I’ve been boycotting Amazon for over a decade on account of their shameless tax avoidance and evasion, the way they treat workers and even suppliers and the abuse of dark patterns on their website.

For those paying attention it’s been painfully for more than a decade that Bezos is a total sociopath with not a shred of Ethics or Morals.

This now is really just the emerging to visibility of another totally predicable natural reflection of that man’s sick sociopathic views when it comes to other human beings and entrenching of his top-parasite position in this society.

In all fairness, newspapers as Personal Propaganda Outlets for the very rich isn’t something new and has a long tradition.

What’s was new (but clearly we’re beyond that by now) was the effort at many levels in the mid/later XX century and early XXIs one to pass them as genuine independent newspapers with actual journalistic integrity.

If it’s owned or controlled by a single individual, a small number of individuals or a group of individuals all from the same social background (The Guardian being a good example of the latter, being entirelly controlled by a small section of the English upper middle class and upper class), its going to pretty much just be a disguised loudspeaker for their voice, “making opinions” to support that which furthers their interests.

Whilst I agree with you in everthing but the first 2 words of your post, I think this is yet another “look at this cool gadget” post that overhypes something, and that is a kind of spam we get a bit of around here, even if nowhere near the levels of the Elon crap or even just US politics.

This is especially frustratingfor people who, like me, looked at the diagram they link from their article and found out it’s pretty much the same as a run of the mill breadboard power adaptor with a USB-C connector and a slightly better design than the cheap chinese ones, rather than something trully supporting USB-PD (this thing doesn’t even support the basic USB 1.0 negotiation needed to get more than 150mA when connecting to a proper USB host).

That the article then mentions a “crowdfunding campaign” for something that a junior EE can design with a bit of datasheet digging, carries a bit of a stink of a cash-grab, so seeing it as spam is understandable.

If you look at the circuit diagram in their documentation linked from that article, that thing doesn’t even support USB-PD or even just the USB 1.0 device side of the negotiation to increase the current limit from the default (150mA in USB 3) to high (900mA in USB 3). It will look like it works fine if you connect it to a dumb USB power supply (because those thing don’t really do any USB protocol stuff, just dumbly supply power over USB connectors up to the power source’s limit) but if you connect it to, say, a PC USB port (which does implement the USB host side of the USB protocol), your circuit on the breadboard that worked fine when using a dumb USB power supply with that breadboard adaptor might not work because the current it needs exceeds that default 150mA limit for devices that haven’t done USB negotiation (worse if it’s a USB 2.0 port, as the limit is lower for those)

This thing is basically the same as the chinese power breadboard adaptors you can get in places like Aliexpress, but with a USB-C connector instead of a Type-A, micro-USB or mini-USB one, plus its better designed (it has a proper Buck Converter instead of a cheap Votage Regulator, plus better power supply filtering and a polyfuse to protect it and the host from current overdraws).

The headline and the article seriously exagerate this “achievement”.

TL;DR - It’s a nice and pretty run of the mill breadboard power adaptor which happens to support USB-C connectors, but the article and its title insanely oversell the thing.

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This is not exact as amazing an achievement as the headline implies since the necessary stuff to talk the to the USB PD host upstream is already integrated so you just need to get a chip that does it (and even without it, you’ll get 150mA @ 5V by default out of the USB 3 host upstream and up to 900mA with some pretty basic USB negotiation in a protocol that dates from USB 1.0 and for which there have long been integrated solutions for both the device and the host sides).

Further, the converting of those 5V to 3.3V just requires a buck converter or even just a voltage regulator (though this latter option is less efficient), for which there are already lots of integrated solutions available for peanuts and where the entire circuit block needed to support them is detailed in the datasheet for that converter.

Looking at the circuit diagram for this (linked to from the article), they’re not even doing the USB PD negotiation or any kind of USB 1.0 negotiation, so this thing will be limited to 150mA for a USB 3 host or whatever current your traditional USB power source can supply (as those power sources really just do power supply of whatever amperage they support over a cable which happen to have USB connectors, rather than including a genuine implementation of an USB host with current limiting depending on negotiation with the USB device, so such power sources don’t require the device to do any USB negotiation to increase the current limit above 150mA).

This is really “yet another run of the mill USB power breadboard adaptor” only the USB plug is USB-C rather than mini-USB or micro-USB (so, a different plug plus a handfull of minor components as per the standard of the circuitry to properly support it), so pretty much the same as the cheap chinese ones you can get from Aliexpress, though this one uses a Buck Converter rather than the $0.1 Voltage Regulator in most of the chinese boards, and actually does proper filtering of power supply noise and proper protection against over current, so it is a quality design for such things, though it’s not really a major advancement.

Without the USB PD stuff I wouldn’t really say that it brings USB-C Power to the breadboard (in the sense of, as many would expect, being able to draw a proper amount of power from a modern USB 3.0 power brick that supports USB-C), more something with a USB-C connector that brings power to the motherboard, as that connector is really the total sum of what it supports from the modern USB spec.

What would really be nice would be something that does talk USB-PD to the upstream host AND can convert down from the 20V at which it supplies peak power, so that you can take advantage of the juicy, juicy (oh so juicy!) capability of USB-PD to supply power (up to 100W right now, which will be up to 250W with USB 4), though if you’re pulling 100W (which at 5V means 20A, which is a stupidly high current that will melt most components in a typical digital circuit) from you breadboard power adaptor, then I’m pretty sure magic smoke is being released from at least one of the components on that breadboard and, by the way, you’re probably damaging the power rail of that breadboard (aah, the sweet smell of burnt plastic when you turn the power on for your half-arsed experimental circuit!!!)

The way I read it, “well adjusted” in there is about being well adjusted to the society you live in rather than being a well balanced individual.

I think that meme is about understanding that some of the things that directly or indirectly make your life hard and cause you to feel bad as somebody who lives in this Society aren’t really on you: for example, if you’re a great artist struggling economically it really isn’t your fault that the thing you’re really good at is undervalued by present day society unless you have the luck, connections and self-selling ability to end up as a superstar.

That artist would be considered badly adjusted in today’s society because of not being monetarilly prosperous (think about how people get frequently judged on the luxury of their car, the size of their house and the thickness of their wallet), or in other words for not becoming one of the 0.00…01% of artists that become superstars or getting a different job in a different domain once it turns out that what they do doesn’t make much money, even if that person is doing great things with their art which make life a little nicer for lots of people.

I read that meme as: don’t judge yourself or your life by the values of a flawed Society and don’t think badly of yourself when you persisting doing what you think is right when that Society doesn’t reward it, causes you grief and pain which you could have avoided by doing instead what that Society rewards more (or in other words, by being a more well adjusted member of that Society).

“It’s either fully privatised Healthcare or it’s Stalinism”

Socialism invariably fails and ends ups corrupted into some shithole authoritarianism decorated with leftie-sounding slogans. It is however meant to do the greatest good for the greatest number, it’s just that in practice in the real world it’s crap at it so it doesn’t work because of human nature.

Capitalism doesn’t even try to do the greatest good for the greatest number - it’s quite literally The Sociopath’s Credo: “do what’s best for yourself and screw what’s good for everybody else”

Ultimately they both fail at making most people’s lives better, but Capitalism doesn’t even try.

The best we’ve achieved has been Capitalism narrowly applied to just Trade and overseen by some other separate political theory that actually tries in some way to go towards the greatest good for the greatest number, such as Social Democracy, but as we’ve been seeing right now in realtime, with enough time Capitalism ultimately grounds down such bounds and oversight and corrupts everything.

Having both a Degree (almost 2 Degrees, since I went to Uni to get one and then changed to a different one half-way, so I’m an EE with part of a Physics Degree) and at the same time being massivelly self-taught because of being a Generalist (to the point that in my career I went down the route of working in that which I learned by myself and did for fun as a kid - computer programming - which was not the focus of either of those degrees), it has been my experience that certain things - mainly the fundamentals - are close to impossible to learn by yourself in a hands on way.

Further, discovering by yourself the best way do something complex enough to require an actual Process is really just going through the same pains of trying stuff out or limping along doing it in a seriously sub-optimal way as countless people in the Past who battled the damned thing until somebody discovered the best ways of doing it, and worst, you’re unlikely to by yourself figure out the best way of doing it even after years of doing it, especially as discovering new ways of doing things is a different process from actually doing the work - you have to actually take time out from doing the work to try new stuff out with the expectation that you might do a lot of wrong things as you try new approaches all the while not producing any useable results.

(No matter what, to learn new ways of doing things, you’re going to have to take time out of doing work to do the learning - because it’s pretty hard to figure out or just try out new ways of doing something without making mistakes and mistakes aren’t a valid product of your work - and if you have to dedicate time for learning the most efficient way is to learn from somebody else, which means either a mentor or a teacher)

It’s not by chance that even before Formal Education was a thing there was already the whole Master + Apprentices way of people learning complex domains (such as Blacksmithing).

Even with the Internet it’s still immensely hard to learn by yourself complex subjects because:

• Plenty of things you don’t know, you don’t even know that you don’t know them - in other words you’re not even aware they exist - so you won’t go looking for them.
• Most of what’s out there is shit for learning. Formats such as Youtube optimize for Entertainment, not Learning, so you’ll be fed by the algorthm countless loud dog and pony shows pretending to explain you things, all with about as much dept as a puddle, whilst the handful of properly deep explanations of things are algorithmed-away because they’re too long and boring.
• Worst, the most experienced domain specialists seldom have the time or the inclination to make posts explaining certain things, worse so for videos (and from experience I can tell you making a good Youtube video is a lot more complex than it seems until you try it). Further what you tend to see is countless posts and videos of people who learned just enough about a subject to think that they know tons about it (and thus can explain it to others) without actually knowing tons about it - in other words, people at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve. In other words, most such “teachers” are just slightly less newbie than you.

Last but not least, you’re not going to figure out the Fundamentals by yourself. No matter how genial you are IQ-wise you’re not going to, for example, rediscover by yourself the various Advanced Mathematics domains, because that stuff took centuries to figure out by the most intelligent people around, often whose only job was to discover things.

So yeah, some things can only be learned from somebody else, the bulk of what you have to learn is much faster to learn from somebody else than by yourself, and since Formal Education with professional teachers is way more efficient a process than apprenticing under a Master (plus it is way broader in what you end up learning, though less deep than learning from a master/mentor) that’s pretty much all that’s available.

Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains, but it’s pretty hard to find yourself in a position were you get a Mentor and as one who often is one in my area, I can tell you I wouldn’t waste my time mentoring somebody who doesn’t even know the basics (for example, because they shunned formal education) when I could be mentoring somebody ready to directly learn the advanced stuff I know which is what’s worth me spending some time teaching.

Ah, right - I misunderstood that point you were making.

So, as it turns out, we’ve been in agreement all along.

Not living in the US, I’m not up to date with US salaries.

That said, even for administrative personnel paid $25/h, $25 will pay 1h of somebody’s work which is way beyond what is needed to close a retail customer account in any modern administrative system were such thing is a common operation which should take less than a minute to do, because people who design the kind of company administrative computer systems (such as yours truly, at least during part of my career) will make the most common business operations be the fastest to do in that system.

It deceives people whose idea of how things work in large companies hasn’t changed since the days when it was the manager of your bank branch who decided if you you should get a loan or not.

Nowadays, for certain in middle and large size companies, all the administrative main business pathways are heavilly if not totally automated and it’s customer support that ends up eating the most manpower (which is why there has been so much of a push for automated phone and chat support systems, of late using AI).

Those $25 bucks for “account closure” pays at worst for a few minutes of somebody’s seeking the account from user information on a computer, cross checking that the user information matches and then clicking a button that says “Close accout” and then “Ok” on the confirmation box and the remaining 99% or so left after paying for that cost are pure profit.

As somebody who works in designing software systems, including for large companies, lets just say that the amount of human time that goes into a customer account closure is negligible because main business operations such as openning and closing customer accounts are the ones that get automated the soonest and the furthest.

The stuff that uses “lots” (in relative terms) of manpower is supporting customers with really unusual problems involving third parties and even then spending 2.5 h man/hours (assuming the administrative person get paid $10/per hour) is pretty uncommon.

You’ve been lied to, repeatadly, for at least 3 decades.

The totals should be compared ON A MAXIMIZATION OF RETURNS sense - i.e. how much good is done for each dollar being spent.

Giving money to people with lots of money - which is what corporate subsidies do, as that money ends up indirectly (and at times even directly) in the hands of shareholders - is just giving money to mainly very rich people and some middle class ones (who hold proportionally tiny amounts have shares either direct or via things like their pension fund), who need it far less than the kind of people who wouldn’t be able to feed their family without those $1500 per year.

In fact the very same logic also justifies progressive taxation (if done properly without loopholes for the very rich) - every extra dollar in the hands of a poor or low earner person, no matter how it gets there (be it less tax or social security) has thousands, even millions and in some cases billions of times the utility value of every extra dollar in the hands of a rich person, not just in direct terms of the benefits it brings for that person and their family but even in Economic terms because they spend every cent they get, so that money circulates a lot more in the Economy, doing good for others as it does so.

One of biggest swindles in the discourse of modern neoliberal politicians is exactly to go around celebrating the good they do with taxpayers’s money (or by “saving people from having to pay as much tax”) whilst never showing or even discussing if that is the best possible use of that money, because generally its not, which is how we end up with corporates being subsidized and the very well off getting tax cuts whilst the money could’ve yielded far more massive returns if used differetly, not just in terms of a better life for more people but often even in purelly Economic terms, such as how, for example, State investment in free Education tends to all in all yield an actual profit for the nations that do it.

Everytime one hears a politician or media commentator harping about “the Economy growing” one should instantly ask “for whom?”.

In fact, asking yourself “who is that really good for?” and “what’s the point of telling me this?” is a pretty good general mental self-defense mechanism for handling the modern style of discourse from people trying to convince you to do something or form an opinion about them, using success stories - pretty much all such stories are self-serving in some way and generally either exagerated or lying by omission.

As a Portuguese (that has also lived in a few other countries in Europe) I would say that it’s more that there is a range of emotions that men can express without that being frowned upon were certain things are still frowned upon if you show them openly (mainly around sadness) though for example openly showing tenderness for your partner or children is expected and even approved (unlike certain other cultures we’re men are expect to be distant).

Mind you, in some cultures the limits on expression of emotions or selectivity about which emotions you are expected to express is pretty high for both men and women (for example, the Dutch in general tend to refrain from expressing much emotion to strangers) and in some cases there is even such a strong expectation that you react in certain ways that it leads to people in general faking expressions of emotion (the English upper and upper middle classes are pretty big on showing the “appropriate” reaction independently of feeling it).

I would say (from contact with Americans and consuming some American media as well as having lived in England) that the expectations on what emotions people should be expressing are quite different and in England they’re even very much defined by people’s social class (for example, the “English Gentleman” is entirely a façade - all about what you show, not at all about what you think - and occupies the same place in terms of male behaviour expectations for traditional old-money upper class English men as the bossy slightly-angry assertive go-gotter seems to occupy in the US).

So far I generally have seen a tendency for growing upon grown up men expressing sadness for themselves (though in some countries, not for expressing sadness in empathy to others, such as close family) and have also noticed equivalent expectations on the expression of emotion by women (for example, it seems to me that middle and upper class English women have a massive weight of social expectations on them in terms of what they’re expect to show to others - including the emotions they express - in lots of situations, and a lot of it is about reacting with the “appropriate” emotion in some situations even if they don’t feel it)

I’ve learned to free my emotions a lot more by studying Acting (by, for a few years, doing short acting courses as an adult whilst living in London): it turns out modern acting techniques - the stuff that roughly falls under the Method Acting umbrella - are all about feeling truthfully as if you were indeed that character you’re playing living that specific situation, so essentially I had a pretty much judgment free (in terms of other people judging you) license to let myself go and fully feel and show it (as that “person” which was the character in that situation).

Curiously it also unlocked my empathy (which turns out to be so high I’ll literally yawn from seeing animals yawn) though I’m not sure if my blocking of most of my Empathy until then was due to social expectations on how men are supposed to behave or a childhood self-defense mechanism due to one of my parents being VERY intense and emotionally selfish (it makes sense I would block it merely not to constaly be overwhelmed by somebody else’s rollercoaster of emotions).

All this even though I’m Portuguese and thus grew up in a culture were people are very expressive (compared to what I saw living in both Northern European and Anglo-Saxon countries, so think something like Italians), and all that expressiveness is backed by actual emotion (people really are enthusiastic or angry or saddened by what the other person telling you their story went through), though I would say that the range of emotions men are socially expected to express is limited to mainly positive emotional states or anger-related emotions.

Anyways, just my 2c as I think it’s an unusual point of view and maybe food for thought.

PS: One of the things I learned in Acting is that not only does your body follow your mind but also your mind follows your body (really: if you have any ability for introspection try walking with a confident walk and see of it makes you feel, the try a downtrodden walk or a fearful walk) which kind dovetails with the whole idea that if you’re not expected to show certain kinds of emotional states you end up not feeling such emotions in day to day (except when you’rr overwhelmed by it and it hits you like a ton of bricks).

“Perceived value”

Without that element, there would be no explanation for Marketing other than pure Brand Awareness promotion working (and McDonalds is definitely beyond needing more Brand Awareness, at least in the Developed World)

Even then, it doesn’t explain a lot of how Marketing does its work (namelly the stuff they took from Psychology and use to do things like create associations between brand and specific feelings on people’s subconscious - you know, the way cars are “freedom” and perfumes are “sex”).

And don’t get me started on other techniques that prey of human cognitive weaknesses (for example, FOMO would not work with the fabled Homo Economicus that underpins so much of Free Market Theory)

Anyways, a ton of present day enshittification (and that includes this kind of price inflation) relies on people having a well entrenched positive perception of a brand after years of having a relationship with it (i.e. chosing it as customers) and there being quite a lot of momentum behind it. It also relies a lot on using a “slow boiling” effect to keep people from spotting the full picture of the changes.