Sounds overkill. They were allegedly 00000000 from 1962 to 1977, and we turned out fine!

If you haven’t heard a spoken sound in your first few years of life (I’ve even seen people claim months), it’s very hard to learn to tell the difference well. You can learn to pronounce them perfectly at any age, but a lot of the time subtly different words will be hard to distinguish if you didn’t grow up with hearing them.

Argentinians (and possibly other Spanish speakers) struggle with e.g. “peach” vs “pitch”, and worry about mispronouncing “beach”.

Some Asians famously struggle with R vs L, which seems baffling to a speaker of western languages, but if you actually look at the frequencies, they’re nearly identical sounds. We’ve just been trained from infancy to hone in on the difference to the point that it’s hard to comprehend them sounding similar to other people.

I have some smart home stuff, but if it needs the Internet to function, it’s not going into my house. And if any of it fails, the house reverts to its old, dumb self.

In my experience, tech companies, especially b2b, just don’t innovate. They coast on existing products, and just sometimes reactively implement things enough customers are asking for explicitly.

A bill doesn’t rip that easily, so I’m guessing that was worth the exact amount of paper it was printed on.

I don’t think we’re contradicting each other. Sometimes the manufacturer themselves (or other Chinese entities) will be the ones creating the spec.

It also makes sense that the trash products, which compete exclusively on price, will mostly be coming from the area able to manufacture products for the lowest price. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t also able to manufacture higher quality things when requested to.

At least for Norway, this is not technically true, but it also doesn’t matter.

Unions will run surveys across their members every year, and as long as they have enough members to have bargaining power, they also have the data. So they don’t really need all wages to be public in order to negotiate.

What is public in Norway, is the total taxable income of individuals. This is meant as a measure against tax fraud, and also an annual source of entertainment as you look up local and national rankings of who paid the most taxes, check that you’re still making more than your middle school bully, and so forth. But total taxable income can contain more than wages, so that is not really the number you’re referring to, and as mentioned the union has better data anyway.

From what I’ve heard, Norwegian unions are actively against a national minimum wage, because they believe that would act as a low anchor harming their negotiations.

Although there is no national minimum wage in Norway, certain industries or specific groups do have a specific minimum wage. For example, there is a legally mandated minimum wage for minors, to avoid them being exploited in summer jobs.

In other cases, unions have negotiated fixed levels for their focus areas (e.g. engineers working government jobs), and everyone working those jobs, whether they’re members of the union or not, will get paid those levels. Sometimes everyone in the group gets a raise simultaneously as a result of annual union negotiations.

Hopefully. Would be weird if it happened twice.

It doesn’t matter where it’s produced, what matters is who designed it and for what market. Things tailored for the mass US market are usually designed to minimize the cost of manufacturing above all else. Things tailored for Europe are a little earlier in the enshittification process.

There are tons of high quality products manufactured in China, the only difference is that the specs for those asked for high quality, while the things you associate with Chinese manufacturing are when they were asked to make trash.

Probably halloween costumes.

Biden already set precedent by pardoning his entire administration to prevent malicious prosecutions from this one. Motivation may have been different, but that doesn’t really change that he just promised to do the same thing Biden did.