Buyers discount the equipment price based on the expected cost of repairs, and manufacturers capture more profit when they consistently produce equipment that is more reliable or easier to repair.
In the short term they can increase their profits by reducing quality and designing their product so that it must be serviced at an OEM shop, but this will come at the expense of future sales when customers take these increased repair costs into account and buy from other manufacturers who don’t engage in these tactics.
This is why competition is so important: without it, buyers have no alternative and manufacturers have no incentive to provide value instead of fleecing thier customers by providing an inferior product with expensive repair options only.
Fifty years ago the average guy buying a tractor had a family farm with a few hundred acres. Equipment was smaller and had less frills because the John Deeres of the world were catering to those small time customers. There were a lot of them.
Those small time farms mostly don’t exist anymore. Today farming is done on an industrial scale, and equipment manufacturers are catering to the big players. They need big, efficient equipment that is profitable to operate at scale and they’re willing to pay for it. Only the big farms can.
I wonder how much of this is just the manufacturers making more high end, complex equipment that is just difficult to repair in general as opposed to them maliciously designing things to be difficult to fix.
Keep in mind, increasing the cost to repair something lowers its market value. There’s a reason Toyotas are more expensive than Dodges. The market prices these inconveniences. It’s not in the manufacturer’s interest to do this.
I think the real risk here is that the equipment manufacturers will use these settlements and regulations to build crazy reporting and compliance requirements that give them a moat that prevents upstart companies from competing with incumbents in the industry. What they really fear is competition, not the loss of a few percentage points on their part sales and service profits.
I’m not sure why the military running it makes this project inherently bad.
You can always point to some geological or ecological reason why a resource shouldn’t be developed. Here in western Kansas there is some endangered chicken grouse that is constantly used to prevent wind turbines from being constructed. It’s just an excuse to block development, as is the concern you’re raising.
I doubt the people who need water to survive give a damn about CO2 emissions. There will be environmental damage, for sure. It will be worth it to these people who will live better lives because of it. Ultimately, Egyptian leadership gets to make that call, not you or I.
If you really care about the environment, you should support these kinds of projects that will raise incomes to the level where Egyptians can afford to care about environmental conservation.
The fact that a guy like Trump was ever elected in the first place would imply it is not working fine. Half of the electorate supports his anti-immigration policies. In an alternate universe where immigration laws were properly enforced he may never have been elected.
Further, just because something has never been an issue in the past doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future. The US is an outlier in being the only large and wealthy country that does this. Not many people are flying to Pakistan to give birth to secure Pakistani citizenship for their children.
Despite all of those things people still travel across the world to give birth in US just so their posterity can become a part of our country. What other metric do you need?
Imagine a country extending citizenship to a whole group of people for no reason other than the location of their birth, and then allowing said people to access the benefits of citizenship, including the ability to receive welfare benefits, vote, and run for office.
I can imagine a compromise that exchanges a path to citizenship for DACA kids for restrictions on birthright citizenship.
What is missing from this debate is the practical side of things. On the one hand, a permanent underclass of non-voting second class citizens is probably not a stable long term equilibrium.
On the other hand, allowing anyone to visit the US to have their baby and automatically receive all the benefits of US citizenship is also not a stable long term equilibrium.
Members of American Indian tribes were born in the United States after the 14th amendment was passed but it took an act of Congress to make them citizens. The question of jurisdiction is a very real one that isn’t nearly as cut and dry as you’re implying it to be.
Is he wrong though? Lots of bad precedents were set during that emergency, the consequences of which were still living with.
The Overton window moved in a deeply authoritarian direction during that time period. Politicians across the spectrum have internalized that move and are restricting freedom in far more overt ways than were possible prior to that emergency.
If you want to prevent future abuses, understanding how and why past abuses happened seems quite reasonable. I don’t find such an idea nonsense or disconnected from reality at all.
I’m unsure what you mean by gated free speech zones. Sometimes specific areas are closed to vehicle traffic for a protest, but that doesn’t mean those locations are exclusively for protesting. In general protest is allowed wherever, provided it’s not on private property.
There is a guy in my town that protests a wealthy businessman on the public street corner near his house almost everyday with a bullhorn and wearable sign. The businessman has tried every trick in the book to get him to stop, but courts in our city and state have consistently ruled he has the right to do this on public property. He is homeless and a little looney, but still has constitutional rights that our courts protect.
In many US states, open carry of firearms is legal without a permit, again, barring private property owners posting signage stating it’s forbidden. I’ve been to protests at my state capital building and people open carry on the premises. Inside the statehouse it’s illegal. Brandishing a weapon is also illegal but generally keeping the firearm holstered prevents any issues.
Using fireworks inside most city limits is illegal, as is discharging a firearm. The difference is you can’t use fireworks for self defense, unlike a firearm, and discharging a firearm in self defense is legal.
There is a legitimate reason to have a firearm at a protest: to defend yourself. Fireworks, on the other hand do nothing but make gunshot like noises, which are very likely to get you shot in a protest here.
You have to assume people in a crowd are carrying firearms here. There are more guns than people in the US last I checked, and many states also allow conceal carry without a permit. Creating gunshot like noises in such situations is a great way to accidentally get shot.
In a nutshell, guns are a weapon that is legal to possess and use in self defense in most areas of the US. Fireworks cannot be used in self defense, but are great at making people think you just fired a gun. See the Kyle Rittenhouse trial for an example of how this plays out.
Most people not from the US have a hard time imagining people carrying handguns in a hip holster at the grocery store, but outside of LA and New York, it’s not that uncommon. And for every one person you see open carrying, there are likely five others conceal carrying.
A friend of mine is a mechanic and about once a month he sees a handgun tucked inside the door or between the seat and console of a car he’s working on. It is a cultural thing in a lot of areas, one that most people that haven’t traveled outside of major US cities have a hard time believing.
I mean this in the kindest way possible: if you're not from the US and your only window into our country is TV and the internet, consider the possibility that your assumptions about how things are here might not match reality.
Yes, that was the defense’s argument, which was ultimately unpersuasive to a jury. Rehashing it here doesn’t make it more persuasive or effective.
I’ve been to several protests over the years and at exactly zero of them did I encounter fireworks of any kind. Maybe we run in different circles.
There is no non-criminal reason to use fireworks at a protest. Most cities ban their use altogether except for a few days a year around Independence Day and New Year’s Day.
He was charged with 37 felony counts, the most serious of which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years. Had he been convicted he would have surely gone to prison for far longer than Estrada. [1]
Both the crimes Trump was charged with and Estrada was convicted of are very serious. But to some people, the severity of the penalties are only an issue when the politics of the person charged with them aligns with their own.
The activity in the body does not align with the title. Even putting aside whether such activities are justified in this case or acceptable in general, people do not commonly attempt murder or posses explosives at protests.
Estrada was convicted of "intending to conceal the box’s contents and impair its availability for use in a federal grand jury and federal criminal proceeding," not for just moving a box of zines. [1]
Tampering with evidence is a serious crime. I suppose you think that Trump's mishandling of classified information was just "moving a box of documents", too?
People have difficulty visualizing large volumes of water. A square mile filled up to one foot with water is 208,544,914 gallons. 2.5 billion gallons of water would fill up this same square mile to only 12 feet.
It’s the size of tiny lake. For context, Lake Meade has about 250 square miles of surface area and an average depth of 180 feet.
The reservoir my city of half a million people gets its water from is 15 square miles and 20 feet deep. 2.5 billion gallons is maybe 5% of our reservoir’s total volume.
This headline is textbook fearmongering. They are intentionally misrepresenting the magnitude of water usage to make you fear data centers. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of them, but water usage is not one of them.
The authors of this article are either assuming you’re to dumb to do simple volume conversions or worse, too stupid to do them themselves. I suspect the latter since they use inconsistent units throughout the article. Liters per kWh, cubic meters, gallons, etc.
In the short term they can increase their profits by reducing quality and designing their product so that it must be serviced at an OEM shop, but this will come at the expense of future sales when customers take these increased repair costs into account and buy from other manufacturers who don’t engage in these tactics.
This is why competition is so important: without it, buyers have no alternative and manufacturers have no incentive to provide value instead of fleecing thier customers by providing an inferior product with expensive repair options only.