Hard is relative. Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.
The difference of course is that the invisible hand of the market gets that fruit into grocery stores. For various relatively good reasons, power is driven by very visible hands.
> Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.
"Brain surgery? Well, that's not exactly rocket science..."
There are quite a few visible hands driving the fruit industry. Trade agreements, tariffs, water rights, disease/blight controls, and of course weather events/patterns are regularly in the news and discussed as it pertains to the cost and availability of various fruits (and veg).
Off the top of my head, we've recently had shortages of fresh strawberries because of weather in California, a shortage of peas because of weather too, and various changes in Trump's tariffs were done to try and alleviate the rising cost of certain fruit and veg.
Politicians have been breaking promises and not answering direct questions and burying inconvenient facts for decades.
They've only recently started directly lying.
There is a difference and conflating the two is a large part of the problem.
You can find examples of them lying in history, but those were huge scandals that brought down governments. Lying had consequences. That's what we've lost
My grocery store does both. If the label says "Sale: 2/$5, Was: $3.99" and I buy one, I get charged $2.50. If the label says "2/$5, Single item: $3" and I buy one, I get charged $3.
In Canada they have a CAD$5 McValue meal deal, so USD$3.67 for a McDouble, small fries & small drink. Do they not have similar deals in your jurisdiction?
For what it is worth, I live in Calgary and the McDonalds near me does not have deals like that. There is apparently a huge range in prices across McDonalds in a city, so there may be geographic limitations.
I don't go either, and the price is part of the reason. (I would go for the ice cream in summer, or for their cheap drinks promos).
US McValue meals (my local location, ymmv):
$6 for a McDouble, small Fries, 4 nuggets and small drink.
$5 for a McChicken, small fries, 4 nuggets and small drink.
$2.50 for a McDouble itself.
A typical burger + fries + drink at McDonalds where I am in the US is now about $20. You can get something much better quality (& larger size) at FiveGuys for same price, and even some nice quality restaurants have lunch specials that cost the same.
McD was never good, but when it was $10 it was still an OK occasional convenient lunch option. At $20 there is zero reason to go there.
There isn't exactly a lot of design freedom in a black rectangle with a screen a keyboard and a touchpad. A real Macbook copy would include Macbook misfeatures, like:
- control key in wrong place
- camera notch
- half sized arrow keys
It doesn't look exactly the same. Sure, if it had a tiny touchpad with separate buttons or missing indent so that it's inconvenient to open the lid or didn't have stereo speakers or was really thick then it would look even more different than an MBP... If one company nails some design elements before others, why should everyone who gets those elements too be blamed for copying it.
That was a Panther Lake based laptop. Lunar Lake laptops can also last well over 12 hours, even in Linux. This StarFighter offers neither Lunar Lake nor Panther Lake, so 18 hours is probably only under really ideal circumstances.
The tigher, more believable theory is that Meta wants Operating Systems to be responsible for delivering an age or an "over 18 attestation" to apps/websites so it's not Meta's problem.
I never used it. VB1.0 was buggy and incomplete, which soured me on Visual Basic and Microsoft. Then they had the gall to charge $60 for the update to VB1.1 despite VB1.0 being completely unusable. Switched to Linux and open source languages and haven't looked back.
Of course these days I would never trust a 1.0, but at the time I was young and naive.
There is tons of EV competition. 252 new EV models were announced at the Beijing Auto Show last week. Reviews of the Xiaomi SU7 2026 generally acknowledge it as best in class. etc.
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