I'm not saying it's better or worse, but I don't think assignments are inherently bad. It works the same way in education from what I've heard - written assignments may not be very valuable on their own anymore, but you can ask students questions about specific things irl to see if they actually know their stuff.

For example in the EU, while good insulation has always been a given in the Nordics for obvious reasons (although modern buildings are even better!), it's only relatively recently that these topics have started to be taken more seriously in the south. Energy costs were generally affordable, and there wasn't as much focus on the environmental side of things (i.e. using energy more efficiently to reduce pollution or switching to cleaner energy sources).

Just trying to shed a positive light on all of this, even if things are gonna suck for a while.

Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.

If governments were serious and fair about it, they'd just provide decent subsidies (or similar formula) to people who don't have enough money to switch, and it'd happen faster. What's going to happen though, is that many governments will just tax ICE vehicles to death (+ the cheaper chinese vehicles) while blaming you for not having enough money to switch.

My smartwatch lasts 10-14 days.

>I don't need notifications on my wrist

I do, as I hate missing the few calls I get, and I love being woken up by a vibration on my wrist instead of a blaring alarm.

I won't address the rest as it's quite subjective, but honestly saying you don’t need a smartwatch is bordering on ragebait.

Edit: It doesn't even seem to be strictly required https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181030

EDIT: I see you're also handwaving very decent legal advice here. I'd highly encourage to revisit your attitudes if you plan to learn and grow.

This is an illusion we really need to remove from our collective consciousness. Running a popular website while being an ops genius, being a neurosurgeon who saves lives every day or being the world's best architect doesn't mean someone has sound opinions on topics right outside their area of expertise.

In fact, nowadays it seems to be all about appeals to authority which IMHO makes us more ignorant because many people seem to not think critically anymore. Instead, it's just "an expert said so" - then you look into the "expert" and in many cases they either aren't actually an expert or they're a paid shill. But that's a topic for some other day.

I understand that ICE is a very contentious topic but this seems to happen quite often in other situations as well. It's made me value Google Maps reviews much less.

Compliance is an important factor in customer retention, but the cost of the other side of the equation (technical implementation) has dropped significantly and in some cases could be what tips the balance.

I think AI familiarity still varies a lot across companies and individuals. Small companies/startups often move much faster than large corporations, so that may also explain what you're seeing. Long before LLMs I worked at places where even monitoring solutions were implemented in-house because the vendors' pricing was extremely greedy.

My point is that I'm sure this will also change for some large corporations in the short to medium term. Not saying SaaS is doomed because it's obviously not and at the end of the day you want a battle-tested solution, but it does feel like the market will shrink.

Honestly, this sounds like a shitpost and I'd remove the line if I was the author.

That aside, I really don't understand the glorification of reading. I love reading (also I'm Spanish) and I do it every day, but reading can also just mean reading romance novels and living in a parallel unrealistic world, and that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict.