Unless you know how many units they sell per month, and what are their expenses exactly, and how many people are employed, and amortized cap ex and R&D cost, you're just making shit up on the spot.

Lets say this thing moves two units per month, and each brings $4000 in pure profit (costs per unit $1000). If company has one employee. Now you've made $96000/yr.

Which is way less than a single competent engineer or entrepreneur in US is worth. Ie. they are losing money.

This is fundamental quality of very low-volume, very niche products. They are almost never priced anywhere near their bill-of-materials cost.

> micro-tonal instruments are prevalent in various cultures which weren't flooded by Europe and then North America by hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. it's pretty easy to find examples on countries inside Africa and Asia

So buy one of those then?

How many people would buy this weird thing per month - even at this low price point? 10? 50? 100?

Imagine you're an engineer and your competency is worth $200,000/year. If this retailed at 1/10th - as you suggested - so $500, and lets generously say you make $100usd per unit at this price point.

You have to atleast sell ~166 of these "weird" niche things per month, every month, no exceptions to match. And you're probably not a single person, so way more.

Can you? And why bother?

More importantly, can you even make these things for $400usd when your order quantity is only 166units per month?

And this is after spending years(?) in development, and some non negligible amount of cap ex.

If you have a well made, but very niche product that sells in very small volumes it will be expensive.

If any of the labour & assembly happens in US that turns it into unavoidable inevitability.

If it was cheaper, it would be a loss making hobby.

A country without "capitalism" wouldn't make such product for sale to begin with.

That means the Chinese government is doing a really good job.

I really hate this argument where every government across the globe have to basically be a drag which sucks the life out of an economy and wastes extracted resources (taxes) on bullshit instead of putting them to good use.

This is what winning looks like fellas, and you're just losing. Get used to it as there's only going to be more of this.

Plus, arm cortex-m0+ cores aren't $1, they are also available in $.15-$.30 range.

Westeners like to buy the $.10 CH32V003 as an exercise in minimalism, after all its refreshing to work in an environment with very limited resources. For the same reason people enjoy 1KB demoscene categories.

There's no economics behind it.

Authors argument almost entirely leans on Aliexpress shipping things for "free" to his island. It also has arm cores, but I suppose RISC-V MCUs have smaller odds of being fakes/clones.

China has amazing prices for genuine electronics components from every manufacturer. Including stm32, NXP as well as local arm32 licensees gd32,hk32,XHSC. From which you can buy Cortex-M0+ down to 10-20cents per piece.

Literally anything you can buy in the West, you get for fraction of the price in China, even in small volumes.

If you live in the third world you wouldn't even think about ordering from "western parts supplier", everything is expensive and overpriced and selection is shit (compared to China).

Lets say you're Germany, US imports make up only 6.9% of total import value(Netherlands is 7.1% and China 12.5% on top) closely followed by Poland with 5.9%.

Take most countries in Europe, US imports are a rather small very modest portion.

So it doesn't make that much sense that US dollar would be particularly valuable.

After all - you really don't actually even buy that much stuff from US, thus the need for the US dollar isn't particularly large, and why would it be?

On the other hand, if you want to buy oil however, you need the dollar. That is what makes the dollar valuable.

Now if you can buy oil from Iran, Russia or whatever in some other currencies, why would you need the stinking dollar?

I mean, you do import some US goods, but not that much really.

Why would you have confidence in an economy that regularly has insane trade deficit (1 trillion now)?

Once the petrodollar goes, thing will go tits up. And it will, because there's only 60years of oil left in the global oil reserves in the tank.

Once that wraps up, US money will be not much more than toiletpaper.

And that is wrapping up because world has like ~60years of oil left at current consumption rates.

Whenever I run a thing and it's unbearabily super duper slow, when you look at the process lists the thing will have spawned bunch of chromium instances - on top of probably making bunch of internet connections. Delegating some of the work that can easily done on my PC to "cloud" instead.

What we have now is way worse - it's electron and webshit technologies on desktop. Like you couldn't make software of worse quality even if you tried. The performance way worse than PCs of 1990s. It's almost like using software that's running from a floppy disk.

And now this trash is probably getting generated with LLMs.

You can't have a functional government that serves the interests of it's people and enables the country to dominate increasingly more sectors!

It's basically cheating!

The government has to be dysfunctional, and should only collect disproportionate taxes with the idea that they'd be wasted extremely inefficiently.... on god knows what, some bullshit, some "social programmes" and "culture" and the dumbest things imaginable - whatever they might be, but not anything that's actually ... you know good for the country!

All it does is simply makes the Chinese government sound good and competent.

Oh, nice, a government that does good things that lead to good outcomes! How unusual, how unexpected! That's basically cheating!

We can't realistically have our government be useful and competent and serve our interests, so there's no way we can compete!

I did actually!

> So you do acknowledge an absolute of good and evil, right and wrong. Good. We got somewhere.

It's not an absolute. "Right and wrong" exists only within framing of living beings or atleast the humans with a functional brain.

And humans who don't believe Santa and alike will derive their moral framework from simple axioms (such as pain and suffering is bad) that are universal across living beings on Earth arriving at something along the lines of Negative Utilitarianism.

> This conversation has become absurd in the sense that you're trying to convince me, a Christian, about what motivates me, or moves me, or about my understanding of reality and absolutes.

The absurd part is that you think this conversation is about you.

Not everything revolves around you. Ground breaking thought, I know.

> In regards to the rest, you're drastically limited by your ignorance and misunderstanding of basic Christian concepts, most probably conditioned by your radical prejudices and already formed opinions.

So you're attacking me instead of refuting my argument or providing a well reasoned counterpoint.

Not that I expected more from a Christian. Sigh

The goal isn't abstract - read it as - goal of "not being a wage-slave" and have a shot at being more. It's an ambition type of thing.

Bible does NOT directly condemn slavery. Kind of worse than that, in the Old Testament it accepts it and puts out rules on how slaves are to be treated. The statement that Christianity is directly responsible for - or has anything to do with abolishment of slavery is absolutely baseless.

As far as Bible is concerned, it's “pro-status quo” as far as slavery is concerned.

> I'll assume you think cutting the hands off someone who stole something from you is wrong. But some other people think it's the right thing to do.

What's right or wrong doesn't change one bit depending on what other people think or what some random book says.

The goal here is to prevent theft, recidivism and to wholly compensate damages, right?

So, if you can achieve that goal causing less damage and suffering than chopping someones hands off, then that is objectively the morally superior thing to do.

You know there's this thing called a human brain, and if you can't use it and on your own derive some sort of Negative Utilitarianism or alike as your moral framework, then you're way too stupid to be a good person.

A person who can stop doing bad only via threats of most gruesome torture and promise of immortaltity and blissful after life, and wouldn't have no clue otherwise - fundamentally can't be a good person.

Imagine you're a God and you want to create freethinking beings that have free will, but you (for some reason, huh) can't create all of them "very good" to begin with, but it's more like random process - and large amounts of people created are inadvertently "bad". (seems pretty incompetent if you ask me)

So you have no other choice, but spawn them lots of them and let them "do their thing" and then at the end of it pick out the ones act well and DO the most good, and do the least bad.

Now, if you told them that doing good will let them into "heaven" and the "bad ones" will be tortured and burned alive, you're literally incentivizing (some of the most gullible of) bad people to merely "act good" under threat of gruesome torture.

You've created fakes and pretend do goodies - the self-serving dishonest kind of so called Christians (ie. vast majority of them)

The ones that don't do bad things on their own volition and do good, because it's the right thing to do, but merely because somebody is threatening them with violence, and promise of eternal bliss.

Purely on societal level - if you can manipulate bad and stupid people to do less crime and less bad things - using nothing, but make believe threats of gruesome torture and such, that's a great brainwashing tool to have. That however doesn't turn them into "good people" that can be trusted.

So, wait a minute, you've got no idea what's right or wrong - and you're incapable deriving and figuring it out on your own?

Thus, without delegating your thinking to somebody else or some book telling you what to do - you'd have no clue what's good and what's bad?

Imagine if instead of The Bible you happened to run upon a different book that says different things, like how killing the nonbelievers is right and blowing yourself up along with bunch of nonbelievers will guarantee you 10 beautiful virgins in heaven.

I mean, you don't know what's right or wrong on your own right, so you'd go ahead and do it?

See - if you can't figure out whats right or wrong on your own - without somebody else telling you (and threatening noncompliance with being burned alive or being promised immortality and goodies) - you are fundamentally incapable of being a good person, if only by accident - as running onto one book over another would completely changes your perception of "right and wrong".

It's pretty crazy if you ask me!

> this conversation is getting nowhere.

This conversation is going somewhere, it's just not going where you want it to go at all. Sorry about that!

Yes, but with Christians there's always some sort of thick-layer of self-serving dishonesty on top of it all.

Imagine a person goes out of his way and really helps you out in a tough situation, would you rather have it:

1. Be a person who does it out of his own volition - out of his own will and mind decided to do that - because that's the right thing to do!

2. Be a person who did it, because a book told him to do so - under a threat of violence no less (being tortured in hot lava!)

I'd always take (1) over somebody who's operating held at gunpoint (2) - threatened with torture for misbehaving.

> But ultimately it comes down to: Christ died on the cross to pay for your sins. Are you going to accept that, repent, and follow Him? or are you going to disregard it?

This is not a free choice! This is thinly veiled threat of violence!

And what happens if I "disregard it" (It being what exactly? Also - what sins?)?

Ah, yes, you get tortured in lake of fire!

The whole thing is just layers and layers of manipulative dishonesty stacked on top of each other.

The incentive structure is set up to produce bad people.

Kind of reminds of the sight where MMA fighters brutally mash some dudes head in, and then afterwards starts praising the Lord and that only through Lord he has gotten where he is. Weirdest shit ever, and yet it's not uncommon to see it.

Imagine you have two neighboors - neighboor A and neighboor B. As they walk past you, they say hello and smile. But other than that they don't leave their house very much.

One of the neighboors prays for the humanity and wishes the best to everyone all the time.

The other neighboor fantasizes about torturing people and animals.

Now tell me, which one is neighboor A and which one is neighboor B?

That's right, you can't tell, because from any observable thing in the world, they are virtually equivalent, A is as good and as bad as B. Their inaction in the real world are virtually equivalent.

The only way you can tell who's "good" and "bad" is only and only through actions and results of their actions. Not their thoughts, best intentions or prayers. Only through their actions and results of said actions.

If they represent themselves through inaction, they are virtually equivalent - equally as bad.

Like if somebody steals your bike? Do you want (a) their forgiveness ("i wont steal again I promise") or (b) your bike back + due compensation for caused distress?

Thus - if you do and have done bad things - and you don't make up for them via direct sustained remedial action, but mere prayer and "asking for forgiveness", you're a piece of shit that deserves to burn in the deepest depths of hell.

For better or worse, this applies to so many so called "Christians".

It's actually not that particularly relevant what Christians believe exactly (and they do believe that the world will be destroyed as-is), what's relevant is what the actual crazy book says.

And if you believe the book that says crazy things, or perhaps you cherry pick and interpret the crazy things to your liking and convenience - his point stands.

And the crazy book days say that the non Christians will burn (for eternity?) in flames of hell and that great many Christians won't be able to get through the narrow gate (and also be tortured to death in hot lava).

Man, this is bloody convenient innit.

"Yo, amma big piece of shit, but lets be real here, ain't gonna self correct that shit by my own merit and by doing good work!

Hell nah!

All I have to do is nothing, uh, i mean, believe in Santa for he died on the cross. That's all!"

Well, the world is exactly as "God" created it.

Thus, if the world is falling apart, then the God - observably so - has done a real shoddy job.

If you come upon a piece of well written software - you can infer that it's written by a good and competent programmer.

And if the software on the other hand is shitty, then more likely than not - made and created by a shitty programmer.

World as is - is obviously created by either somebody extremely incompetent or downright malevolent as far as UX for living beings is concerned.