Yes, it is.
But there are first and second losers.

Tianamen Square ?

If the Great Leap Forward with its mass starvation (most likely the worst in human history) didn't lead to a change, you seriously think that a few export problems will?

Spoilers ahead for people who haven't played the final games in the series.

From my perspective, the way they wrapped up the plot means that the story is essentially going to be a reboot either way. The original storyline involved relationships between several key characters and factions, including and especially Cortana, the Covenant, the Flood, and earth's government. And those plot lines are now all finished. Covenant gone. Cortana gone. The mysteries about the rings and such, solved. There is of course a new enemy that arose like a phoenix. It's an open-ended story that could go anywhere, but it's also essentially a new story with mostly new characters, so, a reboot in its own way.

The next game in this cannon will need to give us a reason to care about the new characters and factions, because the ones we have cared about so far are done and gone. So, what's it going to be? Roll the dice on making something that people will get interested in that won't feel like a re-hash of what we have already seen, or just give the old-but-proven story to a new generation of kids, with shinier graphics?

The second bet is clearly the safer one.

Heliboard is its modern replacement that gets updates.

Install Obtanium.
Install Heliboard.
Install Futo voice typing.

Jettison the Google input stealers.

There will never be a shortage of stupid people.

Generally speaking, a con artist's easiest mark is someone who thinks he is scamming the con artist. The same principle applies here: a criminal's easiest target is someone who thinks they are about profit by breaking the law.

Both. Most people are dumb, and many would use stolen money if they could (and many do, though usually not to buy video game cosmetics).

Intelligence and morality are both things that people are born without, and have to learn. Some people are born pre-disposed to be good at learning (be that knowledge, virtue, or both), but even so, if they are born into unfortunate circumstances then the things that they will learn will be wrong and harmful.

So, in order to reach adulthood with sharp intelligence and a functioning moral compass, several random elements must all work in their favor, including genetics, location of birth, economic status of birth, and a series of not-very-bad life events.

As a matter of raw statistics, most people wind up dumb and/or reprobate.

It's short sighted of a special kind, even.

2-3 decades ago, it was car manufacturing. Every car maker by then knew that the Chinese would steal the tech. There's a famous example of a Mercedes Benz factory making busses which for the first year or two sold like hot cakes. Then demand suddenly vanished. Research found that the chinese joint venture partner (you had to joint venture in those days, not sure about now) had copied the entire factory, brick by brick, one city away. An exact copy making the exact same busses, just without Mercedes Benz in the loop. And, of course, slightly cheaper.

Everyone knew that.

And yet everyone went to China. They figured that it was still profitable to accept that risk.

Of course, the fact that CEOs these days change every few years and get a severance package large enough that they can immediately retire doesn't exactly make them long-term thinkers.

Heck, stop getting any food that is available locally. It's insane that I can buy some food that was grown in South America, shipped to Asia for processing and packaging and then shipped to Europe for less than the same food grown in Europe.

There's quite a bit of utter insanity there.

Yes, but this cuts both ways. These days, a LOT of essential day-by-day supplies are manufactured in China. If China and the G7 stopped all trade tomorrow, the damage to the G7 would be bigger and more immediate than that on China.

True. Germany is learning that lesson now that cheap energy from Russia is no longer available and its export business can't compete anymore.

And cryptocurrencies. What a colossal waste of energy. Our current currency system is sufficient. Ban crypto mining to save the energy for more useful purposes.

I agree. The functions provided by this bed do not require internet connectivity AT ALL, let alone some ridiculous cloud based architecture. $5000 is enough to include a $200 miniPC to monitor temp and positional sensors.

> Why? Absolutely no idea

This isn't surprising to anybody who's studied the psychology of political science.

Those who identify as 'conservative' value maintenance much higher than those who identify as 'progressive'. You're more likely to see them in their driveway changing their oil and measuring their tire tread depth. It's just different kinds of people with different time-preference mindsets.

Note that with a limited budget maintenance spending is money that cannot be spent on immediate benefits.

You need to allocate some of the benefits money to upgrading the IT systems so there's less to hand out. "How could you possibly cut their benefits?" is the kind of misplaced empathy that undercuts the system that they feel is valuable.

Of course there's usually a Federal bailout in the wings for people who don't plan ahead so the incentive systems are all completely misaligned for good governance. Since the Lockdowns we've seen the weaponization of the Dollar through sanctions and tariffs that have pushed world oil markets to the Yuan and cross-border settlements in sovereign currency exchanges, so the Dollar is in freefall compared to commodities which means those bailouts are going to end very soon.

As this reckoning becomes too real to ignore the populations will move strongly to vote for candidates who seem to understand the value of maintenance.

Yeah, and Healthcare is 20% of GDP.

According to Keynesian economists, if we were all much healthier the economy would be worse off.

I'm not sure how much more evidence you need that the entire economic school is a bunch of self-styled money-priests making excuses for government spending.

Keynes did some really good early work but then he got caught diddling kids and after that the King's spending was all the best thing anybody could do.

An early version of "trust the experts".

So the code was written by people who aren't familiar with the idea of "fail-safe"?

I might have gone to school for software engineering but I never equated it with building a bridge at 4000' over a canyon. Those are different things.

But none of my classmates would have thought about building a stack that fails into random or dangerous conditions. We always built from the ground up and verified states as new functionality was added with test evaluation of the possible error states.

And those classes were in C++89 without the advantages of proper exception handling like Java or Python provide.

I think if I were in the market for a $5000 IoT mattress I'd want to see something like a UL label on it. I guess the hardware guys put in a thermal switch so the heating elements shut off at 110*F? Thank goodness a runaway fire wasn't a failure mode.

I wouldn't personally ever spend that kind of money on something like that but if I were rich and disabled maybe there would be use cases.

Yes it's true, we can't escape the interconnected web of dependencies.

I guess my real gripe is that there are too few cloud hosting companies, and the few that exist are too big. We need many more medium-sized ones so that a single outage doesn't do so much damage, and so they have to compete against each other for business to keep their incentives properly oriented.

Or maybe he was quoted out of context.

When you use AWS to host your businesses website, and/or all the data that your business processes, and/or whatever back-end web-facing APIs your business uses, no amount of "fault tolerance" is going to keep you afloat when AWS goes down.

If we want to blame the victim, the correct accusation is: "you shouldn't outsource your critical business infrastructure to a huge megacorp that can survive without you."