Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.

It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.

    > This may highlight to some folks abroad
    > the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment,
    > and an armed civilian population

The idea that everyone can show up at the protest with their AR-15, somehow defeat the state's security forces in armed combat, and that the result will be some enlightened republic is an American fantasy, informed by what's at best a selective reading of American history.

If it comes to that you're much more likely to end up under some warlord. Afghanistan and especially Africa are full of people who are well armed and where exactly that's happened more often than not.

    > The one thing I'll want is what we'll never
    > get which is just making it easier to delete
    > e-mails in bulk.

"Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.

But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too".

Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries.

Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.

    > Steve Jobs himself envisioned a
    > web app future as the future of[...]

His remarks at the time of the initial iPhone release (with the benefit of hindsight) were clearly because they weren't ready to expose any sort of native API's.

Pissing on you and telling you it's raining was typical Jobs reality distortion field marketing, and not an indication that he actually believed it was raining.

    > the novel V2 rocket weapons
    > that killed an average of 2
    > civilians per launch

    > he also addressed the packing problem, saying[...]

If you need 100 PB then moving 500 of those around seems a lot easier for everyone involved than managing a special snowflake truck.

They remain unconvinced that chatGPT has told me it "should be fine", and have inquired as to whether I don't have better things to do than trying to win increasingly obscure and contrived arguments on HN. Please advise.

That's because whoever's attempting to load an ideal 400 million micro-SD cards into one will take approximately forever carefully trying to line up even one row of them on the floor of a shipping container, before having the whole thing fall over like dominoes.

And even if they manage that, the whole thing will tumble over once they need to deal with the first row of the container's side corrugation. Nobody at the department of Spherical Cows in Vacuums thought to account for those dimensions[1] not lining up with the size of micro-SD cards.

If they do manage some approximation of this it'll take forever just to drive this down the road, let alone get the necessary permits to take the thing on the highway.

Turns out not a lot of semi truck trailers or roads are prepared to deal with a 40 ft container weighing around 100 metric tons (the weight of one packed to the brim with sand, a close approximation).

The good news is that such transportation gets more fuel efficient the longer the trip is.

The bad news is that the container will arrive mostly empty, as it's discovered that shipping container door panel gaps and road vibrations conspire to spread a steady stream of micro-SD cards behind you the entire way there.

Commuters in snowy areas held up behind the slowly moving "OVERSIZED LOAD!" with a mandatory police escort wonder if it's a trial for a new type of road salt that makes a pleasant crunchy sound as you drive over it.

Finally, an attempt to recover the remaining data fails. The sharding strategy chosen didn't account for failure due to road salt ingression into the container, cards at the bottom of the container being crushed to dust by the weight of those above, or that the leased container hadn't been thoroughly cleaned since last transporting, wait, what is that smell?

1. https://www.discovercontainers.com/wp-content/uploads/contai...

    > This is rare enough that I'm pushing the recovery
    > of it up near the top of my project queue.

    > how does Tesla know repairs
    > have been made after a minor
    > accident?

But in this case the relevant cost under discussion isn't that of a replacement vacuum cleaner, but what value you assign to your house not burning down due to a crappy 18650 cell, or the anxiety of worrying that that'll happen.

E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like piping to mail(1) etc.

    > How do you even drain a 3.7V lithium
    > ion battery below 3.3V?

    > My devices that use 18650s will
    > not let them go below that.

    > Technically it expensive because demand exceed supply.

    > with the war that source was cut off

I don't see why you're insisting on this passive and inaccurate description.

Someone unfamiliar with this might infer that Russia considered Helium a strategic asset and forbade its export, when the reality is that to the extent that your initial claim is in any way relevant to Helium prices, it's the other way around: The EU forbade the import of Russian helium.

If you look at e.g. the per-dose price of insulin it's as low or lower in countries with single-payer universal systems, where someone requiring insulin is never going to have any idea what it even costs, because it's just something that's provided for them should they need it.

In that case it's usually some centralized state purchaser that has an incentive to bring prices down, or a government that has an overall incentive to keep the inflation of its budgetary items down, which ultimately comes down to public elections etc.

In any case, a much more indirect mechanism than someone who'd be directly affected paying the costs associated with the product, which directly contradicts this particular argument.