Typical nostalgia story. You must have forgotten how many repairs were made when you were a kid. My 15 year old prius has never failed once. I have only taken it in for routine maintenance: oil changes, AC recharging, bulbs replaced, battery changed every few years. It's never broken down or failed to start or made a funny noise and I live in a frozen hellhole. When I was a kid, this level of reliability was UNHEARD of. My parent's Chevy's were being repaired constantly. We knew the local auto mechanic well. I remember being stranded on the side of the road and getting a ride from a stranger to a pay phone to have our 5yo car towed. I was probably 8 and the lady driving had a bag of sour cream and onion chips open she was eating and that was my first time eating one (and I didn't like it, but was so glad she gave me a snack). It was kinda scary being stuck and seeing my dad stressed out in the days before cellphones on a rural road.

Some innovations are important and useful, some aren't. John Deere has been ABUSING their customers for a long time. This is not about technology, but about John Deere. Those ancient cars were unreliable AF. The computers help a lot. My POS GE washing machine? Failed pretty quickly. My expensive LG machine with computers?...identified that a bird set a nest in our 2nd floor vent and shut itself down automatically and messaged me to contact a service pro. When done right, these technologies are amazing and give new capabilities. Others are solutions looking for a problem.

Everyone wants repairability. But for example, in computers, I don't miss having separate sound cards. Embedded sound cards work just as good these days and are far cheaper. It's one less thing for me to worry about. However, I do prefer user-replaceable batteries in everything. So technology is very mixed and the answer is refinement, not regression. We obviously want useful and helpful technology without being financially raped by grifters and horrible companies like John Deere or HP or many others who abuse their customers.

Sometimes I feel like my TV shows different versions of shows to the ones other people watch.

Universe was a mostly civilian crew, because it was supposed to be a science mission. That was a different dynamic, but we already had two military shows by that point. Well, one and a half maybe, but Atlantis was mostly military in reality.

It had some interesting ideas and some good group dynamics. I don't really care for "competence porn", which I know a lot of Trek fans seem like for some reason. If anything, all it tends to do is make the writer's personal flaws become an issue, e.g. Geordi being a creep on TNG.

That's what Stargate Universe was.

Studios are not keen on new things. Look at the backlash against the new Star Trek series. Despite what some people claim, most of it was good Trek, and very enjoyable. Some of it is the best we have ever had from the franchise.

A small but very vocal group of fans made it clear that they just want more bland, Voyager style shows, lots of filler episodes, nothing particularly challenging. Nothing like what Trek should be, or what Trek has been at its best. They attacked everyone who liked it, and of course all the actors and the production staff. You should see the Alex Kurtzman memes.

Same thing happened with The Acolyte. It wasn't bad. Not amazing, but better than most of the Star Wars TV shows. Some fans heard a rumour (untrue) that it was going to make The Force "female", whatever that means, and they started a campaign to make sure it failed.

Then you have the grifters posing as reviewers on YouTube, who pan everything good to get those controversy clicks.

In the era of streaming this stuff matters, because you have to get people to subscribe before they can even see your show. They try to work around it by releasing episodes onto YouTube for free, but it's difficult.

While true, that's like saying dirt can't exist without gravity.

Capitalism existed long before markets existed, and markets existed before people did. Fish cleaners staking out a site for their business in the ocean is a market. An amoeba storing resources for later use is capitalism in action. (I.e. it's getting stuff now for later use, accumulating capital.)

Most of the things that people attribute to capitalism are only the property of one "dialect" of capitalism. And corporate capitalism is itself a cluster of dialects, that exist under specific legal constraints, which vary with time and place.

So, yes, markets cannot exist without capitalism, as markets are about exchanging stuff, and capitalism is, basically, "the way one handles stuff". I suppose one could rephrase that as "the belief in the way one handles stuff", which would eliminate amoebas, etc., because they don't practice belief, but the way it's commonly used doesn't seem to imply belief.

While money != capital, capitalism isn't basically about improving anything. It's about using the capital you have (i.e. stuff that's under your control, which includes money) to increase the amount of capital you have. This often improves things for at least some subset of the people, but that's a side effect, and if it's missing, what is described is still capitalism.

I said "privacy", not just GDPR.

Also fun part about "easy to navigate". There's this curious case of "ease of navigation" of a large Finnish retailer, who got fined for most of their yearly profit recently.

Why?

Research it. It's hilarious. Retailer's name is "verkkokauppa.com". They were compliant with it for entire period. Until bureaucrat decided they needed to be punished, and suddenly they weren't. Decision made by court in the end clearly caused harm to consumers.

You won't believe me what happened to them if I tell you. You'll project your "disconnected and without insight" on me again, because surely, it couldn't be that fucking retarded.

It is though. And that's just one out of many such cases.

USB is now EU tech. As declared by BoogieChile.

Andor shows that you can take a tired franchise and do something new and really interesting with it. I wish they would have at least tried.

I like to buy European products, but often they either don't make what I want, or the price is 10-100x what I can get it from China for. There are limits to how far I will go to support local businesses.

Europe is moving against China too. There is going to be a per-package fee of 3 Euro, to make it harder for sites like AliExpress and Temu to sell into the EU. I don't like that, it's just propping up middle-men who do nothing by add an extra zero to the price of things. Even with it, buying direct from China will still be cheaper.

They haven't gone as dumb as banning DJI drones and non-EU routers yet.

European and Chinese companies have electric tractors. Very simple to operate, very easy to maintain. Yes, even the battery packs.

And import bans to stop people buying Chinese electric tractors that have zero emissions and are easy to repair. For lighter duty work people have been importing them for a few years now.

They had big ideas for it, but as time went on the budget got squeezed while needing more CGI on screen to represent the advanced technology and galactic stage they were portraying.

The actors started to cost more too. One of the reasons why many shows are limited to 5 seasons is that the standard contract is 5 seasons and then a re-negotiation for more money. Amazon has another trick that they used with Bosch - can the show, and start an identical one with the same characters and actors, but a slightly different name and a big reset of everyone's salaries.

It's a real shame that Universe was cancelled. Lots of potential and an interesting idea.

Maybe Amazon isn't the right place for it though. Look at the final season of The Boys. Massive budget cuts were very apparent.

Wasn't this literally the plot of Nineteen Eighty Four?

Higher ranking Party members could turn the two-way Telescreen off for a short time.

If you ever convince a woman to reproduce with you, you will see why this is so huge. I used to have patience for science experiments and computing projects, but now I just don't have time...I need shit to work. Apple supports their devices better than all the PC vendors and the Apple ecosystem is both amazing and popular. I converted a few years ago and love how seamless apps are between tablet, computer, and phone. Moving from Lightroom to Photomator was a godsend. If you embrace it, the ecosystem simplifies your life. With a mac, your family protection/sharing settings transfer across devices. Life is honestly a LOT easier in a single ecosystem. We tried Windows laptops and chromebooks for the kids and it's a lot of extra work and duplication.

Your daughter won't care about specs. She wants simplicity and something cute. Half the boys on the planet don't care about spec, either. If you're a PC gamer?...well...what are you doing with a laptop? Why not a desktop with a nice graphics card? Also, most kids don't like PCs. They like the consoles or an iPad better.

My wife and I both own Macbook pros and enjoy them. In the past, we had to save our computers and hand them down to the kids. it works...but the battery sucks...the kids abuse the devices, so when it breaks, we have to buy a more expensive one...things start breaking with age, etc.

With the Neo as an option, they can use our apps, use our settings, and we can buy them their own shiny new device with a new battery that is fairly kid friendly. They stay off our more expensive devices and if it breaks? $600 isn't THAT painful...windows laptops are priced similarly and have horrible build quality and are mostly unsupported garbage. Try replacing the keyboard on a budget laptop...you MIGHT be able to find the parts...the Apple?...you definitely will. Weird driver error code?...with the Macbook Neo, you will find tons of support articles...not so much from a budget Acer or even Dell (my last dell laptop was a huge mistake).

People have wanted this for a very long time and frankly it was stupid of them to hold off on this. A smart company offers budget offerings AND luxury ones for families. We bought windows laptops and chromebooks out of necessity in the past. Now we don't have to deal with that shit. When the old ones die, my kids are getting neos. They can buy the cool shells and decals and protectors and whatever to make it their own. It will work and be less of a headache...and honestly, not even more expensive than a standard windows laptop from Best Buy these days. Apple is ensuring I forget how to use Windows and never touch it again. TBH, every time I go onto our gaming pc and have to do anything with it, I forget how bad the OS has become. I don't miss it.