This feels like it's becoming less and less true, good quality items are becoming so expensive now or very hard to find.
I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
I'm a big fan of the Harbor Freight Pareto Principle
If you're a hobbyist or doing something at home, a lot of the times you're gonna buy some random tool and only use it a few times. 80% of the time, the Harbor Freight knockoff is going to be good enough. If you use a tool so much that it breaks, then it's time to spring for the expensive and high quality version.
However you may want to go straight to the nice version for things that have safety implications (skip the infamous Harbor Freight jack stands)
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
The "boots" item feels less true, because expensive doesn't seem to be as correlated with "good quality" as it used to. But the general statement still very much stands.
Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this. And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one.
It can still apply to individual items, as long as you're careful about what you buy and do your research to make sure you're actually buying high quality boots, and not just cheap ones with an expensive logo on the side.
It's also just broadly true about whole categories. For example home ownership. Most poor people rent, which means having a place to live costs them money, but they get nothing for that money as a result, they just need to keep paying forever.
Utilities, in my country people who aren't trusted to pay for electricity, gas, even water (which you need to live!) in arrears have to pay up front for it, so maybe I use 500 kWh of electricity, and I've agreed to pay 20p per kWh = £100, at the end of the month I get a bill for £100 and I settle that a few days later, if I don't eventually I get angry letters and eventually a court summons. That's electricity I used two weeks ago and I won't even pay for it until May. But if I was poor, I might find my best option is I pre-pay £10 to get 40 kWh of electricity. So that 500kWh would cost £120 and I have to buy it first before I use it and if at any time I forget or can't pay the lights go off immediately that my credit runs out.
>Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this.
Exchange of future cash flows are not comparable to a one time exchange of goods or services due to the risk of default.
> And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one.
This is a good example, but the best example I can think of is having sufficient cash flow to be able to purchase a home in a higher socioeconomic neighborhood, because if you have kids, you are effectively paying almost nothing for a higher quality education since a lot of comes back to you in the form of equity and your child’s increased chances of financial stability.
It likely is AI scrapers essentially doing a DDoS. They use separate IPs (and vary the UA) to prevent blocking.
I have a site which is currently being hit (over 10k requests today) and it looks like scrapers as every URL is different. If it was a DDoS, they would target costly pages like my search not every single URL.
SQLite had the same thing: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/7d3eb059f81ff694
As have a few other open source repositories. It looks like badly written crawlers trying to crawl sites as fast as possible.
Unless Trump wants to start WW3 the US won't be able to do anything, and even if he did start WW3, Europe would be able to destroy those bases.
The whole point of them was to give the US influence while improving US security. Given Europe can't trust Trump will come to their aid, they won't give the US as much influence over Europe.
Have you ever wondered why the US is able to spend so much on its military? Ever wondered why the US keeps on printing the dollar that's not backed by any gold reserve and other nations still give you real things such as food, resources, goods in exchange for it?
Here's a hint! It's your military. To put it bluntly, European nations and other US allies pretend the dollar has actual value and the US in turn guarantees security and backs the world order based on the rule of law.
Looks like the US is looking to pull out of its end of the deal. That's fair enough, being the world's policeman is sure a heavy burden to carry. I just don't see many people recognizing the implications for the US economy.
The Lemmy homelab community is up to 1.67k subscribers (https://lemmy.ml/c/homelab) so while people may not be joining a specific homelab instance, they are creating accounts somewhere and joining the community.
Having said that, it doesn't seem very active at the moment which isn't a good sign. Granted, I have no idea how active the subreddit is to compare.
The selfhosted community on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted) is up to 12.5k subscribers and seems fairly active so it's possible there might be enough people who care this time for it to work.
That doesn't seem to be true though. There are multiple countries outside the EU that have an adequacy decisions regarding their privacy laws like: Japan, South Korea, Canada, UK, Isreal, etc. They can host EU data without issues.
The only reason the privacy shield agreement was thrown out was due to lack of safe guards from US intelligence.
Even without the privacy shield, US companies would still be able to store EU data in a country with an adequacy decision if it wasn't for the CLOUD act. This seems more to do with US law wanting access to EU data.
Is there anything restricting US companies from first transferring EU data to a country `A` with an adequacy decision and then transferring that data to the US (assuming `A` allows this)?
It looks like the court decided SCCs were not sufficient as Cloudflare is subject to US surveillance laws so they wouldn't be able to provide adequate guarantees.
I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
reply