If your current plan is to buy the latest and greatest phone today, sell it in two years, and then buy a new top of the line phone, then Apple’s new lease program looks like an attractive option. They’ve priced it such that, over the course of the lease, you end up paying about the cost of purchasing the phone minus its resale value. Leasing looks convenient because it saves you from having to find a buyer.

It also keeps phones out of the secondary market, which benefits Apple. Off lease phones are used for warranty replacements, or sold as refurbished through official storefronts instead of person to person.

“It was Biden that shit in my pants!”

I can’t edit the above post for some reason?

Wanted to add:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Phillip K. Dick

That’s around the same time as Earth last passed through the central plane of the Milky Way.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/the-solar-system-may-have-passed-through-interstellar-clouds/

One theory predicts that passing through a sufficiently dense cloud of interstellar gas would collapse our Sun’s heliosphere, exposing Earth to cosmic rays & producing evidence that would be difficult to distinguish from a nearby supernova hitting our planet.

Why not hire more judges?

The eggs are from these flappy guys:

unsent emails kept in the gmail drafts folder allows syncing notes across devices, and its searchable

Fox “News” and their malicious swarms of disinformation spreaders are concerned about losing their monopoly.

Industry likes it too. Without a Federal standard, appliance makers would need 50 smaller, less efficient production lines to meet each State’s individual standards.

We’re still burning fossil carbon for energy.

Carbon capture does not make sense until we have an excess of clean energy to power it.

Scaling it now would do more harm than good.

A dozen, a hundred, there’s no way to tell.

That’s rough buddy.

π == 3

Where will you be when the zoomies wear off?

“You can’t just shoot a hole into the Moon.”

MISSION OBJECTIVE: Shoot a hole into the Moon.

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/eare-earths-mine-usa-china

Most rare‑earth ore occurs as a geochemical stew, so producers must grind, acid‑leach, and solvent‑wash huge volumes of rock before they bottle a kilogram of oxide. The solvents themselves are toxic; the tailings ponds can leach heavy metals; and any thorium or uranium hitch‑hikers raise radioactivity concerns.

Open‑pit mines also chew through landscapes, consume prodigious energy, and disrupt local water tables. In short, the elements may not be geologically rare, but clean, socially acceptable production sites are. That scarcity, not crustal abundance, keeps supply tight and prices volatile.

That’s an excellent point.

I don’t really know what the launch detection sensors’ capabilities are. However, there’s probably a detectably different spectrographic signature from solid fuel rockets like ICBMs versus Neutron’s methalox.

What energy company is a natural monopoly?

edit: are you talking about utilities that produce and distribute energy, or the companies that provide fuel for them? Because a case can be made for mining operations like Exxon & etc to be subject to market competition, whereas natural monopolies like your local electric utility should be publicly owned, i.e. owned by the government, and not have ownership shares traded privately or in public markets.