Most of the time it’s the other way around, at least in the US: because cash and credit card prices are almost always the same it is the cash users who are overpaying, to the tune of 2-3% of the purchase price. It makes no sense to use cash.
Following your analogy, what equity efforts turn in practice is to not only accommodate for track length for those that start behind, but also to cut one leg off of those perceived to be ahead.
That all sounds great in theory but in practice it devolves not into only giving extra help to those in need, but also to _take away_ from those perceived to have some sort of advantage. See for example NYC's idiotic plan to close gifted and talended kindergarten programs in public schools.
The truth is that it is a hell of a lot easier to lower the bar for everyone than to raise it. I.e. it's a lot easier to make dumb kids than to make smart ones, so in the name of equity we shall have dumber ones.
The ashtrays are there, even today, because it is suspected that this flight [0] went down when someone disposed a cigarette butt in the lavatory trash, causing a fire.
A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
Can I ask why don't you want a Tesla charger talking to Tesla? Seems a bit odd if you already own a Tesla vehicle that is just piping the data to Tesla all the time.
Allow me to disagree while I look back at the last 80 years of US government-funded research.
The government isn’t “picking” the research topics. It’s the scientists in places like the NSF that are. No system is perfect but some system is better than nothing, which is where we are going.
Fund them to do what exactly? Come up with their own research ideas?
You got the pipeline backwards. The government picks the research areas/priorities then allocates funding for those, and universities apply and compete to get grants. _Then_, once a grant is given to a school, is funding for labs and graduate students allocated.
If the government has no interest in doing research and provides no funding then schools don’t have projects to work on and no money to hire graduate students.
Local models will never compete with large SOTA models, in the same way an iPhone doesn't compete with supercomputers doing nuclear simulations.
They paths will differentiate and split. Probably SOTA models will eventually be locked down and only accessible to state actors because of how expensive they will be to run (already started with Mythos).
Then you sound like the type of client that perfectly fits Bambu's profile. Now, don't come complaining when Bambu decides you need a monthly subscription to use the slicer, or whatever rent-seeking they come up with in the future. Remember, you are paying extra for the privilege of not thinking, and you bought into that arrangement fully aware.
You captured my imagination as a teenager when I read The Cuckoo’s Egg. I’m so sorry to hear of these terrible news but I appreciate the update. Here’s hoping to a _prompt_ recovery!
Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.