In these parts all of the leases are structured as ending with ownership. However, most cars are returned to the dealership before that. People either get bored of them and want newer ones, or the smart ones return theirs before they're due for the first major overhaul. So funnily enough, in practical terms, the lease is a rent.

The dealership gets a discount on any work to be done on the used cars because of the volume and ties to the manufacturer, and they get to sell the car a second time for another profit. And everyone's happy.

The thing with all of that is that the particular system doesn't matter too much.

Good people can make bad systems work. Good systems cannot make bad people work.

And the oft touted checks and balances fail when you need them the most.

Today I learned.

Where I come from, lease basically means you buy something, most probably a vehicle, with a loan. Once you have paid back the loan, you own the thing.

Turns out for most of people it's just another word for rent. Go figure.

When you lease something, you end up with ownership. With these HP rentals, there's zero path at all to ownership. Thus, it's a subsrciption through and through.

What's your problem with claymation? I've never seen any I did not enjoy..

Yeah, radiation efficiency compared to convection and conduction is what, two orders of magnitude smaller? None of these "x, but in space" morons ever care to remember the giant utilities hookup that is the planet Earth. In this case, it's a giant heatsink. All of the computing on planet Earth is cooled by sinking the waste heat into the atmosphere, or into a body of water.

Even funnier than the "x, but in space" morons in this case is the "X, but in space" moron that thinks he can just by willpower multiply manufacturing capacity in a semiconductor industry that is already severely strained by the ongoing endless demand for AI crap. Ffs Elon, do you have anyone left around you who can shoot your ketamine dreams down with reality before you publicly make an idiot of yourself again?

Everything is inherently global to some extent. But global systems only work if every actor has good will. Everyone should have learned that lesson by now.

And even within a system of good will, there's still basic facts about sovreignity, like if a country cannot feed itself, it's not independent. When it needs food the most is also when everyone else needs it most, and it will therefore starve. In this real world of ours that sadly has a severe lack of good will, you are going to bend over to someone you really don't want to be bending over to, just to stay alive.

Now as to data and such. With the US showing it's true colours more and more in the recent times, the threat becomes real that if your infrastructure is based on US tech, hosted by US companies, and maybe even hosted within US borders, they might just take all of that hostage, and you will be bending over again.

Compliance on the other hand is not so much an issue of affordability, but of giving a fuck. If you are big enough to serve government contracts, you can afford to comply to their requirements. Even more, the government itself will pay for the compliance, because in the end it's just part of the pricing calculation. But let's compare Google, who cannot be arsed to comply with the EU requirement to keep all EU data within EU borders, and Microsoft, who can be arsed. Guess which company has all the business.

Interoperability, on the other hand, is not really the name of the game of the status quo, is it. Every vendor is working to get you locked in to their platform. It takes policy and budget and will to steer clear of that. Funny thing is, interoperability is cheaper, because you can just use off-the-shelf components to build your stack. But building a vendor lock-in platform takes investment, and that's a mega-platform game.

Lastly, there's always the magic word of efficiency at play, isn't it. Well here's the problem with efficiency. Efficiency is brittle. If you optimize for efficiency, there's no room for a safety margin. The 2008 economic crisis was caused by efficiency. Nvidia melting connectors are caused by efficiency. Covid supply chain issues were caused by efficiency. It's just a catchall word to argue against anything that might be important, but what it really argues for is that spending as little money as possible is the most important thing. And it isn't. Money is just something you use to achieve what is actually important. If you spent the money, however little, but didn't get what you need, the money was wasted. If you want to make sure you will not be bending over when the shit hits the fan, you will need to pay your way.

If they are harming bigger billionares, at that.

It's not dead, it just smells funny...

I don't know where that popular is. I don't know anyone that cares about 3D movies the slightest bit, except the one guy who used to ramble about the great potential within, but never knew of any examples of that potential being put to worthy use.

I'm sure there are people who enjoy the spectacular colourful visuals offered by Tron. Otoh there's also people who enjoy the spectacular colourful visuals offered by dropping acid. Neither of these have anything to do with what makes a good movie though. For an actual good movie, 3D is a distraction. It takes away any subtlety of what is going on, there's no room observation, introspection, and wondering about the masterwork you are witnessing; it all just becomes and excercise of spoon-feeding. For a regular run-of-the-mill Hollywood flick otoh it might just distract you from the fact that there's no plot, no dialogue, no acting, much less so camerawork, lighting, scening, blocking and so on. Every one of them has literally the exact same soundtrack... No nothing of what makes a passing grade movie to be found. And this is why 3D is still alive. It's a substitute for substance.

My comment was a jab at the fact that our recent 3D mania was not the first one.

It failed this time exactly for the same reason it did the previous times. It's a novelty that adds no lasting value to anything. There's only so many times you can be bothered to see random junk popping out of the screen. You've seen it once, you've seen it all. And then the reasons you list come to play and everyone discovers that while 3D isn't in any way better than 2D, it is in multiple ways worse. And they walk away from the nothingburger it is.

...maybe enough time has passed that 3d could be tried again?

If the Chinese EVs get in, they'll wipe the floor with the US car market. Walmart is getting ready.

Walmart itself might certainly plan for an EV fleet, too.

And the gambit here might be that they are uniquely positioned to become the replacement for a gas station. They have good presence everywhere, they're already hooked up to reasonable power, they are one of the common places to where people actually take the trips to, and maybe most importantly, they are the one place where people don't mind the 30min charging time, because they will be busy doing the groceires.

Thanks y'all for the Funny votes, but I did not mean this as funny. This is literally how our society and journalism functions.

We live in a time and age where our markets based economy, or at least the one that is declared as such, is failing more and more people. Since it is now more and more difficult to argue that said economy brings prosperity, it must therefore be defended with a moral argument. If it doesn't make things better for people, at least it makes the people themselves better.

Because if the markets and economy should go undefended, it might happen that the people might get the idea to replace it with something different, and also replace the elites running it and profiting from it. And that would be a bad thing, at least from the viewpoint of said elites.

In this our markets based economy, or at least the one that is declared as such, it is the job of economists and think tanks and such to defend this economy. And TFA is a good example of that.

There's the good old quote: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convicing the world he didn't exist". Well the greatest trick the ruling class ever pulled was convincing us they didn't exist either. There's also no such thing as class war, neither does rich people meet and discuss how to advance their position - the latter is a conspiracy theory, in fact.