clusterfish

I don't buy that as a factor. Given that the OEMs overprice the parts that they have to compete with aftermarket suppliers for, why would they NOT overprice the parts for which they have no such competition?

Note that being unable to profitably replicate the part does not necessarily mean that the part is naturally expensive, or that the OEM already sells it at a reasonable price. The part could just as well be hard to reverse engineer and QA for a third party, or the effort to do that might not be worth it given unknown level of demand, etc. OEM can actually have a natural price advantage over third parties in such complex parts.

That's not what this is about. Negative electricity prices are rare, and do not account for the massive difference in utilization between renewables and nuclear. By the way nuclear power output can be ramped up and down by a lot, and in a matter of minutes in case of unplanned problems, even if it can't (really shouldn't) go to dead zero.

The person I responded to claimed that nuclear plants run at close to 100% because they bid low because the marginal cost of their electricity production is low, but the same is true for renewables like wind and solar. Yet these renewables run at much lower utilization rates - because of weather and daylight cycle, not "because they can", except in rare cases of negative prices as you mentioned.

Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.

Bullshit. Coal and petroleum are way deadlier than rooftop solar, even without diluting it with industrial solar installations.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

You don't get it. In the US you can watch something else, despite the oversized influence of media conglomerates.

I mean then we can't really use that video to judge or corroborate the morality / atrocities of the sides. And even for economics and politics, there is no analysis of balance or tradeoffs, just an exposition of what Russia wants. The video is still good information for those unaware, but only in the realpolitik sense, not as a source of moral or value judgements about the situation.

That is a decent factual YouTube video but it is laser focused on the title - what does Russia get out of invading Ukraine. There is no discussion at all of atrocities or moral controversies... Does the advertised curiosity stream series go into more details on that?

I'm with you on all points. Nazis are bad, of course. Invasions are bad. The reason I cared to comment is because Ukrainian Nazis are used as justification for the invasion in Russia.

But nazis exist in many countries, and are given legitimacy in many countries. In Ukraine they're paramilitary, in Russia they're a mercenary force, in Germany they sit in parliament (AFD), in US they have obvious affiliation with the political party that is in power half the time (and have strong legal protections for both their speech and guns).

All of that can be used as excuses to forcefully "denazify" a country, like Russia is doing now, but none of that are actually good reasons to invade those countries or deny any of those countries the right for independence, not even close.

You won't find 100% correctness even in peace time. That doesn't mean you can throw your hands in the air and assume that information from both sides of the conflict is on average equally (un)trustworthy.

There's tons of evidence to show the horrors of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and stuff like the ghost of Kyiv is just a morale boost for Ukrainians and is utterly irrelevant.

So yes, you should of course be sceptical, but no amount of honest and fair scepticism will paint Russia's invasion in a significantly better light.

There's Azov batallion, but Russia has its own Wagner group. None of that is an excuse to invade another country and shell civilians of course.

Yeah right. You keep trying to hairsplit one sentence because you're butthurt that nobody cared about the conflict you cared about, but now people dare to care a "lesser" conflict that you don't care about. And oh here's a story about Namecheap, let's blame them for that too.

Because they don't want to deal with people who are paying for the bombs falling on them, even if it's not those people's fault. They're a private company so they get to make such decisions. You can always go to some faceless IPO-d megacorp that doesn't care about anything except profits.

Don't bullshit me, you were talking about Namecheap's response, not other countries' sanctions.

The sanctioning countries are third parties to this conflict. You can talk about their double standards all you want, I won't disagree.

But Namecheap is not a third party to this conflict. They have full right to care more about what is happening to themselves and their families than what happens to people in other unrelated countries and their families.

Their reasoning in the email is a factual truth: war crimes in Ukraine specifically. They're allowed to care about themselves. You don't have to care about them yourself, being a third party that has the luxury of double standards in this conflict. But don't project your current position in this conflict onto them, and don't hide your envy or indifference behind demagoguery about their email's wording.

I hope your own country / city / office / home never gets shelled, so that you never have to learn the difference between caring for your home and a "double standard". Nothing easier than armchair demagoguery, until a grad shell lands in your daughter's bedroom.

You should email their support. I don't think they actually want to terminate your particular account, I think they only want to target people and companies who are actually in Russia (so they looked for Russian addresses and payment methods on file).

Their communication on this issue was terrible in many ways, but honestly I can't blame a company who's literally being shelled today for missing the mark once.

seizing Ukraine for it’s strategic importance to Russia - food, energy, year round port, buffer against a land invasion to Moscow.

Wow, that's literally the worst take I've heard on this.

- Russia has food to spare, exports tons of wheat, and has declining population

- Russia produces tons of energy and exports tons of oil and gas

- Russia already has several year round ports in the Black Sea. You think upgrading one of them to whatever they wanted is more expensive than waging fucking war?

- How much of a speed bump do you think a "demilitarized and neutral" Ukraine would be to forces that are doing a land invasion on the largest nuclear power? Also, Baltics are already in NATO, and the drive from there to Moscow is same distance on similarly flat terrain. Also, Finland and Sweden might join NATO too now thanks to this war. Also, nobody is ever doing a land invasion on a nuclear Russia. If the nukes didn't even assure that, nobody would keep spending billions on maintaining them.

So? What else are you gonna shell first when invading a country?

Clumsy stupidity doesn't make you into the most valuable company in the world.

rel=nofollow etc.

Although not sure how much it's respected

It's just a strange choice given that the author is lamenting about how traditional relief maps don't represent both coastlines and high mountain terrain well... And then proceeds to not represent coastlines well, even though that would definitely be possible with their approach.

Interesting idea, but elevations lower than 50m or so are colored black as if they're water. Looks like an apocalyptic flood. Don't understand why the author didn't make sea level a clearly visible threshold.

Not everything that is essential should be regulated the same just because they have this factor in common. Stop being so dense. A market being essential simply means that optimal outcomes in that market are very important, so regulation is more justified if that market is a failure (such as a duopoly).

One of the many differences is that the duopoly of Apple and Google in mobile markets is effectively unbreakable without government regulation. Today there is no amount of billions you can spend to break their moat. In contrast, grocery stores are highly competitive because they don't have insurmountable barriers to entry. Anyone can lease retail space and sign up with a distributor. There are lots of independent grocery stores operating in many towns.

Maybe last year was a bit bullshit.

If they actually did it at scale they would run into conflicting dashcam footage very quickly, and the whole conspiracy would go belly up before bearing any fruit.

If you think data is meaningless we should also remove police cruisers' dashcams and stop the rollout of body cams, I guess? Those aren't conspiracy-proof either.

You'd be surprised. Google makes more than that from showing ads to an average US user. Same for Facebook iirc.

I don't even know what you're playing at.

Yes, grocery stores are essential. Yes, gasoline is essential, being the only source of energy for all long range transportation.

Yes cars are essential in many places where there's no good alternative. For example most of America, geographically.

You can't carry your laptop in a pocket. And laptops are also "a luxury you've become inseparable from", doesn't make them any less essential.

You'll need a stronger argument to claim that something that almost everyone uses despite significant cost isn't essential.

Tiny bit? Try and migrate dozens of app accounts to a non-Apple email, as a non-technical user. Disregarding the sheer amount of work, such users won't even know how to send emails from the private addresses they signed up with, making it hard for app developers to identify them. It's always about control and lock-in with Apple.

Essential - adjective - absolutely necessary; extremely important.

Game consoles are not. Smartphones are. Obviously.

Yeah duh because those countries don't subscribe to brain dead free market absolutism.