The government is doing that already (IRA law, although a lot of that was pulled back by the current administration). And like oil had, you would need continuous investment, which hasn’t happened, so a discounting program to incentivize purchasing seems like the best of both worlds. It seemed pretty effective as well at kicking off early adoption, which was then hampered by inflation, high prices, and government divesting from EV investment.

Unihertz literally sells a dozen more powerful phones for less than $500. Their cheapest phone currently which still is a better offer is $100. And Nothing’s cheapest phone currently is $419, still cheaper than this vaporware phone.

They won’t ever get to 90%, they have slowly moved up from 35-40% over 20 years.

Is it? Seems data centers are able to do it quite quickly, and all at the cost of local taxpayers.

Seems pretty easy, instead of incentivizing and infrastructure around gasoline, you incentivize electric already. Data centers are already pushing this for their own use, why would it be impossible in your mind to do this for a transition to greener energy usage?

This isn’t exactly correct or truthful. A new EV Bolt is only $4k more than a new Camry, and that difference is quickly made up from the gas saving, especially when gas is $4+ a gallon.

And when you want to accelerate adoption of something, you incentivize it. The US already spends $40+ billion in direct subsidies for oil (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-government-rigs-the-market-in-favor-of-fossil-fuels/) Imagine instead of giving that to oil companies, you used that to accelerate the development of EV’s and their roll out.

That and there’s only so much gas, once we burn it all up it’ll take millions of years to replenish.

Umm, AFAIK, we actually can’t make more oil, so there isn’t going to be any more gas, just work harder to find what’s left. We absolutely should be moving to alternative energies to power civilization.

They are getting a lot cheaper overall. The EV Bolt is less than $4k more than a Camry. In expensive places like California, or with gas as high as it is, you can quickly make back that additional cost and get ahead over time, especially if you are able to charge from home. And TBH the Bolt isn’t that bad of a car, and get’s great distance per charge.

Everytime you bring it up, you get a whole lot of people with gasoline powered cars getting very angry. Sure batteries are not ‘perfect’, but they are a whole lot better in almost every way compared to gasoline powered vehicles.

Maybe they are using OpenBubbles or something.

Isn’t there a whole lot of small volume ‘phone’ companies that are charging far less? Nothing Phone, or the plethora of Chinese companies like Unihertz come to mind.

Is Apple’s profit margins on hardware 90%? I thought it was still high but around 40%.

What I have seen, it’s basically the right wing group of the Swiss government trying to pull a soft ‘Brexit’, if they have a population cap, essentially it ends free movement, so they would effectively be able to pull out of EU agreements. It’s an insane move that I am glad to see has failed.

Isn’t that basically every ‘all you can eat’ model though? 20% of people will fully max their usage, causing a loss, but the 80% of users will use far less than the purchase price, netting $$$ for the company. When that balance shifts, most places just put more limits to that ‘all you can eat’ or raise prices. Sure, I have unlimited internet, but it’s difficult to symmetrically max out my 5gbit connection to get that full ‘cost’ each month.

As long as OpenAI has a health amount of money in the bank ($50 billion it seems), they have a long time to burn money, and then you just keep getting people to invest. Pretty sure that’s been the model of every tech company for a long time. I think Uber took almost 15 years to be profitable, and had almost $50 billion invested. For a company that owns essentially zero cars, pretty wild.

Oh that makes sense, I typically use a headset and avoid the built in trash that most laptops have and it seems to work pretty well.

Yeah, I just use the web interface, so I end up having a cheap PC with a keyboard/remote which works pretty well, then it doesn’t matter the TV and get’s away from Google altogether.

The phone calls part is one of the better parts at least for me) for Teams. It has it’s own number, works on all the devices, can forward, and works well. I don’t want to carry a work phone, and don’t want a desk phone in the office (even though we have ones that connect to Teams). If there is a better solution that’s ‘cheaper’ all for it, but seems pretty sold.

For me it’s kind of JellyFin + TailScale, but that probably isn’t going to work with less tech savvy family members or on all devices. Plex works well enough, but then again it’s the same thing that someone has to be responsible for the ‘media’ portion, and a lot of people enjoy live sports, which seems difficult through the open source things.