That's a big red flag. They aren't going to offer that service for free. AI uses a lot of power. So either it's there in the hope of all upsell, or they intend to harvest your data, or both.

Need more details.

Also please improve Firefox for Android. Thanks.

I recently bought a Fitbit, and one of the best features is the smart alarm clock. Instead of just going off at a particular time, it waits until you are naturally awake in the half hour leading up to the designated time. Much gentler and I greatly prefer it.

So there is a reason to pay more for a simple alarm clock, but mine does not require a subscription. If they start requiring one, I'll return it immediately.

Nio has been doing it for years in Europe and China, and it doesn't seem to be a problem. Their cars aren't heavier than other similar ones, and the robots are reliable. The look like a car wash, and it takes about 3 minutes to do the swap. Don't even need to get out of your car.

No need to imagine, you have been able to do that for years. Nio has had battery swap stations running for some time in Europe, and they are great.

Faster than pumping dino juice, and the battery get is guaranteed to meet a minimum, high specification. Never heard of any problems, but if there were you would just swap it out again for a few Euros.

You have infinite battery warranty too because if you did ever manage to put enough miles on yours to wear it out, just get it swapped.

You don't rely on their generosity for the warranty, you rely on the law.

I'm the UK it says that things must last a "reasonable length of time". For a thermostat you would be looking at at least 10 years, arguably more due to the high cost.

It's not that much of a change, though. The USA has only ever paid lip-service to its "allies" and always seen Europe as competitors. It's not a shift from "friend" to "enemy", just from "competitor" to "enemy".

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.

How costs build up is really staggering. I'm getting into the business of importing 3d filament. In Iceland, it currently sells for like $35/kg minimum. The actual value of the plastic is like $1. The factory's total cost, all costs included, is like $1,50. If it's not name brand, e.g. they're not dumping money on marketing, they sell it for $3 for the cheapest stuff. Sea freight adds another dollar or two. Taxes here add 24%. But you're still at like $5/kg. The rest is all middlemen, warehousing, air freight for secondary legs from intermediary hubs, and all the markup and taxes on those things.

With me importing direct from the factory, sea freight only, I can get rid of most of those costs. Warehousing is the biggest unavoidable cost. If I want to maintain an average inventory of like 700kg, it adds something like $5/kg to the cost. Scanning in goods and dispatching user orders (not counting shipping) together adds like $2,50. And then add 24% tax (minus the taxes on the imported goods). There's still good margin, but it's amazing how quickly costs inflate.

Your "junk" is someone else's "must-have".
Your "must-have" is someone else's "junk".

Why would we do that? It's good stuff. The same stuff you get on Amazon, but for literally 1/10th the price.

A lot of it is good quality too. Better than European brands in some cases, e.g. I bought a Wolfbox air blower and kids I significantly more powerful than anything else on the market except for Makita stuff costing 5x as much. Don't take my word for it, there are numerous scientific tests of those things in YouTube.

Or thermal cameras. FLIR can't compete with the Chinese manufacturers and their high resolution modules.

Keep in mind you are being fleeced on most of this "quality" stuff. I was looking at USB borescope cameras. Local place wanted £50, Amazon wanted £30, AliExpress wanted £1.50 and they are all the same thing. Same product photos, same USB IDs, same camera module and PCB. I know because I bought all three for work and took them apart.

The problem is always the same - the technology gets abused. With brightness wars the content tries to blind you, and looks bad if you try to compress the dynamic range. Or the other extreme, it gets colour graded for high end sets that can show a lot of detail in dark areas, and people complain that on their SDR LCD everything is black.

The BBC experimented with a second sound stream that made dialogue clearer for a while, then abandoned it.

Ah, that makes sense. I do use a counter top fan oven that is about 1500W.

I mean, from a horticultural perspective, there is some potential to gain more of other nutrients, in that if you have more energy, you can develop a larger root system, or generally more effectively, better feed mycorrhizal associations (fungal hyphae are much finer than root hairs, so can get into smaller cracks, and fungi can "acid mine" nutrients out of mineral grains - as an example, here's a microscopic image showing what they did to a garnet)

That said, yeah, in general if you can provide more energy, you expect the storage of "calories" to grow much faster than the acquisition of other minerals. Also, it's important to note that while more CO2 is generally good for most plants, more heat, or greater periods of drought (land dries out faster, monsoon belts spread) and flooding (atmosphere holds more moisture, monsoon belts spread) are not. In regards to heat as well, there's a lot of details. First off, though we commonly don't think about it, heat management in plants is critical. Their proteins are designed for function within an optimal temperature range, and to maintain it, they have to cool themselves down with transpiration, creating more water stress. Also it's worth noting that C3 plants (most plants) fundamentally don't tolerate heat as well as C4 or CAM plants (there's work to engineer C4 into some common agricultural crops... it's frankly amazing to me that they're getting some success, as it's not a trivial change).

BTW, the reason that plants grow better with more CO2 isn't what most people might think. The TL/DR is that the protein that sequesters CO2 so that (using ATP and NADPH from photosynthesis) - RuBisCo (the most abundant protein on Earth, something that has been evolving for billions of years) frankly sucks at its job. Something like 20-25% of the time (at normal CO2 levels), instead of binding with CO2, it binds with O2 instead ("photorespiration"), which means not only does it not sequester a carbon, but the plant has to *give up a carbon* to regenerate the RuBisCo. This is disastrous in terms of energy efficiency. And as a side effect, you also have to keep the stomata open more, which means more water loss. But as you increase the CO2 levels, the ratio between binding CO2 and binding O2 improves, and photorespiration waste drops. C4 plants "fix" this problem by instead of having RuBisCo directly bind CO2, they first bind CO2 into malate (with high selectivity), then the malate transports into bundle sheath cells, the CO2 is re-released, and THEN - in a high-CO2 environment - RuBisCo takes it up. This reduces photorespiration, but also introduces some more wasteful chemical conversions. (CAM plants to even further by storing malate inside vacuules - at the cost of even more energy - so that they can store it up during the night, and then use it during the day, which - although even more wasteful - lets them keep their stomata closed during the day to conserve water)

(BTW, there are some microbes that have developed a more efficient RuBisCo, but it's proving challenging to engineer it into higher plants)

But most of the air fryers in the UK are the wrong shape for pre-prepared meals, and most of those meals are best prepared with a microwave.

It just seems like an air fryer is worse. Take potatoes or meat. You can pile them into an air fryer, or you can spread them in a fan oven and optionally have a rotating platter to make sure they cook evenly. I suppose it's true that the volume is lower so they heat up faster. More messy to clean though.

I completely agree, but would include things like the pledge of allegiance in schools.