When the numerical differences are that big I'd always be a little suspicious of something not operating correctly.

I haven't seen ARM outperform X86 by a margin that large anywhere else.

1988 would like a word.

This is a wild take.

In theory, competition is what prevents this. If these small companies can sell products that provide more value then consumers buy the alternative.

I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.

The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.

I don't think it's actually that hard - 5 minutes of skimming on Reddit will do a lot. You can also usually see Wirecutter's recommendations (even if they paywall the full article). People just don't care upfront but complain later.

LLMs really like the "it's not this, it's that" framing. The short punchy lists/sequences also feel off to me.

I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.

I don't buy that there's a segment of customers willing to pay to get rid of some but not all ads.

The entire point of premium as it already stands is ad removal. None of the other features are relevant (I don't even know what they are)

Queuing is pretty handy a feature. Long click then "add to queue" while clicking around in the app while something else is playing. Smart downloading means there's something to watch while offline without having to explicitly pre-downloaded something. If you're a video quality aficionado, there's better picture quality available. An in-app sponsorblock equivalent was being beta tested but I think it went away. YouTube music except that not all the videos are licensed. There's a couple others. But yeah, ad-free viewing is the primary reason I pay for Premium. Supporting creators is another.

The question is how annoying the ads are. One 15 second ad before an hour long video, I'm annoyed but I'm not going to flip the table over. 5 minutes of ads every 30 mins? At some point I'm getting annoyed enough to cancel my subscription.

I imagine it's just be keeping the equipment warm and moving, especially for something like a steam turbine. Partial output sounds like a reasonable guess to me.

Sadly a lot of people look at our economic system through an ideological lens - how it allocates resources is, to them, driven by political, cultural and social motivations. The fact that by far its most important purpose is resource allocation is often completely ignored.

Rising petrol prices here in Australia draw criticism against fossil fuel wholesalers - as if they are doing this solely to screw over Australians. The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many.

> The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many

Careful using words like "need". The resources are allocated to the economically most efficient sectors. Since if you are economically efficient, your profits are higher and can afford to pay more than others.

That's a fair point.

In most cases these are congruent ideas, though. If I have no choice but to drive, but someone can drive or take public transport or work from home, high fuel prices incentivise them to not use it, saving some for myself.

I'm sure there are plenty of people throughout an economy who just don't care, but on average it has substantial impacts, and it's common now for people to totally dismiss that.

Any human system is inherently ideological.

"It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology." - Slavoj Zizek

> The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many.

This, for example, is a deeply ideological statement. Do I really need something most just cause I can pay more for it? Does the billionaire need the mansion more than the homeless person needs some living space?

The other replying commenter made a good point that "need" is perhaps not the best description, but I'll stand by it as reasonably close to what I mean.

Yes, there are plenty of people with high incomes who continue commanding resources they may not strictly "need", but across the economy as a whole the effects of these prices is still to allocate resources in an efficient way. The point is this avoids an acute shortage and rationing, which is the alternative to transmitting this information via prices and almost certainly far less economically productive.

That's because home battery providers aren't competing on price yet. The market is still small, the risks are high and they need to figure things out.

Once the early adopters run out they will have to start competing on price to make sales. There's no justification for a home battery when they charge 10k for 10kwh as they do now - only early adopters and government subsidies getting it over the line.

IMO home batteries should be a relatively easy install in principle, it's just still in that early expensive phase.

I don't think there's any particular economy of scale to renewables beyond amortising installation costs.

This is a really big component in most western countries, so big installations are always going to be more cost effective, but there's nothing special about storage vs solar or anything else.

I suppose storage is smaller, so you don't have to pay for much land like you would solar (and where homeowners are basically utilising an underused resource so they have a cost advantage in that respect)

Unless there's so much generating capacity available that they can power the entire connected grid, no.

Consider 100 homes on a power line network and the breaker trips. They probably draw 50kW on average, more if it's hot or cold and AC is on. Unless there's enough power generation available to power that entire load, voltage will drop and any halfway reasonable hardware should give up.