Really don't understand what about this thing makes it worth $6KUSD. Induction cookers aren't new technology, and batteries certainly aren't either. Just reeks of yet another "Tech" startup slapping a 1000%+ markup on their BoM because rich folks will pay whatever they're charging for the latest shiny gadget.
Cool, you built your own YouTube with hookers and coke and... bitcoin. Lots and lots of bitcoin. Cause lord knows there's literally (checks notes) dozens of people out there clamoring for an "Anti-censorship" streaming platform where they can watch spammy bitcoin videos.
"Economics" was invented by the wealthy elites as a tool of class control to justify their bottomless, insatiable greed. All "Economics" does is rationalize the obviously failing status quo.
My biggest disappointment with Framework continues to be the fact I can get a similarly specced laptop from numerous other manufacturers for 40% or less of what the Framework 16" costs. Bestbuy has an ASUS laptop on sale right now for $1200 with damn near identical specs to the bottom tier Framework 16" with the GPU expansion board that Framework wants $2900 for.
I love the idea of a repairable laptop, but reparability sure as heck isn't worth a 60%+ price premium far as I'm concerned.
Came to say basically the same thing. Not to mention they also refer to their F1.8 "Glass" when their own technical specs list the lens elements as plastic.
It's basically a $10 sensor, a $5 mic, $5 of miscellaneous plastic and circuitry, and yet they want $175 for what?
I might have given all their typical startup BS and hyperbole a pass if it was like $79 or something reasonable, but at $175 it just seems like a scam.
I love the idea of some virtual daemon type AI assistant thingy that helps me with mundane day to day tasks via an intuitive natural language type interface. Sci-fi / cyberpunk authors have been writing about this stuff for decades and it's always seemed like super cool and useful tech to me.
That being said I positively LOATHE the idea of it being some cloud based subscription service, as inevitably, no matter how much the founders of these companies talk about privacy or security, it will become yet another corporate data harvester that spies on you and sells your personal information to the highest bidder, or provides a backdoor for governments or other non-state entities to surveil you. Money talks, and morals walk. Let's not forget Ring gives LEA footage from peoples door cameras just for asking nicely with no way for users to opt-out.
Personally, as much as I want something like this (Though the dorky badge format is a big miss for me) I will never, ever, EVER go for something like this unless I OWN the software and that software runs on hardware I OWN as well. I'm sure a lot of folks will get excited by this thing, but as it stands now it's just bog-standard run of the mill, every day dystopian nightmare fuel for me.
I miss the web where there were services actively trying to help you find new, interesting and weird things, not just the stuff that makes them the most money from ads. Feels like even the things that are supposed to be about "Discovery" are increasingly only showing you things from an ever shrinking walled garden. Despite there being exponentially more stuff and content on the web than say 20 years ago, it actually feels like a much smaller these days.
The real reason CEOs want people back in office is 100% because they are broadly part of the same socio-economic class that owns the vast majority of commercial real estate around the world. They and their friends and family own all the commercial real estate, and high vacancy rates are are hurting their bottom lines and reducing the rate at which their property values increase, so they want people back in the office to prop up their property values and keep the commercial real estate graving train flowing.
This is so bare facedly a profit driven land grab. These people don't give a damn about conservation or culture, they just want to use their burgeoning social power to force a kind of "Exclusive economic zone" onto their neighbors so they can implement a commercial fishery for their own exclusive benefit, free of any kind of regulatory oversight or environmental protections.
As someone who lives near a bunch of various first nations, I've seen this pattern playing out more and more lately. They come up with some bullshit rationale about "Protecting the environment and their culture," use that to brow-beat the politicians into capitulating to their demands out of fear of any kind of pushback being labeled as "Racist" and then as soon as the first nations groups gain control of an area or resource, they keep doing whatever they claimed they were against even worse than the people who we're previously doing it (ie. cutting down more trees that the loggers, catching more fish than the fishermen) and then once they've cut down all the trees and / or caught all the fish, they just plonk down some condos on their "Sacred land" and turn into rent-seeking landlords.
To take things a step further, all the various North American indigenous groups have been waring, slaving and migrating their way across the continent for millennia, just like every single other people group on earth for all of history, so it's almost certain that whatever indigenous "Nation" is claiming a given piece of land "Stole" it from some other indigenous "Nation" at some point in the past, yet we never hear them talking about returning "their" land to those "Rightful owners" do we?
Hancock is a charlatan of the worst kind, in that I firmly believe he fully knows the vast majority of what he says is utter bullshit, but he keeps on saying it because it's garnering him a ton of money and attention. "They" (rightly, mind you) call him crazy for claiming the pyramids are 12000 years old, despite huge volumes of verifiable evidence strongly refuting such claims (Literally 100s of carbon dates from organic materials in mortar remnants between blocks, stratigraphy, lexical references like the Merer texts, etc.), and despite the lack of single shred of credible evidence for any of his claims other than his typical "This rock here looks like that rock on the other side of the world so the pyramids are 12000 years old and Atlantis is real" nonsense.
What a laughably bad idea. Spend extra money on top of your already expensive vacation to look like some normcore sheep in the process all so some airline can do a bit of deeply cynical greenwashing. Personally you couldn't pay me to wear "Rental" clothes, as I actually enjoy the personal expression of you know, being a grown up and dressing myself, and the miniscule amount of carbon emissions saved here are a literal drop in the ocean compared to the flood of emissions of biblical proportions emitted by the corporations.
I was expecting be disappointed when it was some kind of RC or slot car type thing, but for a vehicle an actual human person fits inside and controls, this is epically awesome.
Audience score is functionally useless though, as there are entire industries devoted to manipulating it, and the sites know this and do nothing to stop it.
Chinese and Indian film studios have been doing this for years on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. So many absolutely abysmal Chinese and Indian movies have 90%+ user scores on both platforms, it's painfully obvious to anyone even paying a modicum of attention that they're gaming these sites, as there's no way thousands of people can all think these utter turd movies / shows are actually gems regardless of whatever cultural relativism based excuses people try and trot out.
The bottom line is basically every single site that aggregates reviews or has user reviews is functionally useless now, as there are entire multi-billion dollar industries employing tens of thousands of people in China, India, Russia and the Philippines devoted to flooding the sites with fake reviews and the sites themselves know this all to well and do nothing to stop is as they make more money this way.
Sounds like Scientology doesn't want people opening up their so called "E-meters" so they can protect their manufactured illusion they actually do something.
Important context here is that despite their manufactured outrage, China on an annual basis dumps 10X the amount of (potentially much more) radioactive water as is being discharged in this one-off event and has been doing so for years and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future.
No 22 year old is getting a $200K mortgage with no income. Dude's mom bought him a farm. Yet another story of some rich kid having something bought for them being spun as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
The entire field of "Economics" was created as a way for the wealthy elite to justify / rationalize their capitalist oppression of the working class, so it should come as no surprise that a publication that serves a mouthpiece for the wealthy elites and that is named after a field that was created to serve the wealthy elites espouses ideas that solely benefit the wealthy elite.
Anytime rich people say something is bad, one can generally assume that by bad they mean only for them and their entrenched wealth and power and so therefore is good for the rest of us.
Bullshit. When the expectation is that we'll fund any potential rescue efforts when something invariably goes wrong with our tax dollars, it becomes the rest of our business pretty damn quickly.
No, WE need to be MORE "Judgey" because one of the critical elements you're conveniently leaving out here is WE spent literally tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of OUR tax money searching for a sub full of rich, arrogant CEOs and Tourists who may have spent their own money going down, but who offloaded / externalized 100% of the responsibility and expense of any potential search and rescue effort to the taxpaying public.
OceanGate had no rescue plan! Their entire "Plan" for what to do WHEN, not if, something went wrong, was to call in the coast guard / navy and have the taxpayer fund their rescue and from where I'm sitting this whole oeuvre of dangerous, rich-guy-ego-stroking vanity bullshit is an egregiously entitled abuse of the commons that should regulated out of existence with extreme prejudice.
While false positives are a well documented result from drug tests, one detail that struck me as very odd in this story is the fact this dude was returning home to the US from Brazil with not one, not two, but three bottles of Shampoo in his luggage?
There's always a brief window in time with any new technology where it's new enough that the suits haven't entirely gotten their hooks into it, so it's broadly made to be as effective as possible at doing what it's supposed to do. We unfortunately now live well down the enshitification curve of computing and now most everything is made not simply to be as good as possible at it's intended purpose, but rather to make the companies that make it is as much money as possible while performing it's intender purpose at whatever minimum standard will annoy users ever so slightly less than the amount it would require them to stop paying money for it.
How about a "Deep dive" into pricing already. My sinking suspicion is they're intentionally holding back pricing as long as possible, as revealing how expensive this thing is going to be would cause the wheels to fall off the hype-train somewhat.