can't remember the last time I interacted with a person who gave a shit what brand of smartphone I prefer to use. 90+% of people have their smartphone buried in a case, anyways.

And, for what it's worth, Samsung and Google's flagship phones cost as much or more than Apple's (well, until this price increase, but I expect them to follow suit shortly). Weird that so few seem to assume that people are buying a Pixel 10 or an S26 as a status symbol.

Apple sells hundreds of millions of devices a year. That's a lot of sales to attribute to techno-fetishism or chasing status symbols.

Maybe, just maybe, the market is speaking and Apple has actually made a product that some individuals find superior?

I agree that OP isn't an "interesting" comment and wouldn't mod it up myself but I don't understand the tendency to read so much into it. At time of posting, out of the thousands of people who've probably read the post (maybe more like "hundreds", these days...), two people modded it up and one person modded it down. It doesn't say that, that much about the tendencies of the community.

If we define "socialist" to mean "system in which authoritarian leaders commit mass murder", then yeah, I think we can all agree that it's a bad thing. But redefining terms to something different from their common usage isn't very helpful.

If for whatever reason you're particularly interested in the debate over how American children are taught to read, and changes over the past ~20 years that seem to have been quite damaging, I'd highly recommend giving the "Sold a Story" podcast a listen (here, or on the platform of your choosing).

TL;DL: many schools stopped teaching kids to read by sounding out words at that seems to have been a bad idea.

I think it well could.

I, a relative amateur when it comes to software development, was using ChatGPT to advise me on a personal coding project. I'd put it on par with sharing an office with an experienced programmer who could answer your questions and steer you in the right direction.

I decided to try out Claude Code and I'd describe it as more like asking that experienced programmer to do the work for you. It occasionally didn't do what I wanted when I under-specified my requirements, and I of course didn't have nearly as in-depth an understanding of its output as I do of the code I wrote myself, but for my little hobby project? The tradeoffs were worth it for time saved, and for the features I was able to implement that would have otherwise taken me too much time to be worth it.

There simply isn't anything left to hype. ~5 years ago, you could say that Bitcoin was going to really take off once governments started recognizing it, once major investment funds started trading it, once a Superbowl ad educated the public on the wonders of crypto, etc.

Those things have now all happened. The Bitcoin advocates got what they wanted. And the irony is, there's no longer a new shiny (plausible) thing on the horizon that might convince the average buyer that the price will go up in the future. It's a victim of its own success.

This is reminiscent of Richard Gatling's notion that his gun would make war so deadly that no one would be stupid enough to start one. And yet, here we are.