Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.

In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.

As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.

Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).

Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.

The example is the Telluride though? That’s the whole point. Of course any sane person would pick a cheaper car. For that matter why would you ever buy a brand new car?

I definitely agree, but I went with the option which would have the lowest monthly payment. On the other end local rates have a 36 month loan at 6.75%, but that’s $1,800 per month.

I just Googled and the 2024 Telluride has an MSRP of ~$55,000 in my area, used 2023 models are about ~$45,000.

Looking at an auto loan calculator, that’s between $700 and $900 per month with a 96 month 9% auto loan.

Point is, if you can afford the car you’re probably not worrying about the subscription except on principle. If you can afford the car and have principle concerns you’d probably buy a different car.

Hey, I’m not saying this technology doesn’t have a use, and maybe if it’s stupidly expensive it will be heavily subsidized. The point I’m making is that it “likely” isn’t the solution to world wide water scarcity.

Another user commented that desalination is a grift, it’s not, the market forces just aren’t there yet to push its large scale implementation world wide. However, the idea that an upcoming technology may theoretically scale up and be the same economic scale is historically unlikely.

Historically the trajectory of this sort of technology is that it will define technology for the next 20 years (Nobel Peace Prize or more), or it will be bought up and buried by a big corporation (goodwill isn’t typically good for capitalism), or it won’t scale up as predicted and will be a major nothing burger.

It’s complicated, typically US rates aren’t a flat $/gallon. Most have flat fixed costs (meter fee, availability fees, etc) and then the actual volumetric rate charge is tacked on top of that. In my city the rate is additionally tiered, so the more water you use the more those later gallons cost. Most residential users fall into Tier 1 though, up to 4 CCF (Centicubic Foot or 748 gallons) per month, which is billed at $1.89 per CCF or $0.002526 per gallon.

So it’s hard to use the rates alone as there are additionally fixed rate costs (around $10 a month) and other usage is billed differently (commercial and industrial have higher flat rates as well as higher flat volumetric rate). The result is that commercial and industrial users pay higher rates than residential.

Luckily, my city also publishes raw statistics which indicates that, all things averaged together, the water costs around $0.04 per gallon.

But furthers the point I’m making. If your water costs more than mine then the potential price of this machine is even higher and the base price is already expensive as is. If this was truly a cheap and affordable alternative for people’s in need then it likely would have made that price point a major point of the article.

Just because it’s cheaper than an alternative doesn’t make it affordable.

EDIT: Also the article says

“the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water in the United States.”

Great point, sorry for the error!

While this is a cool development I would recommend tempering expectations. The cost of tap water is exceptionally cheap and the claims made here likely take these estimates to the extremes. The economics of scale likely don’t match up.

For example, tap water in my city costs ~$0.04 per gallon, at 5 liters per hour, 0.264 gallons per liter, 24 hours per day, for 5 years is $2,312. So saying they can make it for less than the cost of tap water doesn’t mean it’s affordable.

EDIT: Forgot to convert from liters to gallons

If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.

What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video

I have Windows 10, so things may be different for 11 or whatever version you’re on, but can’t you just uninstall OneDrive without specifically closing it? I feel like that’s what I did when it was default installed.

No, you misunderstand what I mean.

Ah I see, you’re correct, I did misunderstand you. I think your point is true, but still lacks finesse in describing the relationship between developers and digital store fronts. I also think you’re disregarding the benefit that the additional 18% cut the developer gets to keep as well as creating partnership options rather than being stuck with a defacto monopoly.

I also don’t think it’s fair to compare GOG or Humble Bundle with Epic or Steam, their purposes and market share is so much smaller than Steam. Epic isn’t trying to compete with GOG or Humble.

Also, you’re correct that the developer is making money either way, but they are making a larger percentage on sales through Epic. You’re probably right that the developers aren’t taking that into account, but they are materially benefited by its success. If they fail to account for that benefit and Epic fails then it will mean they make less money overall.

I think instead of your McDonalds example a better one would be contractors for a large business. Maybe your business frequently uses an electrical contractor and due to special circumstances the field is exceptionally limited (specialty license or security clearance). There is one contractor available and they have a monopoly and can charge whatever they want. So far this company has been really fair and not abused their power, but a new contractor becomes available. The new contractor has an inferior service line and is a bit slower, but they’re also cheaper. You could just ignore the new contractor and what happens happens, but in the real world it’s fairly common for businesses to diversify service contracts to maintain a pool of available contractors.

Sure, but the idea of fostering a mutually beneficial preferential relationship between two companies is far from new. I’m not saying that the developer has to take a loss, but they could decrease the sell price on Epic while still making more money than on Steam, GOG, or Humble Bundle. If doing so causes more people to switch to Epic it also means they’ll make more money in the long term and in the short term.

I’d argue that the statement that Epic is just as much a customer as the consumer isn’t really true. Epic as a storefront is different from Gamestop as a store front. Gamestop buys the product at a given price and then marks it up to make profit, Epic provides fulfillment and gets paid a percentage of the sale. Epic isn’t a customer in that sense because they aren’t buying and reselling the product.

Yeah, the developers can say fuck it and not help out Epic, but it just furthers the limited monopoly that Steam is. They can’t complain that Steam takes too big of a cut and then make businesses decisions that are counter to that complaint. It’s like complaining about Reddit but choosing to stay there.

I would agree that Epic is a customer in the sense that they are paying for exclusivity, but I think that contract should also include a reduced sale price in it.

EX: Epic pays the developer X dollars so that the first week of the release it’s sold at -Y% of the MSRP exclusively on Epic. After that they can sell it on other storefronts for the MSRP for Z months (with no sales) or they have to refund the X dollars.

hing like that now do ya?

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or if you really don’t understand. If you don’t understand I’d be happy to elaborate.

Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.

Well it shouldn’t be at a loss. As the person I responded to pointed out, Epic had a lower fee than Steam so the developer can sell on Epic for less than they would on Steam and make the same amount of money.

Doing so wouldn’t be at a loss, but it wouldn’t make as much profit as possible.

If the developers did choose to sell on Epic for less than it would bolster the Epic store and potentially lead to more people moving to Epic.

If Steam’s fee is 30% and Epic’s is 15% the developer could sell on Steam for $70 and make $49 and they could sell on Epic for $60 to make $51. That’s a 4% increase in profits.

If the Epic store takes off and a large enough user base switches they could maybe increase the Epic price to $62.5 which would result in an additional 4% increase in profits.

Epic’s deal is that they’re offering a lower rate, but the developers aren’t sharing the benefits of that to help Epic grow. If they did the long term profits would likely exceed the short term.

I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.

Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?

Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.

Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.

Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.

Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.

When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.

If the developer chooses to do so themselves then it’s likely ok, but forcing the developer to do so likely violates some sort of law.

I imagine that when Epic instituted it’s lower percentage they hoped that developers would sell exclusively on their platform for higher profits. Instead the developers decided to sell on both platforms and just make a larger percentage on the Epic sales. From the developer perspective it would have been wise in the long run to lower prices so that Epic could grow, but that hurts their short term profits and also stymied Epic’s potential.

If Epic’s store grew to truly rival Steam more developers might have jumped ship, but to do so prematurely would be losing a large portion of the potential customers.

Ultimately Epic had to develop a full Steam clone quickly while all Steam had to do was not suck for the end user.

I generally prefer AMD, how are they for Linux?

The only thing that seems expensive is the veggie patties in my opinion. For $4.99 I would have expected a 4 pack.

The buns are a bit pricey, but we’re talking a dollar and some change then.

Looks to me like you have most of 4 lunches and 4 breakfasts for $18.