DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

Amazon is supposedly working on it, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up of it being any good.

Time doesn’t slow down when you approach the speed of light

Correct, but only from your perspective. To other people you’ve slowed down, but from where you’re sitting (or careening through the cosmos at the universal speed limit) everything happens just as fast as it normally does.

the theory we’re using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.

Quasi-correct. “The speed of light” as we think of it in physics is actually the speed of information, which dictates how quickly changes can propagate outwards (or put another way: how quickly you can know about something happening elsewhere). We refer to it as the speed of light because photons move at that speed in a vacuum due to having no mass and thus moving at the fastest possible speed, but things like gravitational waves also propagate at that same speed and have nothing to do with EM radiation. However, the speed of information doesn’t change; it’s a hard natural law with no known exceptions.

Physics in general is cheating for this thread though, because the answer to what makes stuff happen as we understand it is a giant metaphorical mass of “I 'unno.” The Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc all have giant gaping holes in them that other models can often fill, but cannot be properly combined in any way that we’ve tried so far. They’re still correct enough to base your entire life around without any worries, but there’s always that last 0.01% that amounts to the margins of old maps reading “Here There Be Dragons”.

Out of curiosity, what’s it cost to fly to China, grab a long-term hotel room, and get treatment there for a foreign national?

Because Stormtroopers are functionally heavily militarized colonial police more focused on enforcing a terror regime than fighting against peer militaries, and the Rebels are more or less the singular exception. Same reason that wearing typical riot body armor IRL is unlikely to keep you from getting fucked up if someone’s shooting .308 at you.

1. Glance at wallet.
2. Cry.
3. Realize that you only have 8GB of soldered RAM.
4. Cry even harder.

What could possibly go wrong? We can always just print more money, it’s not like the stability of the dollar as a global reserve currency is worse than it’s been since its inception!

There’s a top surgery joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.

Sure there is. An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.

Pass nationwide legislation that restricts owning housing for commercial purposes beyond a certain threshold, and put rent controls in place pegged to 20% of the median income per town/city. You’d eliminate 95% of homelessness before the ink was dry, massively increase homeownership rates, and be the most popular politician of an era.

It’s not even an ebil communist plot, and it’d still be more effective than giving even more money to private developers on a pinky promise they’ll build something people can afford, just trust them this time.

If you want to support your favorite artists, buy their merch while at one of their live shows. That’ll put literal orders of magnitude more cash in their pocket than streaming their music ever would, and you get a dope ass t-shirt out of it.

Steve Jobs quite openly hated the idea of anyone gaming on a Mac because he felt like it made their products seem more childish or something. It seems like either nobody at Apple has managed to dig that particular brainworm out yet or have just decided that printing iPhone money makes all other concerns irrelevant.

Sounds like a skill issue to me /s

I can’t wait to watch them do this and then realize that a solid 2/3rds of modern electronics have a RISC-V chip in them somewhere because they’re cheap as fuck and dependable so long as you don’t need cutting edge performance.

You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don’t make money.

So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in ‘upgrade’ for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with.

And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You’ve made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.

Only the most sane and functional economic system.

It takes 4 hours to take Amtrak between NYC and DC. The same amount of time as it takes to drive, which costs a fraction of the money. I would believe that someone made an economical flying car before I’d believe the US suddenly has a working maglev line between two major cities.

For all it gets thrown around as a slur by euros, you’d think they’d remember that the only reason they weren’t paying tribute to the Khan is that his armies decided it wasn’t worth the effort of conquering a backwater so far from home.

The description is going to be out of date. The AR rifles were designed with bleeding edge materials, which bit it in the ass initially because the materials didn’t match up to the intended specs. Things have gotten a lot better since then and ARs are just as reliable and usable as AKs.

Parry this you fucking casual

Damn, for $135 million you’d think they’d slap an Airtag on the thing while flying domestically.

To add to the list of non-chud reasons to dislike it, the plot is driven entirely by characters doing the dumbest thing possible at every turn on all sides for little to no reason.

Someone once pointed out the First Order could have ended the movie in the first ten minutes by having their dreadnaught just shoot the Resistance’s capital ship instead of the planetary (read: entirely stationary) base first, or by having the dreadnaught’s fighter screen/escort ships deployed instead of just chilling and doing nothing the entire fight.

The people next in line behind Putin are rife with hypernationalist hawks. I highly doubt you’re going to find someone who would both sell out to the west after all this and live long enough around their compatriots to accomplish much before getting couped.