It’s not xenophobia, it’s a matter of national security for every single western nation. Without Intel, x86 processor manufacturing would be limited to TSMC in Taiwan, and would only serve to further incentivise Chinese aggression over the island.

So yes, paranoia - but sometimes that can be a good thing.

To borrow Jeremy Clarkson’s joke - VAG do still also make the Porsche 911!

“[The police] said that I was one of 60 cars that had been done in the last three days,” she told the ABC on Thursday. She was able to remove the paint with WD-40. The man has been refused bail and is due to appear before Parramatta Local Court today.

43yo dude targeting German car badges… …probably not all there in the head, but surely not such a big menace that he’s been refused bail?

Indies are honestly the only thing keeping me in this hobby; well that and retro collecting…

A game like Vampire Survivors has given me hundreds of hours of entertainment and value for a fraction of the cost of a single “AAA” game - even factoring in the handful of expansion packs he’s released.

Corporations are beholden to their shareholders, yes - but the issue is more down to the fact that we seem to have forgotten that shareholders have the intellect of a toddler… give them free reign and they’ll eat pure sugar for dinner and then complain about a tummy ache.

The line can still go up by delivering quality experiences (as mentioned elsewhere: BG3, RDR2 & hopefully GTA6); by taking care of your stakeholders (which includes employees and customers), it results in higher long-term returns for everyone.

But again, shareholders are toddlers and the current system is giving them free reign.

Provide me with a complete experience out-of-the-box as an end-user (you know how it should be done, developers - it’s the way things were before the PS3/XBox 360 era), don’t try to nickel & dime me with ‘micro-transactions’ or ‘battle passes’, or scam me with multiple ‘expansions’ every year… and then, and only then, we can talk.

$60 USD in 2000 is worth about $110 now; so there’s room to negotiate - but it needs to be in good faith, and I don’t trust publishers to do so currently.

I’m in House Ryobi; while it does the job, I needed to borrow a tool I didn’t have from our neighbour (wife’s rule; I can only buy one if I need to borrow it 3 times)… he had a set of Bosch Professionals - holy moly, those things are on a whole other level!

I’ve been clean since the second year of Shadowlands; Dragonflight was literally the first expansion I hadn’t played at all (I’ve usually played at least a year of every other one before that)…

…can’t lie that I haven’t vicariously followed the goings-on through YouTube videos, and that TWW has seemed quite promising from multiple angles to the point that I have been tempted to.

However, like my initial dabble with Classic (and anything addictive, really) - things don’t hit quite like they used to… and I’d rather leave myself with positive memories, rather than risk getting slapped in the face with cold, hard reality.

Much better than the Brum I grew up with, that’s for sure!

Getting loans for things is part of the reason why it’s expensive being poor.

The average US credit card charges ~22% interest and there are a crap-tonne of sub-prime loans that prey on desperate people that charge a hell of a lot more than that! A ‘cheap’ $500 dryer will end up costing close to double that by the time the loan ends up paid off.

This isn’t a ‘have you tried just not being poor?’ comment; I’ve been in a similar position for the entirety of my 20s and a good chunk of my 30s, before I learned that there was nothing wrong with going against consumer culture and buying an older, quality second hand product.

Becoming financially mature is probably the most painful part of becoming an adult, in multiple senses of the word.

Bit of a straw-man argument there: firstly you don’t need to spend that all in one hit; the break even point is a lot sooner than 30 years; and lastly, paying to replace cheap shot that breaks quickly with more shit that breaks quickly is one of the traps that keeps prone living paycheck to paycheck.

My two examples below:

Samsung dryer died after 3yrs, out of warranty, broke in our 20s, couldn’t afford to replace it. Lucked out finding an ANCIENT Miele condenser dryer on Marketplace for $50. Not only did that thing last us another 3 years before it started tripping the circuit breaker, it was cheaper to run than the old unit and ended up saving us enough money that we were then able to invest in a brand new Bosch unit that’s still going today (7+ years).

LG refrigerator died in a little over 3 years, due to a known compressor fault; uneconomical repair even though it was still under warranty, so we got a full manufacturer’s refund. We bit the bullet, did our research and went with a Made in Japan Hitachi model. It’s always outlasted the LG, and is again more energy efficient that we’re saving a few bucks a month on electricity.

I will reiterate; it’s expensive being poor. Buying a better quality second-hand unit rather than a new ‘commodity brand’ appliance is just one of the small ways to make things a little less expensive.

I mean, having to replace a fridge every few years because it constantly breaks in a way that’s uneconomical to repair will cost you a lot more in the long run.

That’s the thing, it’s more expensive being poor.

You’d be better off getting a 2nd hand quality brand from a wealthy suburb when they remodel their kitchen every 5ish years or so.

Epson & HP stocks in free-fall following this revelation.

I’ve used similar services to this in the past; not because I couldn’t afford something up front - but because I wanted to amortise the purchase across a pretty short (8 week) period.

Why not just use a credit card? I did. As a semi-regular user of the service, it was set up in such a way that it would bill the first 25% of my purchase after 2 weeks, and again every 2 weeks after that.

So not only was I getting an additional interest-free time stacking the 2 week period with my CC’s billing cycle; but I was earning loyalty/rewards points with both programs simultaneously.

But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences That’s what this is, though.

Take a step back and consider for a moment the absolute mayhem TikTok was able to cause through one single push notification to their US user base (>170m, over half the adult population). That is not a power that should be wielded lightly, and definitely not one in the hands of a foreign adversary ready, willing and capable of weaponising it at their whim.

Think of the power that affords them to put their finger on the scale when it comes to the critical upcoming Presidential election, not just directly - but through slight manipulations of the algorithm to engage one political cohort and disenfranchise another.

We can agree that there is at least a slight difference in having your own (or a friendly nation’s) Government tracking you, versus allowing a competing nation to have direct access to over half of the adult US population (as per their recent push-notification stunt), as well as a robust collection of their interests and preferences.

There is a reason China has banned most US-based software in the mainland (Meta, Google, etc.); in favour of self-developed alternatives. This is just treatment in kind; it’s not an outright ban, rather a forced sale to prevent more of that user data falling into dubious hands.

Yes, over 2.5 years of heavy use; Including ~8hrs of spreadsheets and SQL (Mon - Fri), in addition to waaay too many hours of WOW (fixed HUD) than I’d care to admit.

Consider also then, that Wulff Den ran an OLED Switch for 18,000 hours (two years straight) at max brightness, on a relatively “cheap-quality” (his words) panel: YT link

Additional point: My iPhone Xs was my daily driver until 18 months ago, and now has been relegated to a baby monitor duty (static video for ~18hrs a day) and also does not have any burn-in visible. The brightness on it isn’t cranked all the way to 100%, but neither I would your desktop.

LG and Samsung (the key W-OLED & QD-OLED manufacturers) have implemented firmware-level optimisations to ensure that burn-in is minimised, if not outright eliminated in real-world situations. Again, refer to the Wulff Den video for the amount of effort he had to go to in order to cause the burn-in he did.

All I’m advocating for is not taking “the Internet says” as gospel, as a LOT of the OLED information is either outdated or irrelevant (cheaper/seconds OLED panels from tertiary manufacturers who omit maintenance cycles from their firmware).

It’s a C1; I got it in November ‘21.

This year they’re releasing the C4s, and the C3s are going on heavy discount.

I’m using an LG C1 48in OLED as my primary work/play display (8+ hours use per day), and it has no sign of burn-in.

The general fear over burn-in is over-exaggerated, and the technology has improved leaps and bounds over those early generations.