It was less about the .99 pricing and more about “Sale” pricing and ‘coupons’. Retailers will put a pair of pants on “Sale” for 50% off 51 weeks out of the year and people think they’re getting a great deal whereas when it’s not half off, they just don’t buy.

So, I have clients that are actively using AI on a daily basis and LOVE it. It is however a very narrow subset. Also, I’m pretty sure that a LARGE amount of Dollars are currently being spent on AI generated political articles.

Maybe they can all go shopping at the SCP Ikea.

Very true. I get the feeling that he cycles through a lot of rounds, but not a close enough friend to have shot on his land more than once.

I think he’s had a stockpile since forever, but probably yeah.

I have acquaintances that would definitely be considered classic preppers. One told me that he has 10k plus (each!) of rounds for multiple calibers of weapons, and a years worth of food for each of his family members in a “bunker” on his property. It’d take a LONG time to burn through that many rounds.

My kids get upset when I tell them that any particular piece of media (I’m SO TIRED of certain Disney movies) isn’t available. They have quite literally tens of thousands of choices that I never had growing up with broadcast TV only.

This was my takeaway also. As if Chromium and all It’s derivatives are just going to not use daddy Alphabet’s ai tech.

I won’t even click on links to Twitter anymore. I had an account in the beginning but even back then the signal to noise ratio was stupid low. Now It’s all bots and nazis.

Two of the best, let alone all the cool content you can find on local beetles.

I won’t even click links there anymore. No traffic if I can help it.

They took spinach off of their offerings when there was a listeria (or some such) scare with one of their suppliers. After a few months of going there I asked a ‘manager’ if they would ever get it back and they kind of just shrugged. I walked out a couple times after that and went down the strip-mall to another place a few times, hopefully to prove a point (moved offices so I’ve not really been back to Subway in years now).

I went with the BezosBoxHomeAsssssistant. … it sucks too. The challenge to my mind is that it’s hard to make any profit on these things, so it’s hard to spend the dev and server $$$ required to actually make the systems do what they should.

I had two Pebble Steel watches. One just up and died one day and the other slowly failed as the buttons stopped working. I knew it was fixable, but with the sale to Fitbit happening, I Switched to AppleWatch. I do miss some things (battery life!) but all in all I’m not unhappy with my Apple Watch.

Actually the low cost part of this was that they weren’t upgraded cells. Just tested-good cells from other battery packs. Most of the time it’s just a couple cells in the bigger battery that have issues, and they take those out of the pool and make a good amount of $$$ because we were required to send back all of our cells. Assuming that of the 26 (iirc) cells that 3 or 4 were bad that’s a big profit margin for sure. The car worked great after swapping them out.

I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of ‘used but tested’ cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.