Yeah… it sure seems like bubbles just… don’t pop anymore.

Turns out the market can stay irrational FOREVER.

I was like, 5 when it happened, so I’ve never confirmed it, and my mother is definitely the kind of person who would misremember this kind of thing, but from what she claims she called them directly because they dropped the MSRP, not just a store price drop.

Take it with a grain of salt though.

My mother bought me an NES when I was a child, and shortly after Nintendo lowered the price and they voluntarily refunded her the difference.

She told me years later that secured her as a Nintendo customer for my games for life.

This greed is disgusting, but more than anything it’s depressing.

It may come as a surprise, but non-Americans are ALSO people.

Fellow “want my body to keep working” gym-goer.

It’s the worst.

And the worst part of it is the people for whom the gym IS a hobby.

Oh, come on. This is nothing like the Great Depression.

The Great Depression was caused by a supply side spending boom, producing massive excess of capacity, while nobody had any money to spend on anything.

…

Nothing like it, I tell you!

I agree, and I desperately want a Linux phone, but the really problem with Linux phones gaining traction is that is the developers are DEVELOPERS.

“I make $200,000 a year… how much should a good smartphone cost… how about $700? It’s a bargain!”

I get that making hardware is expensive, but asking people to jump into something with a learning curve and real sacrifices at a premium price is just guaranteeing it stays niche - especially when asking an audience that by and large has to have an Android as a backup for some apps anyway.

And this is coming from someone with no fewer than 16 machines running various Linux distros in his house. You can’t ask someone to spend that much on a secondary phone to play with until they get comfortable enough with it to switch completely. You just can’t. It’s barely working for the Linux OS, and that’s free.

Even in a flawed, crappy democracy, manipulating elections takes work, and the more overwhelming the voting the harder that work becomes, damaging election legitimacy, which ironically might actually lead to pressure for the changes non-voters insist are necessary before they’ll vote.

Is voting a magical panacea? No. But there is absolutely NO action that can be taken that has as much impact towards goals of change in exchange for as little effort, and voting does NOT preclude any of the other actions people want to take. It’s not an either/or.

It’s great and important, but even a 100,000,000 person march with turnouts in every major city every weekend isn’t worth a FRACTION of JUST GOING TO VOTE. All the protesting in the world won’t change the fact that failure to do that has the US stuck with this for AT LEAST the next 3 years.

You say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don’t get to install a custom OS, unless you’re lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don’t get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.

We are absolutely entering this nightmare phase.