Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

I read news so you don’t have to (but you still should).

  • 95 Posts
  • 112 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I don’t like to comment twice, but holy fuck … what the hell did I just read?

    The framing here puts the Louvre to shame (they’ve currently got their own problems). Perhaps the purest perversion of capitalism is the idea that sufficient is never enough.

    Look: Phones are commodities at this point. You only need a new one when the old one breaks. You don’t call a plumber to replace your pipes every two years; it’s generally because something shitty happens. Sometimes literally.

    This feels like the pendulum swinging back, to the alarm of capital. I’m old enough to remember appliances being expected to last 20 years. Fridge, oven, TV, washer and dryer: All were expected to be single-time replacements over the course of a 30-year mortgage.

    Hence growing up with a fridge in almond and a Kenmore set of laundry machines in mustard yellow. And a console Sony TV that made it through my entire console gaming time.


  • I got a new phone about a week ago. My old one was wildly overpowered for my use case, but … I accidentally sat on it briefly, and the screen was never the same. I went from a Pixel 6 Pro to a 9a, and … yeah, the screen seemed slightly smaller for a couple of days, but otherwise, it’s faster than a device twice the price in 2021.

    As with computers, we’ve hit “good enough” with phones for the most part. If you know why you need GPU cycles, that of course is another story, but for basic compute, we’ve nailed it. Hell, I’d still be running my i7-3770K – a processor I bought in 2012 – had my motherboard not died.

    Things get shitty in terms of margins at the top of any technological S-curve.

    I spent $500 on a phone that will get nearly seven years of updates, as I didn’t buy it release day. Assuming I don’t sit on it, that’s a remaining 78 months at $6.41/month. My service is $15/month.

    There’s no money here anymore.