Aceticon

An Oppo A5M 4G costs around a bit over $150 in AliExpress and that's including the VAT for Europe (which will be the VAT of whatever country they imported it into, normally around 20%).

This thing has a 1080p 7" screen, which judging by the pictures is more than that Commodore phone.

Electronics are expensive for these things but that's when you're aiming for heavy use such as gaming, and that means larger/higher-density screen, more CPU/GPU power and bigger battery to feed those all the things as well as more memory and storage, which are the most expensive parts. LTE modules are comparativelly cheap nowadays, as are stupidly high resolution cameras and good DACs.

The only reason I would see for this to end up in the expensive electronics range is if they're aiming for it to run heavier AI models locally, which might very well be the case since judging by what others said the CEO of the company which bought the Commodore brand is AI-bro.

I'm on the Engineering side and $400 buys you parts for A LOT more phone than that, especially with that screen size.

Are they planning on having the phones individually hand-assembled by Degree holding Electronics Engineers in the US - hence the manpower costs are insane - or is it a situation of putting a jet engine on a small car (tons of memory and a big processor on something with a far too small screen to be useful for most things, especially gaming)?

I bet the price bares no relation to the actual product manufacturing costs.

You're either paying a massive markup for that Samsung brand mark or your idea of a phone starts at the upper-middle range.

If you look for it there are plenty of recent phones with recent chipsets at around 250 EUR, they're just not processing powerhouses with 8'' HD screens and 256GB Flash but rather run some recent low-end chipset with less storage, less memory and smaller/fewer cameras.

Here's an example from a big store chain in Portugal which is around $187 including 23% VAT, chipset is Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s 4G Gen 1, which according to this was launched in September 2022, so less than 4 years old.

You can get this one for $157 via AliExpress (shipped from France, 23% VAT included).

Road speed has definitely increased since 2009 exactly and by so much that the trend of falling pedestrian deaths in the US completelly turned around!????

Also I've actually lived in 3 countries of Europe since 2009 and beyond a handful of larger cities (such as Paris) closing a handful of streets and making them pedestrian only, pedestrian infrastructure has barelly improved in that period.

Absolutelly, Europe invested in much better infrastructure than the US, especially for pedestrians and cyclists, but that long predates 2009 - in fact Europe always had much more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure than the US, even in the most car friendly countries in Europe.

Methinks you're trying too to exculpate the huge increase in average car size in the US.

Such differences remained steady during that time frame, so whilst they explain the actual baseline levels, they don't explain the change in trend that happened in the US but not in Europe.

(What you suggest would only make sense if in 2009 the road infrastructure design, driving standards and average speeds became much worse in the US and kept getting worse, something not really supported by observation of those things)

The most logical conclusion is that something changed in one place that did not change in the other.

The biggest change that happened in the US but not in Europe in that time frame was the in the US the prevalence and size of light trucks increased massivelly but not at all in Europe. Further, as we see in this study such vehicles are far more dangerous to pedestrians, so this specific change that happens in one geographical zone but not the other does seem to be the most likely explanation. Certainly this is a lot more logical than an increase in mobile phone use whilst driving (as that also happened in Europe) or the better road conditions in Europe vs the US (as that didn't change even though the rate of pedestrian deaths in the US reversed its trend and started climbing up whilst in Europe it remained on a trend of slowing falling down)

They're a "me, me, me", "don't give a shit about endangering the lives of anybody else", anti-social choice of vehicle.

Those are core character traits of people who are Fascists, though, granted not all people with those character traits are Fascists.

Personally I do believe that the spread if that mindset and the increasing immunity from consequences for being like that towards others is one of the things backing the rise of Fascism.

That said, I do agree with you that "Everything that's bad is Fascism" just devalues the word and reduces its impact.

The danger from higher kinetic energy comes from the longer break distance and time to stop: given the same driver reaction time and distance to the pedestrian, a heavier vehicle will take longer to break to a stop and thus have a higher velocity when it collides with that pedestrian than a lighter vehicle.

This is not to deny the difference that a higher front makes, just pointing out that kinetic energy does in fact make a difference, though of course as you point out not because of any "higher energy transmission on collision" or such, but rather indirectly because the vehicle is more likely to collide at a higher speed because it takes longer to break.

I couldn't find info on this for explicitly for light trucks, but here's some for trucks.

A higher kinetic energy means the vehicle takes longer to stop from the same speed (that's true even with better brakes and better tires, because if you try to reduce the energy faster than a certain rate the vehicle just starts skidding) which in turn means collisions with pedestrians happen at a higher speed, which is more deadly.

I couldn't find a page of info for specifically light trucks, but here's one for trucks.

This is not to deny the effect of higher fronts and hence lower driver visibility, just to point out that kinetic energy too matters.

That also happens in Europe and yet you don't see a similar increase in pedestrian deaths.

What did not happen in Europe but did in the US during that time frame was the invasion of roads by personal tanks.

Yeah, the weakness of the "this is all a massive conspiracy to force consumers to rent all their computing power" theory is that old computers work just fine as long as you don't try and install a newer Windows.

We're maybe 2 decades past the point were you had to upgrade your PC every 5 years for it to be suitable for everyday computing usage. There are only two things pushing PC hardware upgrades nowadays:

• OS support time limits and the ever expanding bloat of newer OS versions (which is nowhere as much a problem if your OS is Linux)
• Games

Now, for Games, all attempts at getting gamers to have their games hosted in servers and playing on light PCs - most notably Stadia - failed miserably.

As for OS, how successful has Microsoft been at getting people to actually upgrade to Windows 11, especially since hardware prices shot up?

I think it's far more likely that people just keep on using their aged hardware more often than not with no longer updated OS versions, than it is for them to actually start paying subscriptions to use remote computing power to browse the web and read their e-mails, especially since that still needs some form of local hardware so doesn't totally solve their problem with expensive hardware.

A charged, tense statement.

The entire fundamentals game was broken back in around 2012 when, in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash, Central Bank meetings setting interest rates became more important in setting the direction the Stock Market took (up if they lowered interest rates, down if they did not) than fundamentals.

It just so happens that the period when Uber rose coincided with that period of high interventionism by Central Banks which lasted almost a decade since their solutions for the 2008 Crash did not address the underlying causes and the recovery following that Crash was one of the slowest post-Crash recoveries ever (in fact, Interest Rates and GDP Growth are still not back to their historical trends).

It wasn't Uber who broke the Financial System's reflection of real wealth creation, it was Zero Interest Rate Policy flooding the Economy with pretty much free money and Too Big To Fail meaning that certain Financial Institutions could do every Financial Crime they felt like and never really be punished for it and take any risk they felt like because Central Bank money was always there in the background to save them if they went too far.