In my neck of the woods, you can buy used Lego by the kilo on eBay clones.
So you can definitely find cheap Lego today.

I know a few people who want to move from a PS5 to a PS5 Pro, or have already done so and sold their base PS5.
My gut feeling is that there are a lot more PS5s out there, just offer someone you know $200 and everyone is happy.

2 years ago I paid €12.99 a couple times for ultimate. It seemed like a nice way to access a large library of games - as is their sales pitch.
Eventually I got bored with the few interesting games I saw there. It was cheaper to buy one specific game on sale for €10.

Now the price is €26.99 for gamepass ultimate.... haha. I'll stick with buying a €10 game during a sale.

Even older cars need microchips for repairs and replacement parts. Unless you mean old-old cars, like a model T :p

I worked at a startup a few years ago. They used weasel words in marketing and PR material. The key question is whether these are "unique users". And I guess now with AI agents, whether the user was even human.

It seems the patients were "walked through" the whole process of buying the bitcoin just for this gimmick. So there really should be no buyer's remorse.

Spot on.

I don't know why this censorship card is so popular. Most countries let you say pretty much what you want, only limiting harmful stuff like incitement to violence etc.

I personally liken it to a hypothetical criminal spouting that their rights to crime are being infringed by all this legal nonsense.

There are a lot of people in the world. So there's always going to be "coincidences" due to probability.

I've watched a long interview with a forensics guy and (from what I understood and remember) he pointed out the same thing... that modern fast DNA tests only look at small specific areas of genetic data. And can only give a degree of certainty.

Plus there are many ways a DNA sample can get onto a crime scene via contamination.

It's a nice stock phrase. Other's should use it too:

[hypothetical bad person says reports of their crimes are]... a "smear campaign" which was based on "false and misleading misrepresentations

Agreed. But what's the alternative to MSOffice when it pays the rent?

Are there any other sources of microplastics, or is it just water?

I can only comment on the lack of opportunities for those straight out of school. While I worked in London, I tried to push for some super junior hires. But unfortunately, we couldn't dedicate the time for training or mentoring.

I figured we could train some university graduates who would love to land their first professional job.

Me, I had to apply for dozens of jobs before landing my first one out of university. After that, I had close to a 100% success rate when applying for a new job. So seems to me that no one wanted to bother with me before I had at least one job... quite the chicken and egg situation.

Quite a few of the old timers with grey hair on our software development projects learned on the job or through training programs or apprenticeships decades ago.

People's physical biology might not change much, but culture changes a lot. What was deemed acceptable in the past can sometimes be considered ridiculous or illegal in the present. It's a classic issue that exists with everything from religious texts to laws of the land.

Most people would find it really difficult being without a phone for 1 day. Let alone 10 days in a foreign country.

Personally, I'd do what others have suggested, take a cheap burner phone and put in your SIM card. If you are on eSIM, then just get a temporary SIM and input the numbers for your friends / family / work colleagues in case of an emergency.