Way before AI, the problem was very similar - universities do not teach practically useful stuff. Its been a permanent complaint about the education system, really, at least for the last 50 years.
AI just gave the students a way to dodge the slog.
But university was never intended to teach the bleeding edge. That would really be impossible in practice. Pre-phd, it is supposed to teach ways to efficiently attack a problem. you can take a bunch of "play courses", and succeeding at any of those requires pretty much only that one skill.
Nowadays, the challenge they face, is to keep teaching "problem attack methods" in a way that can't be trivialized by AI.
Though fundamentally, if you go to university, and evade learning the one thing you can learn there - thats your loss.
Buying EA for influence? With the reputation EA has in gaming? They're a joke - they're not influencing anything. Its like buying a violin to fix a flat tire.
Do you think your average EA Sports FC or Battlefield player is even aware of that reputation? These games still sell tens of million of copies. Positive influence in Battlefield alone would be huge.
I agree they're good at making games that sell to a mass audience - but I really think that a lot of franchises have wasted a ton of money partnering with EA, which makes poor quality games that are exactly the same as the one they printed out 12 months ago. I haven't heard anyone talking about an EA sports game since the PS1 era and they seem to have completely missed the e-sports era where DOTA and Fortnight made vast sums of money. Don't get me wrong, they've made a ton of money, but I think they could have made still far more in more competant hands.
Fabulously greedy FIFA seems to have realized this and is no longer partnering with them.
News to me about FIFA. SA has been trying to gain "influence" in sports overall, and their video game endeavors also seem focused on "e-sports" more than gaming as a whole. I frequently hear complaints about them in fighting game circles, which is a more niche segment of "e-sports". EA is a big step up even if it's not DOTA/LoL levels.
Yeah. Actually it looks to me like FIFA jumped the gun a bit. They stopped letting EA making their games in 2023, but then choaked and have only released two not-great looking games seemingly meant for low end systems like phones and the Nintendo Switch. I doubt either sold as well as the EA FIFA games.
I'll bet they lost a lot of money - I'm sure there's an interesting story about FIFA's efforts to get their own game development up and running. I guess they wanted EA to pay $300 million per year and EA said no, but I doubt FIFA made 50 million on the games they released.
It’s also worth noting that the EA studio that makes FIFA has been continuously doing so for over twenty years. It’s not being handed off between studios and rebuild operational expertise over and over.
If anything, FIFA was probably getting an incredible deal from EA given the cost of making AAA games today.
actually not. EA is a household name. You can ask every single person with a steam/xbox/psn account if they know ea. i guarantee you, 95% of them heard of EA and id say 80% of those have played an EA game in their lifetime.
That being said, influencing happens by mere exposure. There was a time, when Europeans bought up the kit of a bad mexican football club, just because the jersey was hyped on fifa 14. so if someone is trying to influence them, it will happen.
The 'core gamer' bubble has always been bad for this.
Sports games sell like hotcakes and have people buy them every year religiously but you never hear about them, sims too. Their other titles were heavy hitters.
Their just a seperate audience; EA certainly has influence, just not with people that talk about games.
Buying only a 40% stake in Epic, allowed China to successfully breach Apple's store monopoly and establish a foothold on a previously restricted platform. Will the gable pay off in the future or not, is not exactly relevant. The point is that they can leverage pre-existing western companies for their expansion plans in various ways.
They make all the sports games. Have you noticed all the sports and Mr. Beast type slop that's like "Wow and here we are inn Dubai / Saudi Arabia whatever and it's beautiful and luxurious and we're driving in Lambos waooowww"
If product placement didn't work it wouldn't be an industry
I'm really surprised at the hurry. The EU, and many EU governments, have been ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.
It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.
At least in some member states, that's a well used pattern when the soccer world cup is on (as in: people are focused on something else).
Which at least has been going on in the last weeks.
So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.
Honestly where do you even go if you want to get out from under this? The US was the option, but is clearly circling the drain. The EU is democracy theater at best, a democratic mandate that can be set aside any time it's inconvenient for Ashton Kutcher, and speedrunning the rebuilding of a new Soviet Union. Feels like a matter of time until they start building a new wall to keep you from leaving.
In all these places I imagine the people making these decisions are members of the populace. They need to be gently reminded that they are not more equal than others and people do not like their decision-making habits. The way anyone else engaging in anti-social behavior would be reprimanded.
Are you going to take your phone and laptop with you? If so, then it doesn't really matter where you're going. You'll be populating multiple surveillance systems regardless of where you choose to live.
Whenever you see people complaining that the EU is "too slow", more often than not it's because they benefit directly from EU rushing things without thinking.
Multiple active wars on the global stage, huge changes in tariff and job impacts, large scale shipping and oil impacts.
I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.
They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that. They didn't anticipate the Ukraine invasion, or the Middle East blowing up again.
> They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that.
Did we though? At least in Germany a bunch of anti-climate-change projects and changes have been and are being canceled and we're going back to coal and diesel. It seems we're optimizing to have no results and negative progress at the moment.
That's why the EU is a neutral pushover bowing down to the whims and tantrum of US, China, Iran, India, Turkey, etc. because a lot of their industry, energy, exports/imports are from those countries so any disputes would be devastating to the EU economy.
They're trying to avoid any conflict since they have no energy and hard power to counter any confrontations, so they smile and nod to anything happening worldwide or push some stern words about "monitoring the situation" to social media, depending on the situation.
Military spending != military capability and will to use force. For example, Germany spends way more than France on defense but has a less capable military and with no nuclear capability to boot.
From force projection capability, the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage. It's a pushover despite all that military.
The reality is that you need to be willing to drop some bombs every now and then or at least threaten or blackmail those who threaten your interests and way of life, to be taken seriously and for other countries to never fuck with you. For example the Ukraine virtually admitted to blowing up Nordstream pipeline and sending Germany's manufacturing into the storage, just to disrupt Russia. Now do you think Ukraine or any other country, would ever dare to blow up a US pipeline or piece of their infrastructure? Probably not, because they'd get carpet bombed in retaliation and their leaders shot or kidnapped by delta force.
And since the EU never plays hardball like that it always gets taken advantage of by more ruthless and unscrupulous nations with smaller and weaker militaries because both its citizens and its leaders are too afraid to ever use force.
> the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage.
The rhetoric right now is just bizarre. Why should the EU force countries against their will using military? Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
> Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
Internationally agreed upon rules don't come from first principles, they're downstream from power. The world was, and will always be, might makes right.
International rules are meaningless without hard power to enforce them.
Your rules in your country are real because you have judges and police to enforce those rules.
But internationally, there's no planetary police force(other than the US when it wishes to act like one), so solving disputes is dependent to how strong your military is, or on you capability to inflict pain on the offending country through other means like economy or trade.
That why the US walks away unscalved from international conflicts and the EU keeps getting buried further.
And then stop people from being able to afford cheaper stuff from china (without european middlemen) by implementinh a 3eur customs fee on an 1eur phone case!
That's a good thing. We complain about lack of industrialisation. China has historically protected their fledgling industries, if we want industrialisation back, we need to as well, to the detriment of mindless consumption of cheap stuff
But we want cheap stuff, we don't have unlimited money.
This law didn't open a phone case factory in europe, it just made the 1eur case cost ~5euros (vat is paid on customs too). The only alternative is to go to a local mall and buy a case there for 10-15euros, and it's the same chinese case, just more expensive, but the reseller pays a lot less tax, since they can buy 100 cases for 1eur and still pay just 3eur of customs on them.
So I, the consumer get 300% customs on that 1eur case (+vat on huge customs fee), while the mall kiosk gets 3% customs fee, how is that fair? And how will that build a phone case factory in europe?
Why not build the factory first instead? Have it make 2eur phone cases, and then the price raise would make me buy the european one, but for now, it's just makes me pay more for the same chinese stuff, and I can't spend the leftover money for a local beer at a local bar anymore, so stuff actually made in europe.
They will rapidly reindustrialize when the first shots are fired. The EU's goal is the strategic defeat of Russia. What the common people think or want is irrelevant. All environmental and climate legislation that gets in the way will be waivered indefinitely until the war is over 5+ years of drone warfare and 100s of thousands dead.
There are thousands of strikes per day today. The chips needed to control a drone are not the same high cost ones needed for data centers or otherwise. Older fabs work just fine and countries can just eat into their other industries.
Beyond this, if you start attacking neutral fabs you lose out on anything from them. Your expectations are quite a bit off if you think striking fabs stops a conflict.
There are many fabs using "last year's" fab processes for defense purposes. Wouldn't be surprised if they had quick and easy way to set up fabs for chip weapons production in bombed out buildings and warehouses. Defense doesn't need civilian fabs. In the end, we, the civilians, stand to lose tremendously.
These chips are not the latest nvidia etc: false like this are relatively easy to set up compared to fabs that make the chips you seem to be thinking about.
Once the chip fabs get bombed much of modern society collapses and insurrection and civil uprising becomes everyone's #1 concern. Politicians are just too stupid to realize this because they live in a protected bubble of fantasy land where nothing they do usually ever directly effects them.
This does not even make sense as a conspiracy theory.
Had "EU" wanted to hurt Russia there were was a thousand ways to do that. But they didn't. Instead they traded and built infrastructure. Most EU countries saw Russia as a partner before they invaded their neighbour in the most gruesome way possible.
If anything, the EU should have reacted sooner. It was shameful they didn't. You can't really pretend like nothing while an all out war is taking place on the same continent.
War is less imminent now than ever. Ukraine has caused a ton of damage to Russia and at this point the Kremlin has more to worry about than EU countries (pretty much every Russian government ever is brought down from within).
No, leftist governments in the EU have failed to provide prosperity and failed in all their promises, now they're going for total control to try to stay in power.
Look at France, as soon as Le Pen was cleared to run for the presidency they start talking about anti "misinformation" laws...
It's true. Rearming and mobilizing troops will cause a reciprocal reaction in your neighbors. Whether or not war is or was imminent is irrelevant; europe will manifest it regardless.
Are you calling Macron a "leftist"? It does help your argument because it's a tautology that "the leftists failed to provide prosperity" if the entire political spectrum counts as such.
I don't share this outlook, sadly - given that military figures especially around the Eastern side of EU keep saying military conflict with Russia is "inevitable" in the next 4 years. Of course - they are in the military, their job is specifically to look at the worst case scenarios. But I wouldn't be so sure the risk is not there.
I do think there's the possibility Russia attacks a NATO country in an attempt to save face. I don't think they have the manpower or equipment to sustain an assault that would require any level of mobilization from EU countries.
"Conservative" parties in the EU are largely left by US standards... Like, Macron is conservative by Euro standards but Le Pen is obviously way further right.
The point is that the actual far right is rising all over Europe and will likely be ascendant in the next round of elections, the establishment is trying to stay in power.
I presume hes using it as a shitty euphemism for pro mass migration. Conservative governments have kind of taken side on that front despite rethoric (see Boris wave of the conservatives, CDU and such)
I quite like my left wing social policy. It's benefited me greatly and the more desperate even more so. Sure I now pay more tax than I would in the US, but my school was free, my university education was practically free, when I got diagnosed with chronic disease, the process of diagnosis was free and even expedient as it was an emergency.
My friends are allowed to be as queer as they want to be, and those who don't want to see them are free to look away.
Those with mental issues are free from destitution as their employers weren't free to just fire them.
The state should work for the most people to live the most comfortable life possible. We would have the money for it, if it weren't for the trickle down virus that's still infected half our politicians.
And I can't in good conscience judge anyone for coming here, I would do the same and would want to be treated well as well. Not be put in a concentration camp paid for by the EU, or get my dinky shot by Frontex at high sea, just before reaching the border.
Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing
but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the
hurry nor any slowness.
> ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately
It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.
My guess is that with non-left political movements on the rise better surveillance tools were needed to prevent them from winning the elections around europe.
I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.
If you look at who voted for chat control approval you would find that it's majority the currently in power centre right parties. The more far right or left you go the more likely they were against. It's like the one issue where AfD, die Linke and Greens are aligned. That suggests that it's most likely hard lobby that bribes the established class.
Nt being able to scan personal communications would break big tech platforms main monetisation strategy (selling peoples data).
None of these will be used to attack the far-right parties on the right though. They barely investigate those parties in the individual countries, but they focus more on the moderate left already.
To me it seems like the minority would be far more interested in implementing surveillance tools so they can target the majority in order to try and gain and maintain power.
It's a US data pump, and the EU is a bunch of vassal states. That's the hurry, shutting down the data flow because the permissive legislation runs out is not allowed.
I think that's a little naive. This sort of legislation is much more useful in terms of managing the local population and what they are allowed to talk about than it is in terms of profit—except, I suppose, in the sense that holding companies liable for what is said with their software is unprofitable.
for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)
obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent
In Canada, there's been a lot of talk about how immigration, "broke the Canadian consensus," around immigration as a good thing.
The problem is, there never was a consensus around immigration. The Liberals own stats prove that. What there was was a consensus around multiculturalism and tolerance.
Immigration itself, was always split evenly among three camps in Canada: those who want more, those who want less, and those who think we have the right amount.
Trudeau & his fake leftist brigade many have ruined multiculturalism for a large portion of Canadians, permanently.
The promise (for the non-insane majority) was that immigration was going to save our economic bacon. That's the orthodox economist viewpoint after all.
Well, it didn't.
The minimum anyone would have to accept is that the economy went to shit while mass immigration was happening ... (in both EU and Canada). So I guess you don't have to accept causation, but they were happening simultaneously, so this reaction by the population is justified in that sense.
It's not even that some migration is need to save the economy.
You'd need pronatalist policies or you're going to be doing that "some immigration" for ever and ever.
Hm well then perhaps it's time to focus on saving "people," over the economy. Perhaps...states are actually best used to serve their people, instead of endless growth.
> for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
This is completely BS. Nobody wants to let in unlimited migrants. This is not a goal of anyone, including the left-most left. In fact on the left we are very aware that our welfare systems can't support unlimited people.
The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers. There's processes in places to determine whether they deserve this. The right just want to turn their boats back as they approach (pushback) which is literally illegal.
It's important to realise though that asylum seekers are not the root cause of most of our issues even though they are portrayed as such by the right in deflection from the real issues. For example here in Holland the biggest societal issue is the farmers who pollute too many nitrogen compounds and that causes housing projects to be put on hold. The number of asylum seekers has been steadily decreasing over the years.
But farmers make up a huge piece of the right wing so they'll never take ownership of the problem. Better to deflect on someone else.
Numbers are going down, but in my area there are now 4 buildings with asylum seekers. Started with a hotel, then an office building, then some newly built expensive houses that were first up for rent and now rented for asylum seekers, and now another office building. Honoring existing treaties out of principle can also be put on hold when the situation changes.
From what I can tell, a big part of the problem in Europe is that people seeking asylum are prohibited from making a living (due to widespread belief in the lump of labor fallacy) and so have to be dependent on welfare.
Yes and when a government tries to do something about that (like Spain granting temporary permits so they can work and pay taxes) it angers the right even more.
The issues here are the same as they have been forever in every country; Spanish people simply are not going to do the jobs the immigrants are doing. This is the same in every country I lived in or visited, including the US. In Spain, most my uneducated neighbours feel too high to even work in bars, let alone pick fruit, shovel shit, pick up garbage etc. So who is going to do that besides immigrants who are eager to do it; a few generations later, they will vote right and complain about immigrants and will say they are too good to shovel shit, of course.
Look, you can either let people make a living and manage their own lives while contributing to society, or you can not let them make a living and ensure they're housed and fed. You can't be angry at A and also be angry at B.
Nice framing. How about C: not letting in a flood of financial refugees with completly different cultural values in the first place or at least send them back at some point instead of giving them free citizenship and all its benefits as justification for them working here or not being able to work?
> just don't want to see brown faces in the street?
They could be green for all everyone cares about. The actual relevant distinction with real word implication is criminal statistics and per capita rates. Not to mention everyday real life bad experiences for people living outside of the sheltered silicon valley world.
>countries they're from won't take them
That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.
> That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.
Countries are not entitled to keep their citizens by force to prop up their economy. If the person doesn't want to stay, why should they be forced to?
You might want to contemplate the fact that you're literally rehashing the same arguments that Soviets and East Germany used to justify their exit visas. Except you're doing it from the other end of the pipe.
If they are only asylum seekers, it means they are still in the validation process.
Unfortunately the hard-right has also defunded that process for many years, and have thus created this problem themselves. The agencies tasked with figuring out if asylum seekers have a legitimate claim are overwhelmed with all the work. This is purely a self-created problem (intended to gaslight the population in there being a huge 'immigrant problem').
> The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers.
But these are treaties are no longer fit for purpose, as can be seen by the boatloads of mostly young male economic migrants turning up in the UK to 'claim asylum'. People who've got thousands of euros to pay the small boats traffickers.
If they were refugees fleeing war or other dangers, you'd expect a lot more families - women, kids, the elderly - to be making the journey.
(Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more. But the small boats are a glaring example of a broken system being exploited)
1. highly inefficient: its slow and badly run.
2. seriously considers applications that clearly false - people from Canada and the EU do not need to claim asylum! Those numbers are tiny but it illustrates a winder spread problem. people who feel safe enough to return to the country they "fled" on holiday also clearly do not have a genuine claim.
3. It fails to provide a route for a lot of people who do have a genuine claim - e.g. religious minorities in the Middle East.
It is no longer true that the numbers of legal migrants are vastly higher because the government have decided that they need to cut the numbers of immigrants and the easiest way to do this is to cut legal immigration.
Well, don't forget some of these wars are caused by us. The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses so Dubya could make his Halliburton buddies happy. As a result and pure neglect to form a legit democratic government after the war a power vacuum ensued which caused the rise of ISIS which contributed to the war in Syria. Which directly caused the mass migration on foot from Syria.
In this way we do have responsibility towards them. The migration from Africa is a different issue but it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
> Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more.
Well exactly but nobody is talking about that. Everyone is talking about the asylum seekers. Which are only a small part of the issue.
And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market. So the parties backed by those with money are always obstructing new construction and other means to make housing cheaper. This is a much bigger problem when it comes to housing than those few apartments granted to asylum seekers.
Moral responsibility is not real responsibility that can be enforced at the point of a gun by anyone or any nation, and so this responsibility does not have to be assumed
> The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses
True, but I would say the current refugees are not those who most need refuge. Religious minorities who are the most threatened by ISIS are under-represented.
> it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
It does not happen though. it happens in the end, but the system in ridiculously slow and inefficient.
> And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market.
Surely those who need refuge from the worst Islamic regimes are the women, not the men?
As for the housing market, yes, it'd still be in a bad state with zero migration. But at the moment, it seems that we can't build enough to keep up with the migration alone. And when we do manage to build loads of homes, we completely neglect most of the infrastructure needed to support them.
We haven't built a reservoir since the 90s. Transport is a real problem, with the roads overloaded and in bad condition while rail projects seem impossibly slow and costly (HS2 is probably the last one the UK will ever attempt?). And then there's the NHS, policing+prisons, education system, and so on.
For the insane part of the left, yes. For the majority, let's be honest: no. And for the centrist voters without whom neither the left nor the right can do anything: absolutely not. Immigration was going to solve our economic troubles. Immigrants would bring welfare. That was the idea.
Well, that didn't happen. As to whether that's to blame on immigration ... I would argue it's to blame on the rate and the source of immigration. At a slow rate, selective immigration brings welfare, certainly. At this rate? Of course not. Infinite, mostly fake, refugees? No they don't bring welfare. Of course not.
Diego Rubio, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s chief of staff: "... The government provided fast-track work authorization for immigrants in sectors with labor shortages, streamlined the process for employers to apply for foreign work visas, and made it easier for immigrants to settle in so-called Empty Spain ..."
So yes leftist parties are talking about allowing very large numbers of immigrants to "save the economy" (to live and work where nobody wants to live and work: low-wage jobs on the empty Spanish countryside. But it takes immigrants a number of years, apparently about 8, to realize why not. As to how anyone can honestly describe that as an actual pro-immigration stance is beyond me. It's exploiting people)
But this anger and hatred you demonstrate so well is exactly what the right feeds off. That's why they are gaslighting you. Anger activates and motivates more than happiness.
Unfortunately it's a dead-end road, it doesn't solve anything, because immigrants and asylum seekers in particular aren't the cause of our problems. The hatred just serves to distract from the real problems. The richest getting ever richer, environmental pollution, issues nobody wants to solve because they touch their voter base (like the farmers in Holland I mentioned).
Do they? What I read now and in the past is mostly Americans being proud somehow (with Trump doing whatever he feels like to fill his family's pockets).
Is it not comparable in this case? Two western rich nations being undemocratic. At least in the EU there is voting (pointless in this case, but often effective); the US dude just does whatever he wants while the people are against it (ratings and wars which were promised would not happen etc).
Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.
And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.
Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.
for me, some ads also utterly ruin the brand of the ad host.
For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.
i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.
so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.
what would be the point of the government fining itself though?
Now that I'm thinking of it, it would create the need for an extra gaggle of bureaucrats to oversee the process,so I suppose someone might see a point to it ...
You may think you're funny or something, but boy do I have news for you.
There absolutely are fines for French administrations. And, knowing the French tax system, they've probably found a way to levy VAT and some other taxes on top of those fines.
good. now do the software enshittification part, which is the real driver of device obsolescence. being able to replace the battery is nice, but if the new battery lasts half as long because the software needs twice as much resources to perform the same tasks - you're not really fixing anything.
You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.
Very few people do that. I don't.
Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.
Every time a small device like a cell phone or watch or camera or etc gets opened and worked on, they never come back the same. Waterproof seals get broken, parts get misaligned, heat doesn't sink properly, etc. You can extend the life of these devices with repairs sometimes, but they tend to limp along.
> You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.
Still way more expensive than swapping a battery pack, and this mean leaving your phone to a stranger for a few hours or maybe a day if the shop is really busy.
Anything that add friction to changing battery will help sell new phone.
Nah, sorry, enshittification is not "just an excuse". My current 2020 phone(xperia 5-ii - I wanted that sd slot&jack) is noticeably slower than when I got it, even though the battery is holding up decently(it basically needs to last a day, and it usually does). Software shops seem to get focused on testing their stuff on "modern" devices. It looks like, once your device starts to slip out of that "testing pool", things get increasingly buggy until it eventually makes general use enough of a pain to require replacement.
I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.
I have 4+ years old S22 Ultra and there is absolutely nothing slowed down. I didn't install any crap semi-random apps just for the lolz, its basically static set of features with maybe 2 new apps per year added as it keeps doing more and more like ebanking or work auth. It doesn't even have Snapdragon processor, just their own Exynos and its simply fine.
It keeps getting all updates and will keep for few more years.
Camera results massively improved cca 2 years ago with some update so that they are cca on same level as current ones. Plus I still has 10x physical zoom which trumps all current models, iphone pro max including since we still can't bypass physical limits of optics.
Really, 0 reasons to update and battery capacity is the only upcoming issue - still fine now but I feel the decrease a bit. If I could swap it easily myself without paying some phone shop to do it, that's a massive advantage.
There's flash degradation that's unfortunately a factor, too. If not for that and thermal problems (which I learned were common in this model), I'd probably be still using my S22.
(OTOH, I upgraded to a foldable, and don't want to ever use a regular candybar phone ever again.)
AI just gave the students a way to dodge the slog.
But university was never intended to teach the bleeding edge. That would really be impossible in practice. Pre-phd, it is supposed to teach ways to efficiently attack a problem. you can take a bunch of "play courses", and succeeding at any of those requires pretty much only that one skill.
Nowadays, the challenge they face, is to keep teaching "problem attack methods" in a way that can't be trivialized by AI.
Though fundamentally, if you go to university, and evade learning the one thing you can learn there - thats your loss.