To be fair, mandatory warranty has added a lot to that.
Most larger electronics (washing machines, fridges, dryers, ovens, etc.) have a mandatory 5y warranty in most european countries, and since the profit margins are so low, even the cheapest washing machine (~250eur range) has to survive the daily use of a family with three kids (or even multiple daily uses) for at least five years, since even a single replacement/repair eats away profits of dozens others sold.
"back in the time", you'd skip the cheapest stuff, now i just say "buy the cheapest one, it'll work for at least five years", and in 99.9%, it's actually true.
Finding someone who is both willing and able to deliver explosives to a datacenter wouldn't be easy, the last stime something like that happen is 9/11. Throwing large masses on the other hand is not so hard as countries like Iran already have missile building capacity and are partners with actual space capable Russia.
Also, the super expensive data centers are great targets, probably much better targets than US can hit in Iran for example. What happens if those Nvidia chips that are churning the economy start to getting blown up by carefully de-orbited stones?
There were suspicious rednecks shooting out power stations a couple years ago.
The FBI routinely finds mentally ill people to convince/encourage/fund a terrorist attack and arrest them after they purchase materials with FBI money and call it a sting.
I don't think it's nearly as hard to find someone as you think.
AfD is a result of people wanting something and the government doing the opposite... this means that people are looking for an Alternative (intentionally capitalized here).
People just want a nice cozy job, enough money to get an apartment/house, buy the basics they need and live in a safe environment. If you provide those, no one is looking for alternatives.... when one of your bigger companies announces letting go of 100k people in the next few years, when you need concrete blocks protecting your chistmas markets, when you're deciding between eating and paying for diesel for your car to get to work, then you're looking for Alternatives.
Check out what the party actually plans. It's the exact opposite of what those people that vote for it need. The demographic is based on uninformedness, correlating with lower incomes, marketed towards the group that feels disadvantaged because they feel that others around them have it better. This party is not going to advantage anyone, high or low income, but a step down in welfare hurts the most if you're already low income so best not choose them in that case.
If you want "enough money to get an apartment/house, buy the basics they need", egalitarian Linke is the obvious choice, and the "and live in a safe environment" part is something literally everyone wants, hard to make a wrong choice there (though with their support for Russia, maybe AfD is questionable even on that front)
> when one of your bigger companies announces letting go of 100k people in the next few years
...then you need social welfare the most? Linke is the biggest proponent of that. What is the logic here?
> a result of people wanting something and the government doing the opposite
This is perhaps the most mind-blowing part. For decades, the right wing government with Merkle at the head did very little for long-term good, so what's the opposite of that? Move further right!! This time it'll work for sure! Blame all the foreigners, inside and outside. Kick them out, reduce international collaboration and trade, and for a cherry on top, fuck the global climate even more than the compromise position previous governments were already pursuing. That'll fix all future problems
No, obviously the opposite of leaving it all to the market and having strict immigration is to nationalize the things people actually need (as you say, things like housing) and have no concept of asylum (anyone can walk in and work here). Will that solve it? Maybe we need some middle ground? I'm not sure anyone has definitive answers to make a perfect world, but this nazi party is so far out there, saying it is "just an alternative" is like saying hitler was "just an option" that we could try and see how it works out. Yeah, people want something 'different' but what level of stupidity do you need to expect that voting for nazis is going to make things 'different and better' instead of 'different and worse'?
similar thing happened next to a minority area where they put railroad ties (the big wooden things, usually supporting the tracks) on the tracks themselves, and well, that even got politicized for the location reasons.
If we continued as hunters-gatherers we'd do the same with many other animals, but we instead decided to farm them so the other species can survive.
On the other hand, there are wild boars roaming my country in numbers that should be reduced, but somehow very few people want to eat them and they're causing a problems. Bear meat is a bit more popular, but killing off excess bears is a hot topic every year. Meanwhile horse meat is more easily available over here.
Ok, maybe not the war *with a neighbor* (yet), but US has an open war with Iran (and has bombed a few other countries recently also) and it also threathens to annex the neigbor to the north plus another island country.
Sure, americans might consider themselves to be "the good guys", but the rest of the world doesn't.
From where in the rest of the world are you? Did even you talk to anyone living in countries neighboring Russia?
Sure not everyone benefitted from US but a ton of people/countries did and still do.
US never felt a need to build walls to prevent their citizens/allies from leaving. Russia and the others very much so.
With US the track record may be mixed, but a ton of countries from Europe and Asia benefitted tremendously. Russia otoh doesn’t have a concept of win-win, they tend to exploit even their closest allies, which anyone living in Baltics/East-Central Europe can tell you.
What bombed country benefits from US? Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? Yemen? Venezuela? Syria? Yemen? How do they benefit? Destroyed infrastructure is somehow helping them? Americans stealing their resources if they decide to occupy the country? How? Win-win in iran how exactly? US just proved to the rest of the world that you need nukes to be safe from americans, and even then they'll sanction you to hell if possible, just because you're not bending over for them.
I'm from the border of central europe and balkans, I don't benefit at all, it just costs me money to pay for a van full of soldiers every time americans decide to occupy some country half the planet away.
That's why now we need gigabytes of ram to do the same thing we managed in 128Mb back then. I mean sure, there's an AI chatbot in your PDF viewer and ads in your start menu, but the functionality of many daily things is still the same.
"back in the day" we had waterproof phones with user replacable batteries, you could just buy another battery and replace it yourself. I have no idea why we can't do this now.
Power density and all of the problems that are fallout from high power density. A modern LiPoly battery contains a lot of energy. It's stored in a chemical that is highly reactive with oxygen, which you happen to be surrounded by at the moment.
Watch some videos on lithium battery fires. Not only do they have extremely hot flames but they spray out molten bits of battery and can't be extinguished with water.
To make a LiPoly battery that can be safely handled by normal people it needs a strong outer casing. A sealed battery in a phone uses the phone's case itself as the battery's protective casing. A user replaceable battery would need its own strong case. The phone then needs to be larger to accommodate the extra volume or have a smaller battery which stores less power than a sealed battery of equivalent volume.
The market has rewarded thinner phones with long lifetimes but also high performance. That triple point is challenging if not impossible to hit without sealed batteries.
Were they waterproof? I certainly don’t remember my Nokia 3210 being even splash resistant.
> I have no idea why we can’t do this now
For better worse I think the answer is quite simple - a combo of ease of manufacturing, a long term trend of slimmer devices that is broadly supported by customer behaviour, and an extra place to suggest a device upgrade instead of a repair. You’re more than able to get pretty much any smartphone battery replaced with a manufacturer similar spec these days, and people still choose not to do so.
Waterproof phones with replaceable batteries existed, but they used more rubber and other tricks to pull it off. This had the advantage of making it a lot easier to close the phone again and still keep the water resistant properties.
Having replaced the battery in my old phone, I sure understand why people don't "choose" to do so. The battery itself is worth maybe 20 bucks but the labour and tools required to replace it cost much, much more.
Compared to spending 30 bucks on a secondary battery back in the day, things sure have gone downhill since the days of user-replaceable batteries.
Please name these waterproof phones with replaceable batteries. None of my Motorolas or Treos were waterproof. I believe that harden phones may have existed but were not available to normal consumers. Maybe I’m wrong which is why I want to learn what phones you’re talking about.
The G'zOne made headlines being the first water resistant phone and it had a replaceable battery from the very start. The Fujitsu F-02D was another good example, with a fully-featured touch UI while still boasting something other than the slab-of-glass designs of today.
These phones weren't very popular in the west (Japan in particular had a large waterproof phone market, allegedly because people were taking them with them into the shower), but they have existed for a years, before the first Androids or iPhones became water resistant.
Phones like the Samsung XCover (the Android 2.3 one from 2011) were sold worldwide and featured a hotswappable battery. Over time these became bulkier and frankly uglier as they doubled down on how "rugged" they were, but the technology was clearly there.
Almost everything is splash resistant for some definition of a splash. I bet any modern smartphone does better than any dumbphone with buttons, because water can't permeate either of the big flat sides. If the water doesn't get inside, it can't cause damage.
Here in the balkans, if you want anything local, you must find some private sharing site/tracker/forum with magnet links/etc., since no one really leaves stuff seeding on eg. piratebay for a long time (private trackers force you in a way), so much of the stuff becomes unavailable very soon.
The new avengers movie or whatever "globally popular" will always be available on every public tracker, but trying to find a good quality version of "Hajde da se volimo" is a pain :)
And ok, fair. But to be clear I’m not just downloading avengers-tier stuff! e.g. I’ve been downloading some French films from the 70s recently and had no trouble at all. But yes I can imagine that it’ll differ a lot by region. Thanks.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-...
A single cop can do it 2000 times it seems before they get caught
And it's not a lone case: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...
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