This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system.
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
> CITIZEN, you have been struck by an autonomous vehicle! I have reported the impact data to help us improve our platform. Thank you for your feedback.
Man I'm kind of a bag snob but even pricier brands that differentiate on quality and worker wages are not $400.
I got a Tom Bihn Synapse backpack for around $200 in 2017 that I've traveled to many countries with and has been through I think way more than a kid going to elementary school. It's still going strong today.
It was made in a US factory with workers being paid good wages. $400 is a luxury/captive audience/conspicuous consumption price point.
Sounds similar to my Frost River Geologist Pack, which is around the same price point and handcrafted in Minnesota. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it while often lugging 35+ lbs of stuff, and it seems pretty much indestructible.
$450 for an equivalent bag could be explained by things like cost of living differences, but the randoseru described in the article are smaller and made from less expensive materials. The design is arguably a little more complicated, but the price still seems high for what you're getting.
Craftsman also use to make each nail by hand. Looks like kids getting saddled with heavy 200 year old bag designs whose function hasn't updated with the times.
However, that works both ways. It's wrong to say someone is "disrespectful" and "misunderstanding quality goods" because they don't want to get their kid a $450 bag instead of a cheaper, still-durable one.
But lets just say that I exist within the FANG dystopia where at any moment I can be wrangled into a meeting with a half dozen people, that if you actually consider the salaries, headcount, and time, racks up to hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars burned. For the takeaway that the modal should be fullscreen, or that we are dramatically adjusting our "design system", or whatever may have been so mission critical. Real tangible goods.
But perhaps what I do is worth more, I mean, we are talkin' computers here! we are the true craftsmen!
Aside from the PS2, Nintendo owns the top 2 to 4 best selling consoles of all time. All three of them are cartridge based, included their most recent console.
They may have been outsold in the fifth generation of consoles, but first party software gave them longevity that their competitors wish they could replicate. Where is Master Chief and who, Crash Bandicoot, now?
The switch and DS aren't cartridge-based in the same sense at all that the SNES and N64 were though. The progression was generally:
ROM - VERY fast but small
Optical disks - slower but much larger
Flash carts - best of both worlds by the time we started using flash for game consoles
Nintendo f'd up by staying on ROM carts for the N64 because it limited your storage space so much. And the benefit - faster load times - was probably lost on many people. (Notice how no N64 game has loading screens of any notable length). OOT just uses brief fades to black.
If you can consider a Mascot something non-exclusive to the brand, introduced fourteen years after the release of the Xbox, and brought on through an acquisition, then sure.
I thought that the money was "in my data". That harvesting the viewing/browsing habits offered an insight that not even my "wife or priest" could trade in value to Google.
A good point. TIL gross profit only counts the cost of producing the product, but not payroll, taxes etc.
That same link does show a $900M traditional profit on $4B of revenue, so roughly a 20% profit margin. It is a decrease year over year, but still remarkably good.
At an estimated 12k employees, it's also around $360k in revenue per employee, which is pretty decent (though not top-10 for the tech industry).
It's your definition that is misunderstood, not the oxymoron.
> Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning or comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user
Undercut competition by burning raised capital. Then once you've got the market share, you boil the frogs you gathered. I believe the euphemism around these parts is "disruption".
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.