iPhone Duo - Apple Sorry Apple™, I’m really finding it quite hard to justify spending thousands of dollar on your products!

From $1999 or $83.29/mo. for 24 mo.*

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ When it was just me and my wife, maybe, fine, okay. But now I have two young children that also want the same shit™ as we do. This starts becoming a nearly ~$8k expensve just for some fucking whoop-ti-do-da foldable iPhone with a bigger screen.

Who cares? 🤔 I want my ~A$800 iPhone back that fits in my hand. #Apple #Rants #Expensive #Crap

@thecanine@twtxt.net Double standards and cognitive dissonance are great, aren’t they? 🙄

(My favorite line last week came from one of those hardcore AI bros: “Awww, man, hardware has gotten so expensive, everything sold out, this really sucks … *Thanks, nVidia.*“ 🤦‍♀️)

@david@daiwei.me if you have some weekend home type place, with no Internet, getting TV through an antenna and a DVBT box, my recommendation is to just buy some old Dell monitor with HDMI to 3.5mm audio output built in, so you can connect speakers to it.

Doesn’t have to be Dell, but you can often just buy one of those from your employer, for under $25 here.

Were this sadly makes much less sense, in with Internet TV services. Those usually need a dedicated TV app to function and while that can be replaced with a $200 TV box, that some providers force you to rent, thus making you pay more for your Internet TV forever - this also means giving up the “archive app”, that gives you access to all the on demand content, included in the price of your mandatory TV license. None of these overpriced boxes come with it, as they’d mauch rather make you pay, for yet another subscription service instead.

So yes, you can kinda do it with an Internet TV too, assuming you trust the expensive box to not spy on you, but in that case you’re mostly just paying a whole lot more, for a lot less, than you would be, with the LG TV.

@prologic@twtxt.net Our company is paying a shitload of money for all these (different) AI tools … I’m probably not allowed to tell you the exact number, but it is a lot. The only other way would be to lay off employees, so we can pay even more for AI. (Needless to say, that would be the worst possible move.)

For a private person, $20 a month is also pretty expensive, isn’t it? And then assume that you maybe need more than one AI tool. You’re quickly up to $50 a month or much more. This isn’t something that I, as a private person, will ever be willing to spend for this kind of stuff.

“AI” is just expensive as fuck. On every level. They will have to (ab)use every possible way to squeeze more money out of it, and that includes ads and what not.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The nice thing about properties is that you can compute and cache things on the fly at first attempt and also ensure validation for writing. But like you said, since it’s not obvious that reading or writing might do some more things, it’s strongly advised to avoid doing expensive stuff disguised as properties.

I reckon the vast majority of property use cases is to provide read-only access. At least that was my impression when I was doing a lot more in Python.

Personally, I think that this just reads a lot nicer:

oink.my_property
oink.my_property = 42

Than:

oink.get_my_property()
oink.set_my_property(42)

Btw, any field access is implemented using method calls. I might be wrong, but I believe there’s always __getattr__ and __setattr__ involved. 8-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de yup, yup! Our neighbours spent their $50-60K to build their swimming pools. Our community (73 houses) has 52 pools. Our house is one of the few that doesn’t. They are expensive things, not just to build them, but their maintenance. Ain’t nobody got money for that!

The firefly season is ending. I only saw 200 of them or so. There was one female directly on the forest road. If only I brought my camera and tripod, that would have worked out I reckon. I had my torch with me and this looked really cool.

Dusk took forever today. It was really long light out there. Full moon is tomorrow.

On the way back, there was suddenly a load clatter and crashing sound 100 meters away from me. I didn’t see anything, but a tree fell over in the forest out of the blue. Fuck me dead, that was scary as hell. Luckily, I was already on the main road, only meadows around me. It’s the second time I witnessed a tree accidentally coming down. The first one was during the most expensive hail storm in our area so far in 2011 behind me when setting up a summer camp. The weather changed in less than 15 minutes.

Maybe not such a good idea to go out so late alone. :-? Any rustling in the forest immediately reminded me of the boar the other day. Luckily, always false alarm. Still a bit terrified from that event.

I noticed that there are quite a few UI glitches in vim-classic – and quickly found the cause: It comes with outdated Unicode tables.

I have to admit that I wasn’t aware that there’s a new Unicode release every year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions

Look at this huge number of changes. Every program has to keep track of that, often through libraries but sometimes not (like in Vim’s case).

I use Unicode extensively, but this shit is extremely expensive …

My TUI framework is having the same problem. At the moment, this is all offloaded to wcwidth, but if that library was to become unmaintained, I’d have to track Unicode myself.

Gah!

The DOS days were simpler. CP437, end of story. (Yes, I know that’s a lie.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

There’s a new one to stay on one of Australia’s most exclusive islands
It has a reputation for being both pristine and eye-wateringly expensive, but there’s a new way to experience this pristine paradise. ⌘ Read more

Škoda’s New EV Will Likely Be Its Most Expensive Yet
The Škoda Peaq, which will debut this summer as the European automaker’s flagship model, seats seven and has an intriguing design. It will almost certainly come with a hefty price tag. ⌘ Read more

World Cup Ticket Prices in Mexico City Too Expensive for Most Fans
The opening game in Mexico City took place amid weeks of protests from groups including teachers’ unions complaining about pay and pensions. ⌘ Read more

NDIS overhaul must look beyond the balance sheet
The rush to meet the federal government’s NDIS savings target shouldn’t come at the expense of those in need. ⌘ Read more

World Cup Ticket Prices in Mexico City Too Expensive for Most Fans
The opening game in Mexico City took place amid weeks of protests from groups including teachers’ unions complaining about pay and pensions. ⌘ Read more

NSW universities took $3.2 billion from domestic students but are still running at a loss
Full-time domestic students cost an average of $12,000 each even though they are paying for expensive degrees, a parliamentary report has found. ⌘ Read more

Up the duff and in the red
Being pregnant is risky, expensive and sometimes fatal. Should women be paid for it? ⌘ Read more

When things go wrong inside Sydney’s most expensive schools
The HSC might not be a race, but among schools it is definitely a competition. ⌘ Read more

How to Edit, Merge, and Split PDFs With Free Online Tools
You don’t need expensive software for basic PDF tasks. In fact, all you need is a handful of free web-based apps. ⌘ Read more

From a $1.3m Zetland unit to one of Sydney’s most expensive homes: Estranged wife wins $95m mansion
Billionaire John Li has for the past five years called one of Australia’s most expensive properties his home. But he no longer owns it. ⌘ Read more

@arne@uplegger.eu Indeed. I’m glad that it’s all just static HTML. The most expensive part about this is probably TLS. 🤷‍♀️

Private school sports betting site reported to gambling regulators
The website encourages gambling on sporting clashes between 11 of Victoria’s most expensive schools in football, rugby and soccer. ⌘ Read more

Tamara was grappling with a cancer diagnosis. Then came the $35,000 in medical bills
The first financial shock was the out-of-pocket expenses during the diagnostic phase. Then came the bills for four operations. ⌘ Read more

How do you calculate the cost of war in Iran?
Expensive missiles are just the start. How do you tally the cost of war – and what will be the bill for Operation Epic Fury? ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Jesus, that’s expensive. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net my gosh, that’s some expensive lottery! I have the feeling I would win, but I never play. 🤭 Wife, on the other hand, does. East and west coast, with a bunch of her friends (a pool). They win nothing, for many years. 😅

Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees
Article URL: https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tokens-agents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48244434

Points: 54

# Comments: 14 ⌘ Read more

Airfare Keeps Going Up. Here Are Some Tricks to Finding Cheap(er) Tickets
It’s an expensive time to fly. These tips can help lighten the load on your wallet. ⌘ Read more

Just saw the video. Can’t believe that ladder is that expensive. Even in AUD, it is almost $100. It is also 2.5 stars, with 13 reviews. Gulp. Engineering aside (and you are right, it is pretty interesting, and some, if not most of it went over my head), the ladder is rubbish. This is the one I have. Not super, but have been with me for a while, and used quite a bit, still as good as new.

‘Bear suit’ fraudsters sentenced to jail for elaborate insurance scam
The inventive crooks had been caught staging bear attacks on expensive cars by dressing up in a costume. Back in 2024, we reported on what must assure… ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.

… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I never saw the point of a registry to be honest, as it defeated the point of what I believed to be a truly decentralised non-social social ecosystem. What can and does work however is a search engine and crawler. I used to run one, but I took it down, mostly because it got expensive to operate, at least the implementation I built… Maybe one day i’ll try again with a SQLite backend.

My washing machine is making funny noises and I’m this 🤏 close to just throwing it out and washing everything by hand, instead of buying another expensive enshittified product that’s designed to break down in a couple of years.

Washing is easy anyway, the spin cycle to dry that stuff is the important part …

@bender@twtxt.net Only missing roots would trigger that kind of sync IIRC. And that only works if another peering pod has the root twt. What you’re remembering, possibly, is an attempt to do what you were thinking of… But I tried it, turned out to be too expensive of an operation to do auotmatically.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, the lower right corner is different on purpose: It’s where you can click and drag to resize the window. https://movq.de/v/cbfc575ca6/vid-1767977198.mp4 Not sure how to make this easier to recognize. 🤔 (It’s the only corner where you can drag, btw.)

@bender@twtxt.net Seriously, if I ever get a CRT monitor again, I want it to be an amber one and then hook it up to some 8086. 😅 Only problem is that this stuff is expensive as hell now …

Before smartphones people used to use the Sony Camcorders, but even though they still exist today, they’re uber expensive 😂

@kiwu@twtxt.net at what price range are you looking to keep your expenses? A mobile phone camera doesn’t cut it?

@prologic@twtxt.net Time to make a new internet. Maybe one that intentionally doesn’t “scale” and remains slow (on both ends) so it’s harder to overload in this manner, harder to abuse for tracking your every move, … Got any of those 56k modems left?

(I’m half-joking. “Make The Internet Expensive Again” like it was in the 1990ies and some of these problems might go away. Disclaimer: I didn’t have my coffee yet. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net Pfft, they want folks to relocate to Sydney. Fuck that 🤣 Sydney is a bit like San Francisco, I’m not actually sure which is worse. Fuck’n expensive as hell, the only palce you’d be able to afford to buy or rent is at least ~2hrs out of the city by public transport (i.e: train) and by that time you’ve just pissed your life down the toilet, because you’d be expected ot work a 9-10hr day + 2-3hrs of travel each way, buy the time you factor in having to wake up super early to get ready to travel in to work, you basically have zero time for anything else, let alone your ufamily,

Fuck that.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s way more expensive and time-consuming in the end. If only somebody had warned us!!1

The triangle reminds me of zalgo text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text

‘Oops’: Trump health official admits half of ‘sweeping’ layoffs at CDC were a mistake
David McAfee,  Senior Editor  -  Slate

Stephan: At one level, this is a bit of good news. At another level it is a further picture of the chaos the Trump administration has created in America’s already low ranking, but most expensive in the world, healthcare system.

![](https://www.schwartzreport.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Screenshot-2025-10-13-at-12.57 … ⌘ Read more

Open source mega-constellations could solve overcrowding
Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it’s unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space. ⌘ Read more

Ultra-thin sodium films offer low-cost alternative to gold and silver in optical technologies
From solar panels to next-generation medical devices, many emerging technologies rely on materials that can manipulate light with extreme precision. These materials—called plasmonic materials—are typically made from expensive metals like gold or silver. But what if a cheaper, more abundant metal could do the job just as well or better? ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Some stuff is actually more reliable, that’s true. It’s also waaaaaaaaaaay more expensive, though … :-)

I called it a day, yes. \o/

What #TheLEFT had to say about #vonderleyen ’s #SOTU speech?

There are several news stories going around saying that there are two no-confidence votes to Von Der Leyen about to be submitted, saying little to nothing about them, and even filing them together as if they both want or mean the same.

It might be useful to know exactly what the criticisms are, so here is a link to The Left’s comment to today’s speech. Read it in full, but here is my summary:

• “acts as the guardian of the interests of the most powerful, at the expense of democracy, justice, and the future of the planet”;

• Gaza: “The bare minimum is ending military cooperation and fully suspending the EU–Israel Association Agreement. This is genocide and we need to do everything to stop it”

• pushing the MERCOSUR deal (they are actually light on their criticism of this treaty, but I’ll leave my rant about ot on a another toot)

• the EU-US deal: “subjugation of European policy to the economic and military interests of the USA. You are sacrificing energy, digital policy, security, and climate protection on the altar of the hollow phrase of transatlantic partnership”

• “Europeans’ living standards are falling, jobs are lost, authoritarianism grows, and social systems are under pressure”

https://left.eu/the-last-state-of-the-union/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What do you define as “expensive”? 🤔 (I’ve always thought of modern-day painters as a “rip”, and the ink my god 🤯)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. There’s “ESC/POS” as a variant of “ESC/P”, if I’m not mistaken.

All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding “traditional” dot matrix printers for use at home. 😅 Epson still sells them, but they’re more expensive than my laser printer was. So yeah, they still exist, just expensive, by the looks of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Are you sure?

because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive.

I think dot matrix printers are still pretty common in many Point of Sales (POS) registers right? At least here in AU they’re very common. I had a quick look myself today, there seems to be quite a solid market for these types of printers. In fact even EPSON still sell Dot Matrix printers themselves 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

FWIW, I have an OKI Microline 3390eco. Good thing is, you can still buy new cartridges for it.

If you want to buy a new device, check if it supports the “ESC/P” standard. That’s very widely supported.

@prologic@twtxt.net If anything looks expensive, then it’s that. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net That’s what I thought as well, sounds way too expensive to me. But I have no idea what the prices are over here. Probably also astronomical. Campers sit around most of the time, one really would need to use them a lot to justify spending so much money on them.

But yeah, each to their own (expensive) hobbies. :-) I, for example, burn my money on tools that I don’t really™ need. :-P

Those campers are so expensive! For comparison: https://www.rvtrader.com/Orlando/rvs-for-sale?city=orlando&state=Florida%7CFL

Selling a home in Australia is getting more expensive — one company controls most listings
It can cost thousands to list a property online for sale. The competition regulator has stepped in after years of complaints that REA Group is using its dominant position to the detriment of home sellers and real estate agents. ⌘ Read more

Woman forced to become a ‘reproductive refugee’ to legally undergo IVF
Four years after freezing her eggs for the future option of motherhood, Jane was shocked to find she could not use them to access IVF in WA — sending her on an expensive and lonely interstate mission. ⌘ Read more

Robots roll out as grape growers struggle with disease, rising costs
Wine grape growers grappling with declining sales and rising expenses hope advancements in autonomous technology can help to safeguard the industry. ⌘ Read more

@nghialele@nghia.im Man, I wish I could watch Formula 1 on a regular basis again, but it has become expensive as fuck here. 🫤

TSA warns travelers these free services at airports can lead to your data being stolen
Matt Durr ,  Contributing Writer  -  mlive

Stephan: Flying in the United States today has become more expensive, less safe, often cancelled, and it leaves you more vulnerable to having your personal data stolen.  Even the TSA acknowledges this vulnerability, and this is what they recommend to protect yourself.

![](https://www.schwartzreport.net/wp-co … ⌘ Read more

You Can Download & Play Fortnite on iPhone & iPad Again
Fortnite, the wildly popular online action game, is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users to download and play. The app has returned after Apple removed the popular game roughly five years ago while Apple and Epic engaged in an expensive drawn out legal squabble, which ultimately ended up disappointing and irritating … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/05/21/you-can-download-play-fortnite-on-iphone-ipad … ⌘ Read more

We had sun, clouds, wind, rain and a whole lot of fun on our trip to the Wasserberg. We’ve been out seven hours in total, not bad at all for all those kilometers. We added on some detours to check out a pond I’ve been introduced by a mate a few years back.

After some (expensive) tucker at the Wasserberghaus, we tried to actually visit the summit this time. However, there’s nothing to see, just a rough logging trail (46-49). That was a dead end, so we had to turn around. It was some nice exploring, but I reckon this was my first and last time up there. :-)

Image

Unfortunately, we didn’t go to the neighboring Fuchseck this time, only the Wasserberg with some extras.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-den-wasserberg-2025-05-18/

Influencer with no medical license picked to be nation’s top doctor
Emily Singer,  Staff Writer  -  Daily Kos

_Stephan: The United States, which already has the lowest healthcare ranking in the developed world, as well as the highest expense, thanks to aspiring dictator Trump, now has the strangest healthcare system in the world. Not only has Trump gutted most the institutions and agencies that do medical research, he has now appointed as Casey Means as Surg … ⌘ Read more

‘The Fix Is In’: GOP Wants Poor People to Pay More for Medicaid to Fund Tax Cuts for Wealthy
Jake Johnson,    -  Common Dreams

_Stephan: Healthcare in the United States is the worst system, as well as the most expensive, in the developed world. It is about to get much worse because aspiring dictator Trump, and his MAGAt-controlled Congress are trying to pay for tax cuts for the oligarch – who already pay a lower fraction of their annu … ⌘ Read more

Sometimes things go wrong when buying CDs second-hand. I bought an album quite cheap – but as it turned out, they only checked the cover, not the content, so I got something else instead which is actually much more expensive. 🤣

@thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah this is where I think all the hype really falls down. It’s all just a really really expensive search engine and auto-complete 🤦‍♂️ That’s it!

The Nintendo Switch 2 is $700, are video games getting more expensive?
High-end games and systems are more popular than ever, but what about their price tags? ⌘ Read more

There are other tasks LLM(s) are far better suited for, which are also its downsides, and gawd so expensive and unrealistic to run yourself 🤦‍♂️ Do you know what one of these NVIDIA H100’s cost? 💲 That’s right! 🤣 > $50k USD 😱 And many of the models out there require 8 of these suckers 🤣 Each one consumes around ~400W of power each (not including the machine that houses them!)

Anchor Screws
⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I’ll think about switching to higher resolution teasers in the future. The reasoning behind the thumbnails is to avoid wasting traffic. Maybe folks in the outback or on expensive mobile networks appreciate it. Yeah, they could disable images in general.

10 Hilarious Excuses Firms Once Gave to Cover Up Their Bad Deeds
Big corporations often hire expensive PR firms, crisis managers, and legal teams to clean up their messes. But sometimes, the excuses they cook up are so laughably bad they only make things worse. Whether it’s blaming hackers, the weather, or even the consumers themselves, these companies tried to dodge accountability in the most ridiculous ways […]

The post [10 Hilarious Excuses Firms Once Gave to Cove … ⌘ Read more

CDC’s top laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration
Helen Branswell,  Senior Writer, Infectious Diseases  -  STAT

_Stephan: American healthcare already the worst amongst the developed democracies of the world and by orders of magnitude the most expensive, has been so severely destroyed that your healthcare is already seriously compromised and your health may be at risk. Imagine, we have a system in which th … ⌘ Read more

Trump Will Get His Showy (And Likely Expensive) Military Parade in D.C.
Tom Sherwood,  Staff Writer  -  Washington, D.C. City Paper

_Stephan: I have been waiting for this. All dictators like nothing better than huge ceremonial military displays. Think about Nazi Germany, North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Putin’s Russia. So it appears So, that’s where we are headed on Saturday, June 14, for the maximum leader’s 79th birthday. It will cost tens of mill … ⌘ Read more

FOSDEM 2025
I recently attended the large Free and Open Source Software conference
FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. I went there by train, of course,
via Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Cologne. The same route back.

Image

I lived in the rather expensive, allegedly fancy hotel Le Châtelain in
Brussels. It was really not that fancy, but they had a … ⌘ Read more

A catastrophe is unfolding at the top US health agency — and it will put American lives at risk
Dylan Scott,  Staff Writer  -  Vox

_Stephan: In 2024 the United States was ranked by the World Health Organization as the worse healthcare, yet by orders of magnitude the most expensive, in the developed democracies. Thanks to psychopath “monarch” Trump American healthcare will now get significantly worse, Almost unbelievably America’s h … ⌘ Read more

[$] Approaches to reducing TLB pressure
The CPU’s translation lookaside buffer (TLB) caches the results of
virtual-address translations, significantly speeding memory accesses. TLB
misses are expensive, so a lot of thought goes into using the TLB as
efficiently as possible. Reducing pressure on the TLB was the topic of Rik
van Riel’s memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Some approaches were
considered, but the session was short on firm conclusions. ⌘ Read more

How did childcare in the US become so absurdly expensive?
Robin Buller,  Staff Writer  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: As I have told readers again and again, one of the things that stands out about American society is how poor, and yet how expensive everything about childhood is. It is hard to be born as a baby in the United States, our infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world, and even if the child survives American maternal mortality is almost f … ⌘ Read more

All 50 States Show Rising Rates of Avoidable Death, While Comparable Countries Improve
Irene Papanicolas, Maecey Niksch, and Jose F. Figueroa,  Medical Researchers  -  Study Finds

_Stephan: The United States has the worst, yet most expensive healthcare in the developed world. Americans live shorter lives than people in other developed nations. The United States has more avoidable deaths than other developed nations. Those are facts. And un … ⌘ Read more

RFK Jr.’s Mass Layoffs: How Many Jobs Top Health Agencies Will Lose
Kristina Fiore,  Director of Enterprise & Investigative Reporting  -  MedPage Today

Stephan: The United States already has the lowest-ranked and most expensive healthcare system in the developed world. Now, as the fascists continue their coup, it is going to get worse. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what good healthcare is actually like.

![](https://www.schwartzreport.net/wp-c … ⌘ Read more

I’ve identified several issues with my current (admittedly cheap) upright bass by now. It might be time to upgrade to a better model. 🤔

If only those things weren’t so damn expensive. I just checked the prices and simply burst out laughing. 😂

I lost my original Windows 95 CD (and it’s too expensive for my taste to buy on eBay), so I finally sat down and got an old disk image of one of my PCs to work in QEMU.

I don’t intend to do much with Win95. I just want to be able to boot it, if I want to check how certain things worked or looked in that version. The purpose of this really is to be an archeological digsite.

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@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).

(#h5cwthq) @kat@kat That’s thankfully not entirely true. There are some companies that are starting to realize that “Cloud” i …
@kat @yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz That’s thankfully not entirely true. There are some companies that are starting to realize that “Cloud” is actually more expensive and so we’re starting to see a bit of a migration back 🤞 ⌘ Read more

10 Expensive Infrastructure “Solutions” That Were Total Fails
Infrastructure projects are meant to improve lives, reduce congestion, and modernize cities, but sometimes, they backfire spectacularly. Whether due to poor planning, unintended consequences, or outright corruption, these projects exacerbated the very problems they were designed to fix. From flood barriers that made flooding worse to highways that increased traffic, here are 10 times infrastructure […]

The post … ⌘ Read more

@arne@uplegger.eu That’s nice, but … where do they get the money for this? Must be expensive as heck. 😅

Self-hosting my emails again: A few weeks in
A few weeks ago, I moved back to self-hosting my mail server after using Purelymail for three years. The decision wasn’t about cost – it’s actually more expensive to rent a VPS – but about control, security, and data locality. My mails are now hosted in Europe, giving me more confidence in their privacy, and I can configure everything exactly as I want while ensuring compliance with GDPR. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net i hope all corpo AI dies slow and expensive deaths

Trump executive orders threaten healthcare of millions of Americans
Marina Dunbar ,  Staff Writer  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

Stephan: Healthcare is going to deteriorate more in this country, as well as becoming more expensive As this article describes middle and lower-class Americans will be particularly affected.

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Netflix Increases Prices Again
Netflix is raising its prices for all plans in several countries, including the United States, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina. The cheapest Standard with ads plan will be $1 more expensive in the U.S., going from $6.99 to $7.99 per month.

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The Standard plan’s price will increase from $15.49 to $17.99 per month, and the Premium plan will now cost $24.99 per month, up from $22.99 per month. The St … ⌘ Read more

(#l5hukaa) @doesnm whilst technically true, expensive and unnecessary.
@doesnm @doesnm.p.psf.lt whilst technically true, expensive and unnecessary. ⌘ Read more

GOP senator who appeared to urinate on self in DUI test caught double-dipping on expenses
Cassandra Stephenson,  Staff Writer  -  Raw Story | Tennessee Lookout

Stephan: I want to make a point today that most of the media either does not see, or won’t properly address. They do one-off stories like this one, but they don’t report on the trend I described in my editor’s comment.

![](https://www.schwartzreport.net/wp-content/uploads/20 … ⌘ Read more

The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military
Mark Bowden,  Contributing Writer  -  The Atlantic | msn

_Stephan: This is the best assessment I have ever read about how a military-industrial complex so expensive that it costs you and me almost a trillion dollars a year, more than the nine next biggest military national budgets combined, yet cannot meet the needs of even the Ukrainians because of poor planning and corporate greed. Imagine what those billions properly spent could … ⌘ Read more

‘Our big fear’: How Trump’s plan to privatize USPS could have ‘disastrous consequences’
Carl Gibson,  AlterNet Staff Writer  -  Raw Story | AlterNet

_Stephan: Since he took office as Postmaster General, I have been reporting in SR about Louis DeJoy’s destruction of the Postal Service. It is much slower and more expensive than it was when he came into office. I consider it one of the major failures of the Biden administration and the Republica … ⌘ Read more

Hungry flying foxes cost SA cherry growers $4million to save Christmas
Flying foxes are in abundance in South Australia and their hunger for local fruit is now impacting cherry growers, resulting in an expensive solution to save your Christmas celebration. ⌘ Read more

The deep roots of Americans’ hatred of their health care system
Dylan Scott,   Editor and Senior Correspondent  -  VOX

_Stephan: The expense, quality, and social outcome data of America’s illness profit system (IPS) has become so expensive and bad that many apparently see the shooting of United Healthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson as a killing done by someone enflamed with rage by something that happened to them done by the IPS.  I think Trump, the oligarchs who serv … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Maker Rebrands as “Global Crew of Activists”
Mozilla, facing the loss of 80% of their income and mass layoffs, pays for expensive rebranding. ⌘ Read more

Editor’s Note – Can You Help
,    -

Stephan:

I have been doing SR now for 33 years; I give it away freely and don’t permit advertising because I don’t have time to dig out whether a potential advertiser fosters wellbeing. Over the years it has taken longer and longer each day to research fact-based articles and reports, and it has become ever more expensive. My out-of-pocket costs last year were $22,000, and this year it will be more. So if you read SR regularly, and are able to, I would certai … ⌘ Read more

Editor’s Note – Can You Help
,    -

Stephan:

I have been doing SR now for 33 years; I give it away freely and don’t permit advertising because I don’t have time to dig out whether a potential advertiser fosters wellbeing. Over the years it has taken longer and longer each day to research fact-based articles and reports, and it has become ever more expensive. My out-of-pocket costs last year were $22,000, and this year it will be more. So if you read SR regularly, and are able to, I would certai … ⌘ Read more

U.S. gets poor grade for maternal, infant health care outcomes
Marina E. Franco,    -  Axios | March of Dimes

Stephan: Yet another miserable report about the inferiority of America’s illness profit system. While the two parties in Congress whine and rant about each other no one other than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seems to give a damn about the grim healthcare social outcome data that failed, yet so expensive, system produces year after year.

![](h … ⌘ Read more

Why Mass Deportations Would Cripple California’s Economy
Mark Kreidler,    -  The American Prospect

_Stephan: When you combine Trump’s tariffs and his deportation schemes, what you get is that you and I are, by Robert Reich’s estimate, going to face about $6,000 in additional annual expenses. It is going to particularly impact Trump working and middle-class voters in Red states. And that doesn’t even address the massive social disruption that will arise from ripping im … ⌘ Read more

This bloody inflight.pacwisp.net is Uber expensive haha 😆 I have 4MB left poo 💩
This bloody inflight.pacwisp.net is Uber expensive haha 😆 I have 4MB left poo 💩 ⌘ Read more

Two friends with a love of coffee cross paths with Colombian farmer, changing lives across continents
Mathew Hatcher and Lewis McKenzie started a coffee-roasting business in a small Australian town, motivated less by money and more by the excuse to taste rare and expensive beans. When they met a coffee-growing family from Colombia, the business would transform lives and form a “connection with the heart”. ⌘ Read more

I wish I had someone who could send me the Hacker Decals and Patch from Hackerboxes. Mail forwarding systems are so expensive!