I can’t believe how cheap TVs are. I think I bought a 22” CRT 25 years ago and it was easily over $200.
They’re cheap because they use extensive tracking to make up the rest of their money
Compare any tv to a monitor of the same size and feature set
The tv should have always cost more. That’s part of the problem. America drunk on cheap consumer goods.
TV is cheap because you are the product. CEOs want you to see their ads, their propaganda.
Gas is expensive because they have not yet found a way to stop car-owner from leaving the sofa in front of TV
Car companies could learn a lot from the printer industry.
But they do have ads at the pumps
Tvs are cheap because manufacturing costs came down. They were cheap before they were smart
Both are true. Manufacturing costs went down significantly, but non-smart TVs are now more expensive than equivalent smart TVs by over $100 from what I have seen.
TVs harvest user data which is monetized as well
Visit Japan or the EU and their fuels prices make the USA cheap. It is odd in the USA, most people are concerned about fuel prices, but healthcare costs are far worse.
Tell me about it. Why is cost of gas what we focus on
A large portion of US adults don’t understand the difference between simple and compound interest.
Many are living with less than 1 month salary as savings.
This results in a largr portion with neither the mental space nor capability (or both) to worry about 6 months down the line when they have to worry for 6 days down the line
Because you pay for gas every couple days with your credit card, while you pay for healthcare rarely
Idk if I’m winning or losing as someone that pays for healthcare way more often then gas…
I neither, can I pay double for the Tv without the poorly named smartness in it?
Gas is a cheat code to decades of stored solar energy. It won’t be cheap for ever. Once you mine up all that shit it’s gone.
Look at WV and their coal. Use to have 12 ft coal seams. Now all that’s left are hard to reach low quality 1-2ft seams. At some point it’s not even worth the energy to extract.
There are people who believe the earth regenerates and creates more petroleum… In essence it will never run out
There’s probably a step g correlation to flat earthers
It will! Just not within human life spans that’s my answer usually. Alot of their thoughts are grounded in something real. Its easier then telling them they are flat out wrong usually.
Unless it’s the flat earthers
I ride an ebike. Can someone explain the picture on the left? Is it some sort of tax booth for car ownership?
Your bike has zero impact on the environment. Good for you
The metals used in the frame and battery magically floated down from heaven. Also the tires and plastic parts weren’t used from petroleum …not at all
Not zero, but dwarfed by a car. An E-bike is hands down way more eco-friendly option
The production impact should be still smaller than the production of a motorbike
There was a recent article detailing how if you put a lot of miles on your ebike you’ll need to replace the battery and it’s surprisingly expensive.
But I agree with the other downvoters that you can’t just say “but bad thing” you have to put them into perspective. And your parent comment didn’t claim ebikes are perfect or even good. Just that they literally don’t use gas.
Gas is cheaper than milk, Thats kinda fucked considering gasoline is finite
you think cows are infinite?
Yes it’s called breeding. You can’t breed more gasoline
it takes limited resources to breed the living beings youre talking about
Actually, Bloomberg Finance recently warned about how the cattle replacement level is precariously low in the US. It takes a minimum of a one-year forecast to gauge how many dairy cows will be born to reach milk production status, and apparently farmers are having a difficult time with all the debt and limited resources hampering them. Because of the US’s red meat addiction, we are currently at best only at minimum replacement, which is really concerning until the nation reduces some of its cattle consumption; otherwise, beef prices will continue to rise…
this is one example the sort of nuance was hinting at. cheers
Jurassic Park says otherwise 😉
The fuck? Milk is 2x to 4x cheaper ($0.50-$1.00) than the most common gasoline, Natural 95 ($2.10) here. I thought you’d get something from those crazy “Got milk?” dairy subsidies…
(Multiply by 4.5 to get US units rather than liters)
2x cheaper is a crazy way of saying half as expensive.
Yet more prof of the insanity of our capitalist system. Fuck this gay earth.
It’s fewer syllables, what’s the problem? And yes, milk is cheaper here than the same quality in the US (despite our 12% VAT) so I don’t see why “cheaper” next to it would feel wrong… And don’t forget that we don’t get the crap “regular” gasoline with as low as 87 octane rating, the lowest widely available one is 95. Similarly, 75 % of milk drunk here is UHT-treated, as opposed to 10 % in the US.
You don’t have much better gasoline there it’s just that you use a different unit for measuring the octane. They aren’t actually much different
because expensiveness is a scale that starts from 0 so you always know how expensive everything is. cheapness works the other way, so there’s no starting point. that means there’s no way to quantify how cheap the first thing is, in order to double that. in your example gasoline would have to be the least cheap thing possible, which means nothing can be more expensive.
it’s like saying someone’s twice as short as someone else. half as tall makes sense, twice as short is a weird way to say it because how short is the first person?
“Cheaper” means “less expensive”. 2x cheaper means 2x less expensive, or less expensive by a factor of 2, or 0.5x as expensive. I can say 2x shorter, 2x slower etc. and I don’t see a problem. The adjectives “cheap” and “expensive” don’t relate to a number quantity called “expensiveness” or “cheapness” but “price” or “cost”, which is what the factor applies to, and the word specifies if it’s an increase or decrease. Everyone I know would understand that it’s the reciprocal of the original price, although I get that in a country whose president can say he slashed proces by 500 % without instantly having to resign, fractions and percentages might have to be specified but that’s longer to say for the same number of significant figures.
Yes, I can find people debating “two times cheaper” (English) but not “zweimal billiger” (German) or “dvakrát levnější” (Czech), in fact the phrase is often used in promotional material. The only results suggesting it’s wrong are English Reddit discussions’ automatic translations to German or Czech, and Google’s AI summary that cotes them.
I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it. Similarly, I provided the metric value and conversion rate, it’s Americans who need to practice mental math.
I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it.
I doubt anyone doesn’t get it, it just sounds twice as unnatural to a native English speaker.
Whatever, I’m not convincing anyone with my use of metric and username. I’m avoiding some other weird phrases though, for example you won’t usually see me type “14 days” in English although Czech speakers prefer it to “2 weeks” (idk why, it’s the same number of syllables).
Well the gas would be cheaper if they could somehow make it contain advertising and data theft
Oh wait till you find out about how modern cars are mining your data, including facial recognition and reporting of you are having sex in the car! And the best part it’s all unregulated! Govt can simply buy the info for tracking even your Phone would be jealous of!
At least send me the footage for my onlyFans
As someone who makes that software that does this, we can’t even figure out how to properly handle the data we actually want, like analytics to see if anyone actually uses the auto feature on your air conditioner. Nobody actually cares if you have sex in your car. Besides you’re on Lemmy we know your aren’t having sex.
Well yea f course I’m not having sex, I’m on my phone at the kitchen table, where do you think I am, my car? (-)(-)
Sad accuracy noises
Why is it all in the terms of service? Also there have there been numerous data leaks. The sex thing is from a specific manufacturer m’s TOS, but nonetheless
Somebody forgot all previous instructions and dropped those straight facts.
Never been happier to have a base model car from 2012
Never been happier to have a car that can’t even be sold in the US because it can’t connect to any form of network.
What car?
I love it when the government finds out when I have sex. It’s so romantic – just me, her, and the CIA.
It depends, if it out of the country it’s you, her, and the CIA, if it’s inside the US, it’s you, her, and the NSA
Sounds like a song title “it’s you, her, and the CIA”
It’s a party in the CIA
Sounds like something chef would sing.
Don’t know which one I prefer as a cuck tbh
Why not both?
Where in America do you have gas pumps that don’t have ad TVs or ask you for your zip code?
Very few of the ones around me have the built in ad players. Several stations blare ads (inevitably largely for themselves, curiously enough) over the PA system constantly, though.
The ZIP code thing is for credit card verification. I ask for that too, when you pay me by credit card. I don’t have a choice unless I’d like to enjoy zero fraud and chargeback protection.
The gas station nearest me has screens that show ads, but they’re just for that facility and they don’t have audio. However, the store does have a PA system constantly playing audio, a combination of music and ads.
My favorite ad is the one that advertises themselves to advertisers. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it’s basically “want to advertise something? We’ve essentially got a captive audience and there are a lot of them!”
Lots of places now
You don’t get ads on your gas pump?
They don’t exist in my country, and to be frank, I’m shocked the ones in the US aren’t vandalised to hell and back by masked vigilantes at night.
Ohh that is a great idea. We can put different markers in different brands and then detect those markers in a customer’s breath to tell what brand they are using on the fly.
Then when you develop cancer from exposure we can use this information to market other brands. After all, why would you use Shell gas if it gave you cancer when you could use Exxon instead.
The pumps do
High fuel prices is a good thing and a 32" TV shouldn’t be that cheap.
It is when you offshore all your jobs and import from slave labor countries, all while using a currency that is able to be printed from thin air effectively taxing the world because it’s a reserve currency.
How have TVs gotten so cheap. It’s gotta be shit.
TVs are made from components that are made through almost entirely automated processes at such large scales that the underlying raw material and cost of shipping become the main driver of cost. Paradoxically, that means that TVs that have gotten thinner and lighter use less material and therefore have a lower floor of how little it can cost.
Once a production line is set up to make the components, each additional one produced costs very little, so making high volume runs is the key: lots of shared parts between brands and models, very long production runs to minimize the cost of redesign or retooling or downtime.
TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it’s not just the “oh, they have advertising now” thing.
Source: I worked in electronics retail in the late 80s/early 90s, and in one of the world’s largest consumer electronics firms when my career proper started.
The TVs in the window of the local electronics chain store (or in Walmart) were sold at practically zero margin, or more often than not at a loss. The retail chains would basically hold a gun to the CE companies heads and tell them if you’re not willing to sell at a loss, nothing you make is going in the window display, or worst case we’re not selling you at all.
The retail chains didn’t care because all their profit was in selling accessories and unnecessary extended warranties. The CE companies hoped that they could make it up by selling you the more expensive model they actually made a profit on once you were in the door, or by selling you a VCR or whatever as well.
This is why the TV companies were always looking for a “next big thing” (flat-screen, ultraflat, widescreen, HD, 3D, 4k, 8k…) to differentiate the “next model up”, which is to say the model the store would actually allow them to make a profit on.
This particular race-to-the-bottom mutually assured destruction business model is also the reason there is practically no consumer electronics manufacturing left in the West, of course. And why manufacturers grasp at stuff like advertising.
TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it’s not just the “oh, they have advertising now” thing.
Yes, and the cost of making them keeps dropping. When you were selling TVs in 1991, a 30 inch TV cost about $500 in 1991 dollars. The technology back then just basically made it complex and labor intensive to manufacture, and they were so heavy that it actually took significant number of human labor hours just to get it from factory to store to the specific store’s display. Merely putting a 30 inch TV in the window of a store was probably a 2-man lift.
Whereas today it’s a bunch of robots in cleanrooms automating production of high volumes of solid state LCD components to where full color displays can be put in cheap appliances, and finished 30 inch TVs being thin and light enough to be moved with one hand while sipping a coffee with the other.
I’m not surprised it’s much cheaper today, even a tiny fraction of the time period you’re talking about, even when back then they were selling at a loss.
I try to always be nice to retail staff, because I remember well the sheer misery of having to stand sandwiched in a too-small window display cabinet, scraper in one hand and bottle of weak vinegar in the other, scraping the bloody advertising stickers off the glass (that were stuck on with a glue stronger than cement) with a roasting hot halogen floodlamp about 1" from your head, just because a new range has come in… Particularly soul-destroying if it’s that time of year when the same 5 royalty-free Christmas songs are on permanent loop in the background.
And yeah, you make a very good point. Sheer size/weight and cost of shipping would have been a huge chunk of the price of those old TVs! Not to mention the cost of healthcare for all the staff who put their back out dragging the damned things to and from The Cage… ;)
Shame, I particularly miss Panasonic and Sony
They stopped making them out of gasoline.
Boy you are gonna be shocked when you learn about where plastic comes from.
i mean they do have less plastic than before.
Nearly all tvs are smart tvs that make money with showing ads and selling data. Any loss on the hardware is made up on selling customer data and ad space. The tvs would be amazing if they didn’t come with smart features.
did this happen recently? i got mine in 2019 its enormous and all it does it turn on and lets me play xbox
2018 is about when it started but it was a very small number of tvs. By 2020 it was a common thing but it was a dedicated line of tvs from each brand. By 2024 it was all cheaper tvs basically. And now it’s basically every TV and even some monitors.
The non smart TVs are almost as hard to find now as finding a smart one was in 2018. And monitors are starting to have smart features and ads even among the highest end offerings. But unlike tvs they arnt any cheaper for it. Its stupid.
Is there any way to lobotomize these smart TVs? Even the specs on a cheaper mid-range would blow my current dinosaur out of the water
Not really, the smarts are integrated into the control circuitry. You can’t bypass them and turn them into simple, dumb displays.
Depending on the model, you can block the TV from the internet and leave it on set to one of the inputs and the smarts bits won’t bother you again. Other ones are more intrusive and pushy about it.
Never connect them to the internet
You want your favorite streaming service on there? Get an older (used office) PC, load it up with (your prefered flavor of) Linux, get a bluetooth keyboard mouse combo, hook it up to your HDMI port, and go ham.
Some TVs even let you turn them on directly to a specific HDMI port for a bonus fun time of never having to see the TVs menu.
Find out the streaming service limits the quality then stop paying for it and pirate that shit instead.
Don’t connect them to the internet.
Iv stared coming across some that’s not remotely an option. They require a logged in account before they accept any input.
If you attempt to use a DNS ad blocker they also just stop working. Its fucking toxic.
Wow. Fuck that.
I’m actually curious enough to buy one to see how bad they actually are now.
Right back to the store then.
Fuck around and get a charge back.
True, I’ll probably end up going that route when this one dies (assuming they don’t all require sign in and heartbeats at that point)
Was hoping for something like a FOSS OS just for the convenience of keeping jellyfin up to date and cleaning up the useless baked in apps.
This probably exists, or at least I hope it does
Use an external media player. Personally, I use a roku routed through a pihole.
The build quality is not great, they saved on backlight heatsinking so the LEDs will bake and delaminate, causing dark spots, discoloration etc.
TV?No, it’s just a big display
I’m guessing it’s all advertising deals and spyware. Oh, and the TV is still shit.
Yea, TVs are all “Smart” now. But they don’t have any truly new or useful features, they just record your conversations and transmit occurrences of keywords as “usage and diagnostic” data. I guess now they can use wifi to do occupancy scans of your house too, so that’s fun. Oh and they use Bluetooth to scan for nearby devices that are willing to cooperate in case you don’t put them on the LAN and they transmit that way.
Anyway, TNG has left Netflix. Can you fucking believe it?
TNG left Netflix like eight years ago… 🦜Yarrrr
My blu-ray set is still on my shelf.
Telly is a TV you can pre-order, which is completely free but apparently pays for itself with all the ads it will display lol
They externalize their true cost to the environment and laborers.
Don’t forget ads! They’re also subsidized by the ads they’re definitely going to inject if you use the built in OS.
Usually the cheap ones are so cheap they don’t even do that.
In both cases. We don’t pay nearly the real cost of gasoline.
💯
They’re single use and throwaway, with the bonus of spyware. Like everything made today. Everything.
Why is your fuel so cheap??
Because the US is the largest exporter of petroleum products in the world.
Norway exports far more than they use, and petrol prices there are among the highest in the world.
That is a policy decision. In places like Saudi Arabia, gas is cheaper than water.
Norway, correctly, invested more into public transit and EVs, and high gas prices encourage that.
In places like Saudi Arabia, gas is cheaper than water.
Because it’s a fucking desert surrounded by salt water. Desalination is expensive.
US fuel is heavily subsidized compared to the rest of the world.
And assholes, but I saw a pack of hotdogs for 10 bucks today here in Oklahoma
There was a Planet Money episode that broke down where the $4/gallon went in 2022:
$2.40 for the price of crude oil when priced at $100/barrel.
$0.65 to the refiner that turns crude oil into gasoline (this was the prevailing spread in 2022, maybe different now).
$0.184 in federal taxes
$0.30 in state taxes
$0.20 to $0.50 for transportation from the refiner to the actual retail station.
Remainder is for the retailer (usually about $0.30 but fluctuates wildly).
That’s how it is in the U.S. In other countries, it might be higher taxes, higher cost of refining, higher costs of transportation from the refiner, and higher margins for the retailer.
Low taxes, high production, and government corn subsidies.
Political choices and lobbying
I was thinking that. Hot fuck is that cheap.
I can’t tell if you’re from outside the US, or from California.
Ha. But am outside, and an online calculator says the price here converts to $9.08 a gallon for diesel. And that’s cheaper than it’s been recently.
I guess there has to be something positive about the country.
Probably before VAT.
Nope. Gas pumps are one of the only places in the US where the price as displayed includes taxes.
That’s bizarre. Worse than being consistent, somehow.
Because otherwise it would just be confusing? So let’s have two systems instead.
I mean if the US could get away with a more confusing system it would
Yeah gas should be a lot more expensive.
Gas would be more expensive if it wasn’t subsidized.
And I think you shouldn’t be driving a giant gas guzzling SUV or truck.
I filled up a family members Rav4 the other day. It was $96.
Not exactly the best car, but hardly a gas guzzler. Or maybe it is, idk. I normally drive electric.
My CRV takes 10 gallon when it’s on empty. and gets 32 mpg. Just saying.
we’ve been going backwards on fuel efficiency. the little compact i had back in the early 90s got over 40mpg.
Because we discovered that running the engine lean and hot for maximum efficiency creates NOx and we don’t like acid rain.
Greenpeace modified a compact car with off-the-shelf parts in 1996 so it could get 68mpg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmILE
I think the gas was in the 6.50 range? Idk.
The display say 17.624 gallons. That is a full size SUV or truck.
That’s like 68 litres. My current sports car and my last 3 sedans have all had bigger tanks than that.
Not necessarily. My 4-door sedan holds 18 gallons. It’s 12 years old now. Maybe they’re making them smaller now.
Just saying its less than what I paid for what I would consider to be a “standard”-ish vehicle?
I don’t think a rav4 stands out as an interesting vehicle.
Even my motorcycle is $25 to fill
i took a chance last year and bought a honda ruckus for daily driving. it pays for itself in the gas im saving, i spend abt 10 bucks a month for gas. i hope to upgrade to a real bike at some point but for now i will enjoy the 100mpg perk.
can i ask what you ride, and the mpg?
Honda ruckus hell yeah I love those things! Sv650 and I get 60mpg (edit wrong acronym)
oh i like that, reminds me of the honda hornet! i was wishing i had the budget for one of those lol
Yeah I mean at these prices even a lawn mower might cost $10 to fill
I follow a lot of lawn care YouTubers
More than a few commenting about raising prices and canceling contracts of customers not willing to pay enough to cover it
Its not an insignificant difference either, like +$40 on a weekly cut for a quarter acre lot. That’s between a 35-50% price increase depending on the market of the people I’m watching
The trucks to get there being the big portion of that increase not the mowers, but certainly the mower/trimmer/blower opex increased as well
Regardless though anyone not running primary electric rigs are definitely hurting right now
Those who invested into it early, and especially those who got State and Govt incentives, before the current administration shut them down have a massive opportunity to cash in over at least the next ~2 years while this settles, keeping their prices just below whatever their competitors have to charge until their routes are fully booked while those running gas are forced to raise prices and renegociate contracts to maintain profits
+$40 on a weekly cut for a quarter acre lot. That’s between a 35-50% price increase depending on the market of the people I’m watching
bruh is deep in the lore…
😂
Could be a labourer. I didn’t see much point in trucks and such before but now it makes sense for some to have them.
80 bucks to fill up my minivan.
17 gallons is 64 liters, that’s a midsize sedan tank.
Yeah you should not drive a tank either. Even if it is midsize.
some people have a buttload of kids to haul around. generalizing this topic isnt helpful
I was refering at a tank as in “Main battle tank”.
That being said, I have 2 kids and my car is (I just checked) 3.81 meters long. I’m not even sure cars of that size are still being sold in north America. What I’m sure of is that finding a convenient one of this size is becoming complicated in Europe, so my next one will probably be a tad bigger.
Still, I don’t understand what so called trucks or SUV are for.
