>Where there's Africa, there's corruption.
Where there are people, there is corruption.

There, fixed that for you.

Hand-held phones you put in your pocket typically aren't desktop devices, but many VoIP desk phones used in businesses are. Some may even run Linux (I haven't checked).

Not all desktop devices use a mouse or keyboard.

That said, the total number of desktop phones running Linux is probably small enough to be considered noise, at least for now. But in a few years, who knows?

> It's not really applicable for businesses and companies, though, since they likely don't have the expertise or the man-hours required to cobble together their business-critical systems from used parts.

Even if they do have the expertise to do so, they have the wisdom to NOT do so.

If you have to manage thousands of computers and buy dozens of new ones every month, you want all the computers you buy in the same month or quarter to be either the same base model or maybe one of two or three base models. You do NOT want a bunch of bespoke computers that you will have to maintain for 5-10 years just because you needed to save $100/unit for a few months during a price crunch. The colloquial term is "penny-wise, pound (as in British money) foolish."

What a business MIGHT do is push back the scheduled replacement cycle. Instead of buying 20 computers a month to replace "aged out but still functional" computers like it normally does. it might buy a few from now until the price crunch passes just to cover failing hardware, but defer the "normal replacement of old equipment" until the price bubble pops. This isn't without its own problems though: There will be a "bubble" of computers that will age-out at the same time a few years down the road. But at least that's something the company can plan for.

Back in my day kids were born with only 640KB of memory.

>Soldered-in RAM is not acceptable
Soldered-in RAM is not acceptable in SOME use cases, including perhaps 100% of the use cases that apply to you.

As for me, I'm fine with soldered-in RAM for devices that make no sense to have a RAM either upgraded or swapped out due to failure. I'm thinking "throwaway" things like "disposable" e-cigarettes; "appliance" things like routers, cable TV boxes, microwave ovens; embedded systems that won't be touched until it's time to replace them like the chips that are in my car radio or in a satellite; and much more.

I'm kind of torn about soldered-in RAM on my phone. Sure, I'd like to be able to upgrade it, but going from soldered or SOC-based RAM to user-upgrade-able RAM involves tradeoffs and costs that I may or may not want to make. Even if I want to make them, if enough people don't it's not going to happen because it won't be cost-effective to make a RAM-upgrade-able phone for the relatively few people who want it. Same argument goes for soldered SSDs vs user-upgradeable ones. Same argument goes for "super-thin" or "super-lightweight" tablets and laptops.

For "ordinary" laptops and desktops, where there is plenty of room for air flow and plenty of room for the extra space needed for user-replaceable RAM (and SSD) I agree with you: Soldered RAM (and SSD) is unacceptable unless the end user is demanding it.

is a sin tax error.

>Make more RAM?!?
Summary addresses this: "it can take years to ramp up capacity and/or build new manufacturing facilities"

>Even when itâ(TM)s true, you what? Lie? FUCK that delusional shit.
Option 3: You don't publicly say anything that suggests the victim is or is not to blame.

Even when it's true, trying to deflect blame by publicly blaming the victim is usually a very bad idea. Their PR department was either asleep, not consulted, or vetoed.

"compared to entry-level electrical engineering" should be "compared to recent graduates with electrical engineering degrees doing relevant entry-level work"

Proofreading the rest of my post above is left as an excercise to the apprentice AI proofreader created 5 years from now.

"Low skilled" is relative: As far as "trades being low-skilled" it may be that apprentice-level electricians (on the way to becoming a Master Electrician) are low-skilled compared to entry-level electrical engineering (on the way to becoming a Professional Engineer). Even your average PE electrical engineer is "low-skilled" compared to somebody. Likewise, your apprentice engineer is "high skilled" compared to the same person when they were 16 and flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

Proofreading for common things like spelling, grammar, and style-guide compliance is something I see AIs becoming very good at in the next 5-10 years if not sooner. Even pre-AI spell-check and grammar-check was usually better than nothing, provided you took it as "a suggestion" rather than "the computer is all-knowing." But even a good 2030-era AI proofreader will have difficulty (flagging "errors" that aren't) if your writing style is not what it considers "correct."

AI-assistants that direct people how to do things like indoor wiring and plumbing may cut down on trades, provided the legal landscape allows it. AI assistants can also help an advanced apprentice-or-higher level person do some work that is more advanced than his level would indicate. But then again, so can having an expert co-worker standing over your shoulder as you ask him questions.

But any time you've got a situation where "if things go south DURING the job, bad things happen" you want an expert there who can react faster than an AI-bot can tell a less experienced person "STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND TURN THAT KNOB CLOCKWISE 1/4 TURN RIGHT NOW OR YOU WILL HAVE AN EXPLOSION."

In other words, I don't think you'll have a huge loss of trades workers because of AI. Some reshuffling and some loss, maybe, but not a huge lost.

Robot machine operators that can operate machines with no people around or in other situations where a "bad event" may destroy equipment but not hurt or kill anyone may be good candidates for robots.

Administrative roles that pretty much operate on a "checklist" or "do it by the book" are candidates for automation, but be careful here: Some of these "do it by the book" roles are intended to do things like catch fraud. For these roles you want people who can "do it by the book" but who have a "spidey sense" to detect when someone is trying to "do the paperwork just right to get past the AI-robo-administrator" but who is in fact trying to do something bad, like steal money.

How about 2^30 seconds?

You can kill explorer.exe if you don't want a desktop.

Paper tapes from the 1750s are still readable if they were stored properly. Finding looms from that era are a different matter (but you could make a modern reproduction).