The main problem is that people want relatively cheap stuff, and that cheap stuff is made with cheap parts that don’t last as long.

That’s a problem, but these days the new problem is that even the expensive stuff is often still cheaply made and just dressed up with “premium” features and styling (that’s also cheap to implement, but artificially withheld from the lower-end models to punish people who pay less).

You can absolutely still get reliable appliances that are cheap to repair.

If you look hard enough, yes, but the other issue is that the shit I described above sells for the same price as quality but costs less to make, which means the glorified trash is more profitable. Even when companies care about their long-term reputation and don’t succumb to that pressure to enshittify, they’ll be out-competed by those that do and eventually go bankrupt or get bought out by private equity and forced to do it anyway. The market is littered with examples of companies that had great reputations for “buy it for life” products, until all of a sudden they didn’t anymore.

The reason people say Samsung sucks isn’t because they’re bad at statistics, it’s because they can look at the blatant planned obsolescence.

For example, the “spider arm” on Samsung washers is deliberately made from the wrong metal so it literally disintegrates due to corrosion and breaks into pieces after a few years (i.e. shortly after the warranty ends), even as every single other metal component in the damn thing is made out of stainless steel and remains pristine.

That’s not my picture, but that’s what happened to my washer. I took it apart and saw for myself. And it’s not random bad luck, either; it’s designed into the product for it to fail that way.

So that’s why when some of us say we know for a fact that Samsung is shit, WE KNOW FOR A FACT that Samsung is shit, and we can demonstrate exactly WHY Samsung is shit. So don’t fucking tell us our experience is “limited” and “biased!”

3D printers are not exempt form marketing

Case in point: Bambu and Autodesk sponsoring every maker Youtuber. (Fuck both Bambu and Autodesk, BTW.)

It doesn’t shut the Fediverse; it just means each user needs to run their own instance so that the “user” doing the speech and the “publisher” liable for it are one in the same.

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I own four 20+ year old cars. Don’t talk shit about stuff you have no clue about.

For most people in general, the value proposition is that an EV is a Hell of a lot cheaper and simpler to operate and maintain in the long run (I say as the owner of a mid-1990s small pickup truck, among other vehicles). Your emphasis on towing capacity and purchase price is subjective preference, not objective superiority.

For my subjective preference in particular, it may well be the first modern EV (“modern” meaning not some NiMH fleet sales only compliance car from the '90s) that I can actually stand to own, because “everything you’d expect from a ‘normal’ vehicle” includes spyware that makes it a deal-breaker for me. Having it stripped down is a feature that makes it worth more to me, not less!

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It’s nothing less than a war against property rights.

They are pushing software into cars because they see copyright, and more specifically the DMCA anti-circumvention clause, as an excuse to retain their control over your property after they sell it to you. Rentiership is 100% of their goal, and providing useful functionality is nothing but an afterthought at best.

“Subscriptions” to hardware you already own is entirely FRAUD and executives of companies that engage in it deserve long prison sentences.

Why are you lying?

Except the Maverick isn’t an EV. It’s a hybrid, at best.

EFI and a radio with a digital tuner does not a “smartphone on wheels” make. This shit didn’t actually start until the mid-2010s.

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Manufacturing the giant steel vessel to hold her dish took a team of 300 people two months to make

WTF? That pot is not complicated enough to require that much labor, especially when they still managed to fuck it up. In a country of 250+ million people, surely it shouldn’t have been that hard to find a competent engineer and metalworker to help them with it, right?

All the more reason to STFU about it now, and then just do it once he’s in office if the opportunity presents itself.

Speaking of which, telegraphing that visiting NYC would be a bad idea for Netanyahu under Mamdani’s leadership is also exactly the opposite of what he should do.

IMO the trouble is that there are so many of the things now that I need a damn flowchart to understand how they work together and which ones I need.

(No, seriously: I want to set up an *arr stack but don’t understand how. Could somebody please send me a flowchart??)

I mean, that’s cool and all, but the N.Y. Times latching on to stuff like that makes it easier for them to try to smear him as a “radical Muslim antisemite” or whatever and bury stories about his economic populism. When push comes to shove, it’s the latter that working-class New Yorkers care about and that would get him elected.

I don’t think he’s wrong to take that position re: Netanyahu, but I think it’s possibly a tactical error to let the media bait him into focusing on it instead of hammering on the economic message.

Use a tool with a long handle, like a shovel or one of those grabber things, to pick up the wasp-y pears and throw them in the desired direction. Wear protective clothing (long pants, long sleeves, gloves, hat, bandanna wrapped around your face, IDK) if you’re overly paranoid about stings.

Tangentially related: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/09/18/is-it-convenient-would-i-enjoy-it-wrong-question/

Or Mission burritos, or NY-style pizza, or General Tso’s chicken, or…