Firmware in most consumer routers is based on Linux, with the router vendor adding some UI and chip-vendor drivers to the open source baseline. Not written from scratch. And thus just as good or bad as routers whose hardware was assembled elsewhere.
China can't manufacture the high end chips yet, but they do have their own supply chain for midrange SOCs and memory. Gigadevices cloned some European SOCs. They work. Chinese contract manufacturers build to the quality level the customer pays for. You want cheap junk, they're happy. You want good, they can. And their native design capabilities are catching up. The US, in contrast, is now mainly an exporter of raw materials -- wood, scrap metal, animal feed. Plus weapons to allies and airplanes, though Boeing's reputation ain't what it used to be.

"And that's before you consider that TikTok and Slashdot are not remotely similar in their impact on people. "

Quantify this. What is this "impact" on people, and how are you measuring it?

You can do that, right? Because if you can't you're just another moron talking about how video games and rock lyrics and D&D are corrupting the minds of our youth.

You are posting to a social media site which many of us started participating it when it started, when we were "children." Your bootlicking is pathetic.

"What is the point of having a job, when you can not live from the wage?"

Sometimes it's to buy textbooks, or make extra money on the side, or to earn money during the summer so you can spend it during the rest of the year.

It's myopic to assume that all jobs are supposed to be full-time careers.

I just want to be clear about this: you believe the American middle class is smaller/worse-off than it was in the early 1900s?

Another person who needs to read Bastiat.

Do you think it would help the middle class to bring back the requirement for people to walk in front of cars waving a lantern?

"If I say "all white people should die"

That is 100% protected speech, full stop, and is absolutely your right to express in a free and open society.

"I've always been pro free speech, but"

You can always just stop posting after the 'but' because it means that you are not in fact pro-free speech.

At the time, Apple promised that the AI features would be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and higher models. (They weren't going to be on the plain iPhone 15, I guess because it has an older CPU.)

If only we had technology that would allow us to breed crops that could eradicate micronutrient deficiency and prevent its resultant illnesses and deaths.

Oh, wait, we do, but neo-Luddies who want everyone to live in a state of impoverishment and suffering don't want us to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

I meant, you get a stream straight from the studio master, not ripped from an audio CD.

I thought the "high res" thing was to sell you music straight from the 48KHz master -- not jankily downscaled to 44.1KHz, clipped because of loudness wars, and then lossily compressed. Am I out of date?

I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

Right as other manufacturers realize physical buttons are good actually and are changing back:

https://www.businessinsider.co...
https://www.autoblog.com/news/...