you don't get the insane profit margins they want without those predatory practices, not in this industry and if you do it's a one-off and not something you can do every fiscal year
there's certainly massive amounts of porn, esp. if you look at active traffic, but perhaps even worse than that is random crap collected for no good reason and "backyard genius" trash content pooled together by the gigabyte
quality and traffic are grossly uncorrelated, so finding stuff is a huge challenge
probably worth adding some ML filter to it because yeah, most of the bulky stuff in bittorrent is always going to be garbage - a lot like the internet generally, the value is in filtering the good stuff out
still worth it because otherwise you have essentially no software advantage over competing architectures (at the time, mainly Motorola 6800 successors and the PDP-11 architecture)
If you look at how extremely overpriced console hardware typically gets away with being, this is not a bad deal if the system is durable, relatively quiet and there are good games well optimised for it. The deal is sweetened by the fact that you will be eventually be able to upgrade the RAM and storage easily and for cheap if/when prices eventually come down from the current AI insanity levels.
Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.
It would be nice, but sadly a much deeper restructuring of the system is needed than just offering cheap season tickets, presumably by heavy subsidies.
there is not a set number of tickets that either get bought by the consumer or subsidised, that is so far departed from the issues it's pointless to even consider
but that is a market you are describing, one for the allocation of resources
it isn't really, the resources are created by the structure commercialising the service, and incidentally the other means of transportation are also made expensive by a connected structure
owning and operating a car in the UK is very expensive, esp. if you need to regularly park it near the most important economic centres, and this is also by design
more than a market, it's engineered scarcity and tax collection running this service and that is what they're maximising for, instead of economy of transportation which is perhaps the implied real metric of what would work as a market
I think seeing it as a market introduces the kind of biases and distortions that make the British system so incredibly expensive, and now also unreliable.
This is not the market for some fruit or some generic consumer good, with competition at all levels and a very flexible incentive structure that will move resources around to make the product as good and as cheap as possible, creating even different grades where demand justifies it.
This is more a piece-wise single provider structure that only has incentives to extract as much money as possible from the user, and substitute services are also pushed up indiscriminately by the government/regulators hierarchy, that sees them as a politically manageable way to fund massive pressure groups.
The NHS works under similar incentives and is also way out of hand by now.
Internally, the incentive to improve processes and infrastructure is much diminished by the fact that money isn't allocated on value or even perceived value, but established budgets that actually get locally lost if they are not spent, so oftentimes spending more for the same is better. Any improvement or extra budget allocation is a power struggle between localities and political pressure groups.
Trying to introduce competition has also been a massive failure. You have companies outsourcing as much of the maintenance as possible to the infrastructure regulator, squatting lesser profitable lines with skeleton-crew service, and actively impeding the entry of other operators.
It's not a matter of subsidies, sweet-spot for prices and passenger capacity. It's much deeper than that.
The Dutch system is primarily public and primarily operated by NS which is a public operator. The Japanese system is primarily private and operated by private companies, and the regulator has a tight control over it. The British system is hard to even categorise. It's a flailing mish-mash of public/private operation that goes back and forth and that is incompetently regulated.
Even at that price, the British mind cannot comprehend such good a deal. An equivalent pass in the UK would be easily 10x that to even cover just a much smaller region than The Netherlands.
so around US$150k which is Small/Medium-Enterprise territory already, but who knows when it will hit "reasonable" home consumer territory
I think there's hope future generations of unified memory machines may get this sort of memory availability when new fabs open in then next couple of years and then ramp up production for a few years afterwards - that makes ~2030s credible at this point, but nobody can really predict the market that far ahead
That's why they have a full blown war in their borders and they're powerless without American hardware and intelligence. Also they're right now scrambling to allocate huge investments in weaponry, of course late, but better than never.
You can explain that to the Ukrainians and tell them how they shouldn't have American technical superiority like Starlink and the American AI and data in their drones to survive another day.
It's not like there's a moral high ground about not collaborating with the military. Unless you want to advantage America's adversaries, namely China, Putin's Russia and Iran's current regime. There's always this implicit, sometimes explicit, "war bad" childish political philosophy in posts like this. In reality war is a given and you have to be prepared to have the upper hand.