Back in the day, electronics as an example came with schematics, with the assumption that the user may want to service or have his items serviced. Spare parts for prior purchased items were also typically available for a number of years (for those manufacturers still in business of of course). So what changed? A couple of things come to mind:

  - more manufacturing has been moved to low cost, offshore entities
  - products have become cheaper while onshore labor has become more expensive -- making repair less realistic
  - more companies have been lured into the "subscription" model, even where it really makes no sense (i.e. why does my stove need to be connected to the internet?)
  - the product release cycle has been shortened considerably (for hardware, but particularly software) (back in the 80's, one bought a word processor on floppy and used it unchanged for years, learning to live with many flaws -- now, it might be updated weekly/monthly)

All of that being stated, physical items which are purchased, are purchased and the new owner should be able to modify or repair as necessary, and physical parts should be available for a period of time. There are a number of gotchas in this regard, such as timing, costs and lately, the desire to only provide replacements as "subsystems" as opposed to individual parts, unnecessarily increasing repair costs.

Regardless, some of these repair requirements will likely increase purchase costs. The days where only the rich could afford a color TV or take a airline flight are not coming back, so arriving at a balance of increasing purchase costs for some of the products in order to get longer life and easier repairability.

You could hear the birds all the time. I don't care about cheap gas, but cars make cities noisy, ugly, polluted and dangerous. I only realised this in covid when almost all of the cars went and councils allocate more space for everything else for social distancing.

I"ve been trying to figure out what ya'll were trying to say about no cars, etc.....then it dawned on me that ya'll must be living where they had lockdowns.

Where I lived, sure, traffic was lessened due to more WFH, but it certainly didn't go away to any levels of no cars on the roads and hearing the birds chirping any more than normal....

Glad I didn't live where ya'll do.....for the most part my life didn't change all THAT much after the first month or so...it was largely getting back to normal.

Your hypothesis is that Japanese people aren't having as many kids because of climate change?

I guess so....apparently it is too hot outside for young people to fuck....?

Wow...that never was much of a deterrent to me back in my younger days...

Aww, I was getting excited for Jews in space.

I'm still waiting to see Hitler on Ice.....

;)

So the system responded that it was an already claimed serial number and not an invalid serial number? Who the fuck would do that?

Let's say someone put in a claim.

Well what is to stop them from trying consecutive serial numbers to see if they can get even more?

In related news, call center wait times have increased markedly, due to an abundance of of no-shows at work today.

Outage expected for at least the next week or two...

"We matched you with somebody who REALLY likes horses!"

Hey....Tim Walz needs love too you know....

Yes great to mention the linking aspect, that was key to the whole thing being really useful.

Games are $80 not $90. And that is still a huge discount from what games cost back in the 80's, 90's, 2000's when adjusted for inflation. NES games in the 80's were either $55 or $39.95 at discount. Inflation adjusted that puts the games at between $120 - $165 for the NES at launch.

The SNES games were $59.95 at launch, which inflation adjusted would be $140. Even PS2 games which were DVD based stamps (i.e. much cheaper to make than NES/SNES/N64 cartridge style) were $50 - $59 at launch, which is still $90 - 108 inflation adjusted.

So yes, games are still not as expensive when adjusted for inflation as they were back in the 80's, 90's, or 2000's.

So much wrong with your statements. Just to start, the original NES was released in 1985 at the price of $179.99, which inflation adjusted to today would be over $530. The SNES in the USA was released for $199.99 in August 1991, which inflation adjusted to today's price would be $470....

Show me a single modern phone that will use 20W of power using it's CPU+GPU capabilities. They are all much lower power, lower performance chips that will typically at most use 8W (think about this logically, you don't have a phone that has a heatsink and fan capable of dissipating that heat of the high performance parts used in the Switch 2).

I mean, seriously, this is not that surprising. It seems like Nintendo delayed the hardware 1-2 quarters to allow for more time to produce more of them ahead of release, and even imported many of them to the USA at least two or so months in advance to avoid all the tariff uncertainty.

I guess the only surprising things might be how quickly it sold out in the USA. Japan was almost certain to sell out, given the pre-order "disasters". But the USA selling out typically being Nintendo's largest market was not as certain. That said, the backwards compatibility and essentially upgrades to 4K+HDR capabilities, was pretty certain that it would be a good seller, even at the higher price point than people had been originally anticipating (I believe fans were hoping for a $350-400 range, but given that it has essentially sold out within 2-3 days of launch across the country at $450, it shows the market could support that price).

Without news sites to scrape, there will be no feeding the AI. With one key exception. When a site is driven by political agenda instead of advertisement revenue.

You have it partially right here.

But the one divergence from the pattern you didn't list is, that because most AI. (and Google's AI specifically) is very left leaning, it will feed you only left leaning news... so the sites that will remain, and keep earring revenue are more right leaning sites since people would have to go to them directly anyway to seek out news Google will never give them.

Of course that merely delays the full effect of what you lay out, when most for-profit left wing news sites fold the AI starved for information will in the end actually make use of right leaning sites as well.

What it does mean is that left wing news sites that remain in the next year or so will only be hyper-partisan info funded by some external source.

Then maybe they have already relaxed the more stringent gun video standards then....or were any of these you watched particularly old videos?

I know I've seen channels like MAC and Sootch , etc complaining they couldn't show this or that without getting strikes...

but there was a major (and predictable) power outage in Lousiana two or three weeks ago that made the national news.

I LIVE in the New Orleans area in Louisiana, and I know nothing about this power outage you speak of....?

I never saw anything about this on local or national news....?

I'd be happy with YouTube, for a start, to relax the mods on gun content...these days they cannot even show a video of disassembling a gun to show how it works or how to clean it...

They ban videos showing someone screwing on/off a silencer these days.....it didn't used to be this strict....