A lot of cheap kitchen scales are also just crap. Talk to your local drug dealer about what brand of scale might be right for you.

Food, especially fresh food, used to be a lot more expensive when adjusting for inflation. A canned chicken like this doesn’t look super appetizing right out of the can, but it probably tasted OK after you shredded it and put it in a casserole. And it was significantly cheaper than buying a fresh whole roasted chicken, assuming you lived somewhere that fresh whole roasted chickens were even readily available. Food like this became particularly popular during the great depression, and stuck around for decades afterwards.

Nowadays, between industrialized farming, highly optimized supply chains, and a buttload of government subsidy, fresh food is comparatively cheap. You can get a whole roasted chicken right off the spit for $5-10 at just about any grocery store. So for most people the value proposition of a $3 canned chicken isn’t really there anymore, especially if you don’t have an enormous baby-boom-era sized family to feed.

Well you wouldn’t want GM’s alternative. They are killing these features so they can charge you a subscription for shittier versions of things you already get for free on your phone, like GPS navigation.

That would be cool, but since GM have decided they are no longer including Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, any renewed Chevy Volt would be worthless pile of steel, lithium, and carbon. Might as well have the factory dump them straight into a landfill.

Some things cannot be effectively regulated in this manner. At all.

There is simply no way to stop people from building their own 3D printers. There are too many open source designs, and they can be built with very simple parts that are readily available at the hardware store. Most hobbyist-level 3D printers basically come as a kit that they have to assemble themselves anyways. What happens next? Background checks to buy stepper motors? Background checks to buy a microcontroller?

To me this is like trying to mandate government backdoors in encryption algorithms. There is literally nothing that would stop criminals from just using an open source encryption algorithm that doesn’t have a backdoor, so you end up just making it so all legitimate communications are less secure than they should be.

wait a sec, are you using a bunch of alt accounts with the exact same username from various lemmy instances to upvote your own comments?

let’s think for 5 minutes here.

I know how a NAS works, but other people might not or possibly even mistake you to mean you transfer media to another machine for viewing.

I meant what I said. If you interpreted this incorrectly, that is your problem. stop trying to pretend someone else doesn’t know what a NAS is, they are perfectly capable of looking up words they don’t mean. me using a word someone else does not know is not misinformation on my part, it is ignorance on theirs.

learn to comprehend the whole conversation, don’t reply to individual comments like they exist in a vacuum. language doesn’t work if you interpret everything hyper-literally. do you fall apart when people use euphemisms or turns of phrase? because those are far more vague than anything i said.

maybe most importantly though, don’t be an absolute dick to people when you ask for clarification.

scroll up. my very first comment, which is the top level comment in this thread, makes it pretty damn clear.

read the whole context before you go off half-cocked and accuse people of spreading misinformation when they aren’t.

OK i see the problem. you’re hung up on the fact that i said “streaming” without specifying commercial streaming services.

however, my context should have been made clear by the fact that i was talking about ripping blu-rays to my fucking NAS, where they get streamed from.

i’m saying “you don’t get the same quality from streaming services as a blu ray”. does that make you happier?

i am more than well aware of all of this. nothing i said is misinformation. same algorithm, different settings. the primary means by which you reduce bitrate with h.265 is by reducing the quality setting. there is no magical way to cut your bitrate by 75% using the same compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. no commercial streaming service is offering video at the same quality level as a 4k blu-ray.

few streaming boxes even support dolby vision profile 7, and no commercial streaming service offers it. so saying you can get it through a streaming service is actual misinformation.

i have literally been doing this shit for 20 years

lower bitrate == lower quality when using the same compression algorithms.

most streaming services are using h.265, same as 4k blu ray, but at substantially lower bitrates

streaming dolby vision profiles are also gimped considerably compared to blu-ray dolby vision

4k streaming is also way lower quality than a 4k blu-ray

blu-rays are often as cheap or cheaper than “digital copies”, and ripping them to my NAS is pretty trivial these days thanks to makemkv.

the best part is, uncle jeff cannot legally break into your house and take back the disc just because of some petty rights issue.