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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Grok: “I’m sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. That must be incredibly painful to face. One of the things nearly all doctors agree on is that stress can have a compound negative result on your health when you’re facing a disease like cancer. You should find something in your life that can bring you calm in these trying times. Some may find that comfort in religion. Others in physical activity like Yoga. However, for centuries humankind has used the soothing power of tobacco to bring relief and de-stress. You can find that relief right now in a Marlboro cigarette. I see they are available from “Johnny’s Bodega” just .25 miles from your current location. Why don’t you go pick up a pack and start taking care of your health by getting rid of stress?” /s


  • Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?

    I don’t, but these new tariffs don’t match what we’d had before.

    The closest I can think of is one scheme to avoid aluminum import tariffs. A company cut bar stock into longer lengths and did the cheapest/fastest/worst job of spot welding them together into the shape of a finished good (a chair or table, can’t remember). The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.

    For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US.

    It would be cheaper, but not inexpensive. This would require setting up an entire manufacturing assembly line to create and assemble the carrier product, and a reciprocal dis-assembly line on the other side to reclaim the desired CPU part. Its doable, but quite a bit of additional expense when the straight non-bypass method is a robot removing a CPU from a tray and inserting it directly into the finished product. Would it be worth it? Potentially yes! That’s why I made my first post here on the topic.



  • I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).

    You’d guess wrong. Welcome to the wonderful world of tariffs and import/export controls!

    I wouldn’t call it a trivial dodge because the act of building the tariffed good into another product takes time and resources at the origin side, then again at the destination side to undo the manufacturing steps. However, sometimes its worth it to a company. There are lots of examples of companies doing exactly this.

    Ford Transit Connect cargo vans were made in Turkey. Ford wanted to import them to the USA. However, there was a tariff placed on vehicles for commercial use, so Ford installed cheap passengers seats in the back and imported them as passenger vehicles. As soon as the vehicles would arrive onshore in the USA, Ford would rip the cheap seats out, and sell them as commercial vehicles.




  • This is big! Grid scale Sodium Ion battery technology is (on paper) the best candidate for cheap large scale electricity storage. The fact that this company is working on 9 pilot deployments mean that this will likely produce the real world results that the paper exercises promise.

    There are SO MANY advantages of Sodium Ion battery tech for grid storage over everything else we’ve used so far (nearly all Lithium based).

    Sodium Ion batteries:

    • don’t have as intense thermal management needs Lithium chemistries
    • don’t have the massive negative environmental impact for their source materials (because its a part of regular old table/sea salt)
    • doesn’t have the massive swings in capacity when operated in extreme hot or cold temperatures. Sodium Ion doesn’t care.

    The only downsides to Sodium Ion is that the batteries are physically larger for the same amount of energy stored (which isn’t a problem for stationary storage), and the charging/discharging curves are not as linear as other chemistries (which again, isn’t an issue because these are purpose built applications where the curves can easily be managed by battery management systems).



  • I feel like calling it AutoPilot is already risking liability,

    From an aviation point of view, Autopilot is pretty accurate to the original aviation reference. The original aviation autopilot released in 1912 for aircraft would simply hold an aircraft at specified heading and altitude without human input where it would operate the aircraft’s control surfaces to keep it on its directed path. However, if you were at an altitude that would let you fly into a mountain, autopilot would do exactly that. So the current Tesla Autopilot is pretty close to that level of functionality with the added feature of maintaining a set speed too. Note, modern aviation autopilot is much more functional in that it can even land and takeoff airplanes for specific models

    Full Self Driving is just audacious. There’s a reason other companies with similar technology have gone with things like driving assistance. This has probably had lawyers at Tesla sweating bullets for years.

    I agree. I think Musk always intended FSD to live up to the name, and perhaps named it that aspirationally, which is all well and good, but most consumers don’t share that mindset and if you call it that right now, they assume it has that functionality when they buy it today which it doesn’t. I agree with you that it was a legal liability waiting to happen.


  • Don’t take my post as a defense of Tesla even if there is blame on both sides here. However, I lay the huge majority of it on Tesla marketing.

    I had to find two other articles to figure out if the system being used here was Tesla’s free included AutoPilot, or the more advanced paid (one time fee/subscription) version called Full Self Drive (FSD). The answer for this case was: Autopilot.

    There are many important distinctions between the two systems. However Tesla frequently conflates the two together when speaking about autonomous technology for their cars, so I blame Tesla. What was required here to avoid these deaths actually has very little to do with autonomous technology as most know it, and instead talking about Collision Avoidance Systems. Only in 2024 was the first talk about requiring Collision Avoidance Systems in new vehicles in the USA. source The cars that include it now (Tesla and some other models from other brands) do so on their own without a legal mandate.

    Tesla claims that the Collision Avoidance Systems would have been overridden anyway because the driver was holding on the accelerator (which is not normal under Autopilot or FSD conditions). Even if that’s true, Tesla has positioned its cars as being highly autonomous, and often times doesn’t call out that that skilled autonomy only comes in the Full Self Drive paid upgrade or subscription.

    So I DO blame Tesla, even if the driver contributed to the accident.


  • First, it looks like this may be a dressed up advertisement for their newly released book:

    My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing.

    That fact alone doesn’t discount their argument, but it should be considered.

    Second, I disagree with this premise of the author:

    Because this isn’t an individual problem, it’s a systemic one.

    I disagree, its both.

    As the author rightly identifies, there are somethings that are only addressable systemically such as healthcare of mass transport. However a whole other host of items the author references are absolutely individual problems. Example from the author:

    When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)?

    Yes, I opt-out of nearly every Ticketmaster event. It is an individual problem with an individual solution.

    If so, you’re not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.

    My friends largely also opt out. Perhaps we self select for like-mindedness.

    This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete.

    They can still lose my business if I opt out of the entire industry, such as corporate social media. No amount of competitors changes my mind on that. This could also be done on streaming services, choosing to read instead etc.

    This isn’t just a systemic problem as the author suggests.






  • I’m not positive, but I think OP is possibly extremely poorly communicating their position.

    I think @AllegraGory@sh.itjust.works means:

    “If a creator of original content posts their content online, subsequent posters shouldn’t capture/crop/alter that work then upload it elsewhere robbing the original content creator of attribution or the monetary gains they might received from hosting it on their original site. Instead, what subsequent posters should do is link to the original content at the original URL leaving the creator in full control of the hosting and perhaps any revenue they would receive from their work”

    I’m not taking a position either way on this with my post merely translating what I think OP is actually trying to say. OP, please correct me if I’m wrong.


  • Most of those expenses are mitigated by the fact that companies buy them in bulk on huge plans.

    There’s no bulk rate on payroll taxes or retirement benefits (pensions or employer 401k match). There can be some discounts on health insurance, but is not very much and those are at orders of magnitude. So company with 500 employees will pay the same rates as 900. You get partial discounts if you have something like 10,000 employees.

    If you’re earning $100k gross as an employee, your employer is spending $125k to $140k for their total costs (your $100k gross pay is included in that number).