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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • The fact they made it possible is impressive in itself. Sure it’s not competitive for the latest games or such, but society is more and more reliant on smartphones, so having a local option is valuable in itself.

    It’s a bit like countries making their own planes instead of buying the F-35, which is better and cheaper. They looked stupid at the time, until Trump came back and it turned out strategic autonomy had value.

    As for the price, probably it is due to small production ; but also simply underlines how we got used to not paying the “true” price of things, by moving production to places with cheaper costs & labor.





  • Right, I should make myself clearer. I’m no expert in economics, I just try to build a reasoning based on what I know.

    The context of his statement is that Russia is outproducing the West in ammunition, specifically artillery shells. Earlier he states Russia is producing 4 millions shell a year compared to .5 for the US. So without qualification, the statement implies Russians are somehow 80x superior as they produce 8 times more with an economy a tenth the size.

    I feel he should have qualified his statement to improve reader understanding:

    • in general domestic production for domestic consumption should be compared using PPP, in which the Russian economy is “merely” a fourth of that of the USA (hence my PPP comment)
    • the sanctions Russia is under distort the nominal picture since they restrict trade
    • weapons production is hard to put a number to, since they are very “custom” goods that can’t be easily compared or traded, and even moreso for Russia which has a huge domestic arms industry
      • granted, that last point is is much more true of things like fighter jets than artillery shells
      • still though, there is some Western focus on quality over quantity that also explains the discrepancy (or at least there was before countries realized their entire inventory wouldn’t last more than months in Ukraine)

    Because he didn’t provide this context to the number he is giving, I thought that either he wanted to misled or he was not sufficiently informed, and assumed the more charitable option.


  • My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

    So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.