they were able to pass the physical.

Oh, come on, stop harping on Joe Biden's frailty — he's been out of office for over a year now!

But you don't read the generated binaries, do you? Not even the assembly text...

For one, the P and R are irrelevant. They were not part of the statement. Which, restated to follow your format, would be "LC decrease, U increase, therefore LCU decrease". Where are P and R?
Given that the amount of change is not included, no conclusions can be made about the final size of M. Maybe LC went down a little and U went up a lot. Two components shrank and one grew. That is not enough information to justify the conclusion. Thus, not valid.

Never expect markets to be Pareto optimal. They can't be. There is no game where nobody ever loses. Never expect them to find a Nash equilibrium, the equilibrium points are always moving. Markets exhibit pendular motion around the regions where those points tend to fall as the markets constantly seek and then overshoot those points. I suspect most human systems operate that way. Government certainly does.

But, I'm starting to wander and am forgetting that you asked a direct question.
No. At least not one that doesn't already exist. If you didn't care about harming the consumer, you could drive costs up to the point where buying replacement things wasn't feasible. That was why everything had to be repairable before the mass production of plastic goods. Also, nothing back then was computerized. You can't repair a microprocessor (not at home anyhow), and it rarely makes sense to repair a circuit board. If those parts are responsible for the bulk of the item's cost, and they usually are, why replace them instead of the entire device? Since most electronic devices have few to no moving parts, hardware failures tend to be the result of age. Why spend almost as much to repair a beat-up laptop with a missing 6 key, when you can get a new one for not much more? We may even be at a point were making things repairable would harm consumers more than you assume the lack of repairability would.

But, if you're still bothering to read, you may recall that I said, "not one that doesn't already exist". There are laptops designed to be easily repaired. If those companies can get the prices down to where Lenovo is, while keeping the laptops light and pretty (because you're swaying those consumers), they may be able to get a trend going. The problem is that they're trying to solve a problem that most consumers don't consider a problem.

You could try making fancy laptop cases with modular guts you could easily swap out like batteries used to do, but you're just moving the issue around since people will just throw the old guts in the trash.

In the end, some sort of major technological change would have to occur. Right now, there is no incentive to make repairable devices. It isn't economical or desirable for consumers or manufacturers. The expensive bits can't be repaired (because computers), and the other bits are too cheap to worry about (because plastic). There would have to be some new tech that makes those issues obsolete without regularly making itself obsolete. If you know what that is, please tell me, I'd like to invest in it.

I already have collars for my solar-powered cows.

Oh, the temperatures were quite remarkable and remain so now. It was hotter then than it is now. And we are referring to the same locale.

Yes, but that doesn't actually sound like a market failure requiring regulatory intervention, but rather a failure to suit your preferences. Overall consumer preferences went to price and weight, yours goes to repairability and the two are often incompatible.

Any chance he was railroaded by corrupt politicians who abused their power to level absurd charges against him?

I once heard of a guy being charged with sexual assault by a woman who admitted she invited him into a small private room to watch her get naked, so I take all that with a grain of salt.

Maybe there aren't any of them in California to care?

Does Gates get his money back? If I give someone $600 to erect a shed with my name on it, and then they take my name off, I want my $600 back.

I assume I'd feel the same about $6 million, if I had it.

Nope, too reasonable and rational. You won't get clicks that way.

eBay? That's your go-to for new product research?

And as I doubt any of us here personally know any billionaires, let alone who all of them are, to make moral judgements against them as a group falls somewhere between inappropriate and malicious.

I can walk over to Microcenter with $600 and walk out with a spiffy laptop with an 8 core snapdragon CPU, 16 gig of RAM and 1TB of storage - running Win 11, the same OS most companies & schools run. (Acer Aspire 14 and 16 laptops in specific)

The people excited about a $600 iPad are looking for a laptop to take the place of an iPad, and they have to be casual users that don't have specific software requirements/needs - nothing beyond a browser or office suite.

There are a lot of them, but not enough to scare or "terrify" a company like Acer in any meaningful way.

"where he got handsy with fellow guest Salma Hayek."

Who wouldn't? Have you not seen her?

I believe the term is, "va va VOOM!"