Phlarp

Why exactly does the 'expected lifetime' of durable goods keep getting shorter?

Forest, meet trees

I have a mid 2000s sedan from the Ford motor company, recently the air conditioning stopped working; initially I engaged with a few different freelance mechanics, one billed me for a pressure system check / recharge, another said they didn't know what was wrong but could do "diagnostics" until I cried uncle on the costs. The car is worth maybe $3,000 so I can't justify a lot of repair costs on it, but at the same time the powertrain is still in great shape. The Ford dealership was able to pinpoint the actual problem, which was a $25 ambient temp sensor-- but it's buried in the center of the dash requiring $1000 worth of labor to replace.

Ultimately I was able to find the ambient temp sensor pins on the glove box wiring harness and bridge them with a 47 cent resistor, tricking the computer into turning my AC back on.

Cars could be so much better. We'd generate less waste if perfectly good vehicles weren't getting thrown away because Ford and GM designed them to fail in opaque and unserviceable ways, unfortunately things have been trending the opposite direction with BEVs and Tesla in particular.

In the "better" category, Apple claims webcam access is controlled by the secure enclave processor, which is more than most manufacturers do.

F150 owners treat their trucks like gamers treat their RGB desktops. Does the watercooling and lighting package really improve performance? Not really. Do nerds still spend lots of money on them? Absolutely. Putting a lift-kit on the pickup truck that drives exclusively on paved roads is similar.

Big tech has a big PFA problem

Just as we've seen; they can regulate the on/off ramps between local currency and crypto.

If you've got a method to turn meaningful amounts of BTC into USD without being subject to KYC regulations; then the US government is probably already building a federal money laundering case against it.

Or more likely the data you've collected gets liquidated (or stolen) at some point.

Between that and a crypto bro founder / CEO this seems more like a pretext to harvest mobile numbers.

It's so much deeper than that. This is a journalism organization by the top .1% for the top .1% owned by one of the richest men in the world.

See also: The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal.

If a journalist or academic gets found to have knowingly fabricated even the smallest detail it immediately calls into question their entire body of work, and even colleagues they may have worked with.

These are federal agents and the best standard we can hold them to is "oh, we don't have direct evidence of other crimes so we'll just assume the first time we caught you was the first time you did it"

They sold him details of the case for bitcoin into their personal wallets. It wasn't part of a sting or intel operation. The same cops that built the case against him were themselves indicted for money laundering payments they received from Ross. Multiple independent agencies and field offices with rogue agents undermining the cases they were building in real time for personal gain that was contemporaneously worth less than a million dollars.

Did the police investigating Ross misrepresent these murders to him while they were occurring?

Did the police investigating Ross attempt to enrich themselves by stealing illicit funds from his drug enterprise or by selling him details of the pending investigation?

I'll give you that the courts have repeatedly held the police can legally do most of these things, and that even having lying/stealing cops running the investigation doesn't invalidate the fruits of that investigation. Perhaps you could also concede that a lot of observers are going to have difficulty seeing the difference in these two shades of grey?

For my 2 cents it seems entirely reasonable that an armed gang backed by the state would consider themselves to be individually above the law, since they are constantly told that the ends always justify the means, no matter how odious those means may be.

Shaun Bridges of the US secret service and Carl Force of the US DEA were siphoning bitcoin off to their personal accounts throughout the investigation. Bridges even tried to flee the country while on bail.

Think what you want about Ulbrict, but the cops that took him down were every bit as dirty as he was, if not more.

Aren't these tech companies all there to do government services contracting? Seems more like DC is providing industry / jobs to Virginia

There is even an enclave within the enclave that carves out a single medium density housing complex. Can't have the unwashed masses using any of THEIR community resources.

Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.

This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018.

The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really hard problem, BTW we're hiring!" which honestly felt like an admission from HR that they're looking for engineers willing/able to cash the checks marketing already wrote.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jzozv3/every_answ...

Ok grandma, lets get you to bed.

As a counter-example to this specific point, the Screen Actors Guild does a tremendous amount of work to raise the pay and conditions of the median earning actors, without preventing the highest performing members from negotiating compensation in line with their ability to contribute to the success of a project. We can have our cake (collective negotiation) and eat it too (million dollar+/yr IC roles).

Other notable examples; State bar associations (lawyers) and the American Medical Association (doctors).