11 grand a year is crazy numbers.

Believe it or not, not everybody lives in California. I live in Texas and bought gas here yesterday. Using that price at 35k you’re looking at like 6500 a year.

And maintenance on an ICE is super cheap if you just change the fucking oil. There’s a reason I have 565,000 miles on a single engine that still runs great. I spend about $200 a year on oil change supplies (changing oil is supe4 easy and you should neve4 pay someone to do it), and maybe another 50-100 for things like air filters. I buy used tires (shop I use buys tires from other tires shops when someone upgrades tires on new vehicles) every 2 years or so for about $200 for a full set. Other incidental maintenance like spark plugs, brake pads and AC compressors come along, but I’m still averaging around $500/year on maintenance because maintenance is cheap and easy to do yourself.

So all in I’m around 6k a year in running costs.

Oh - and I’m not spending another 7 or 8 grand a year on a car note on a car I can’t service myself.

That’s absolutely not true. The starter battery is lead-acid, but those don’t move the car.

A standard group 27 lead acid used just to start a car’s engine weighs like 70 pounds. One big enough to actually drive it any distance would weigh literal tons.

Our hybrids both having battery failures is personal experience, not Republican talking points.

But the great thing about hybrids is that they still work if the battery fails. And I can put enough fuel to drive 300 miles in at a gas station for the same price as paying for a level 3 charger that’ll take 10 times as long.

I would love to have an electric, but it doesn’t make sense for me or many others who rent when a hybrid is cheaper to buy, just as cheap to drive when you don’thave a hime charger, and doesn’t depend on a $15,000 part that can’t be serviced by the owner.

They are better if you own a house. Otherwise charging becomes a much larger issue. The cost of fast charging at a public charger isn’t any cheaper than filling a gas tank and takes a lot longer with fewer options.

I’m also worried about battery lifespan. My gamily has had 2 hybrids, and both became standard ICE cars because the batteries failed and cost more than the cars are worth to replace. I drive about 35,000 miles a year, and need something that will last. I bought a used 2005 F150 that now has almost 600,000 miles on it with the original engine, and if it does have a failire, I can buy a new engine for about $3500, whereas an EV battery costs 15-20 grand.

They’re still feeling the burn from when they tried entering the drone space. The GoPro Karma almost bankrupted them on its own, and marked the end of their perception as a quality brand. It was a disaster they never recovered financially or reputationally.

The concept was great. The gimbal and camera could actually be removed from the drone to use independently. People were excited for their entry into the space, and they built a TON of the drones.

But they were also missing features. They didn’t have an API for third-party integration and flight automation like DJI. They had no collision avoidance features, which had started to become standard in the market by the time the entered. Their battery life was pretty bad.

Oh - and upon release the drones constantly lost connection to GPS and would suddenly shut off mid-flight and fall out of the sky. The FAA actually advised all users to ground them.

They eventually recalled all of the Karma drones over safety concerns, took a huge stock hit, and went through a round of layoffs.

Employees quitting is the goal. If they get them to quit they don’t have to pay unemployment.

You don’t have to literally be the only business in the industry to have an effective monopoly.

In the US installation of cameras is actually pretty similar, but it’s a property thing more than a privacy thing.

For instance, Flock made a deal with a local HOA to install cameras, but the fence lines for the houses are at the property line, so where they’re wanting to place the cameras is in the public right-of-way. So they need to request a license to encroach into public property with private improvements.

However, cameras on private property facing public property are perfectly legal. And any private space visible from public property also has no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Private property in public view not having an expectation of privacy sounds insane, but prohibiting recording of publicly-visible property essentially bans almost all outdoor recording of any kind because some private property is probably going to be somewhere in the frame.

If I take a selfie in the break room of my office (2nd floor), the background will include bits of dozens of private properties through the window.

But that actually wouldn’t meet the law. The law requires the printer to do the check.

Only if you want to use cloud printing. I print on my A1 using Orca all the time.

It’s also pretty much a technical impossibility if you know anything about 3D printers.

3D printers can’t read CAD. They aren’t fed STLs or any other kind of 3D model. They’re fed G-Code, which contains no geometrical details. It’s a list of instructions saying “turn these 4 motors this speed this for this amount of time while heating that part to this temperature and turning this other motor this speed, then heat this part while tunlrning that motor that fast…” with hundreds or thousands of instructions, and then new instructions for the next layer.

In order to print a model, you first have to run it through a program called a slicer that generates that G-code by slicing it into layers with instructions for how to move, heat and cool the nozzle, build plate, and chamber, feed the filament, etc.

The printers just follow those instructions with minimal on-board processing and zero information regarding the final model’s structure.

I drive through Austin regularly and see Tesla and Waymo automated taxis all the time.

The Waymos are just about the best, most-predictable drivers on the road. The Teslas are like toddlers pretending they can drive by randomly spinning a steering wheel.

It’s probably Amazon. They can absolutely afford it.

Guillotines?

Was looking for any kind of context that would somehow make it even slightly less-outrageous than the headline indicated.

It was worse.

Cable was a shitty service. It was expensive, you had to subscribe to a bunch of shit you didn’t want for just a few programs you did, and was full of ads. People dropped cable for streaming because it was cheaper, centralized, and didn’t have ads.

Now that cable is essentially dead, streaming is bringing back the high prices and the ads, and now you have to sign up for a bunch of shit you don’t want for the few programs you do.

In that case, for a random person I’d still recommend Bambu unless you’re boycotting on ethical grounds.

Their printers run just fine without a network. Just export the g-code to a microSD card, put the card in the printer, and select the model from the card. It also allows you to use whatever slicer you want that way.

It’s really only cloud printing that’s locked behind Bambu Studio.

The thing is unless you need the slightly bigger bed size, the A1 mininfrom Bambu is simply a better product. It’s faster, easier, and often cheaper (I got mine for like 150-ish). And the full-size A1 is also bigger.

That’s the thing with Bambu. What’s made them such a disruptor and given them the opportunity to be shitty is that they make a really good product with excellent software at less than half the price of a comparable Prusa.

And with the new SnapMaker U1 slapping back, they dropped their prices again. The new X2D is half the cost of the last-gen X1 and has an extra nozzle.

Exactly. And I think we need to be honest about our criticism of Bambu. A lot of it is legitimate complaints. They stepped into a community that built itself around sharing ideas and group effort. They benefited from the work of the community and made some great innovations, but refused to share those innovations with the community that had shared so much with them. That’s a dick move.

But there’s also an uncomfortable element of the Bambu hatred coming from people who have been part of the community for a long time. They tinkered and toiled using weed-eater line through modified hot glue guns and spent years buulding up shitty machines into something serviceable. They did awesome things, and they should be proud if it. But they can also be gatekeepers who are hostile to those who just want to print something without needing to understand g-code or what pressure advance is.

They don’t want new users who haven’t made the tinkering and fiddling the hobby. They see the confusion and technical knowledge required as a rite of passage all users need to experience. They were a huge part of making 3D printing what it is today, but (just like Bambu) hey don’t want the next guys to benefit from it.

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