• 26 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • This kind of discovery is really cool to hear about.

    But the impatient part of my brain really hates to read stuff like “hoping to start human trials within five years”. Gotta be careful and do it right and all that. But my monkey brain wants that Star Trek medicine now where I go in with literally anything and almost all of it is curable and a lot of it with only some sort of non-evasive tool while I am young enough to benefit from it.





  • All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.

    The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.







  • Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.


    That depends on how many people want them.

    Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want “dumbphones” bad enough to stop buying “smartphones”.

    Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren’t what they want. Apple, Google, etc can’t force you to buy it from them after all.

    Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.

    The real “sin” in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.

    Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.