...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

I'm not the person you replied to, but the Fairphone 5 meets their specification list.

As a side note, everything the parent asked for is common on older phones. Asking for them all together is not like asking for unrealistic / unicorn options.

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle%2Fc...

A 512 MB module cost $100-$200 in 2006. Sold in an $1000 machine. 10% of the cost.

And now a macbook air costs order of magnitude the same, but the RAM they're putting in it.... $10-20 (1-2% of the cost).

I wonder if that difference in cost is going to some other part of the machine or into margins?

(I know Apple don't pay retail prices for their RAM, which is what I quoted here, the actual percentage of cost will be lower)

You want me to do busywork so Apple doesn't have to pay an extra $10 for memory on a thousand dollar machine?

The telephone. And at grocery stores. And obtained car and home loans. All freely.

Please donâ(TM)t have children. You will sux as a parent.

Government is after these companies for encryption, which the companies claim it is about privacy. But this really should be about security. By using these services, you are nearly guaranteed that end user is who they say. What is needed is for governments to hand out a packet of vetted digital certificates and then use these in various services/applications.

China is pushing massive amounts of effort on AI for industry and military. Doing this should not be an issue. However, these ppl are likely to be a detriment to this. So best thing would be to do a NASA/USAF kind of thing. Split the group into 2 with those that fighting military involvement and put them in a group devoted to industry, pure development while other group continues to do pure development but in all areas including military. For this 2nd group, put in ppl with security clearance.

This has been claimed multiple times over the last 15 years, but their goal is 1.75 TW of coal plants. It will return to adding 40-50 GW new coal plants / year next year, if not this year.

NASA should be creating standards for private space. Not just space suits but even docking, sat capture, etc is a mess.

It used to be that we had intelligent ppl and postings on /.
Nuclear power plants do NOT have hires in their cooling towers, ESP. BLACK ONES. Only idiots bought off on this.
They burned a bunch of tires in the cooling towers to play to the anti-nuclear idiots that run around in the west, so that do not pay attention to things like Ukraine taking a chunk of Russia.

reagan and W focused on spending large amounts of $ on DoD fast and wastefully. These are NOT the ones to emulate.
We should be looking at IKE and JFK. Both of these men spent money with a dual use to them. It is insane that we waste money on buying shells (both ammo and missiles) when instead, we should spend the $ on automating the lines and getting the costs of shells very low and fast to make.
Likewise, when doing that, it should be required that the automation equipment work on regular ammo and other manufacturing goods.

Add the costs of Wind OR PV to a new fossil plant that is then ran at 2/3 to 3/4 of the time, AND subtract the massive subsidies for wind/PV as well as FF.
Then compare that to the cost of a nuclear SMR while subtracting the paltry subsidies that America uses on nuclear.
You will find that Nuclear is a great deal cheaper. Nuclear SMR is even cheaper.

Like always, you are wrong. AI can and regularly does tell us exactly why it chose to do something.