And the rise in oil prices and removal of sanctions is pulling the russian economy out of the gutter while simultaniously drawing away air defence that would have otherwise been given to Ukraine (either directly or through European purchases)

I can’t tell if this is a moment from your real life or a bit of creative writing about a dystopian future.

A completely pragmatic soultion with minnimum effort to implement and no R&D cost? Sounds completely useless for generating value for shareholders.

Remember when we joked about america invading anything for oil and then we all stopped for a bit because they tried to convince us that there was more to the US than being the state equivelent of a crackhead with a dozen shotguns? And then they launched a self described war to bring about the apocalypse and also steal all the oil… can we stop pretending everything is ok!?

I felt like the thunderhead was pretty great but had its flaws, it was wayyyy too comfortable with destroying non-human life even if it did it in a pragmatic way.

Presumably this is marketed at Elon Musk so he can pretend to be a gamer.

So to go down the bullet point list:

• Swappable battery: I’m going to assume its a generic battery and therefore the best possible option here since I know some (a lot of) laptops have weird proprietary batteries. Point for Thinkpad.
• Industry standard m.2: Even notebooks can do this.
• Easy keyboard replacement: This looks like a lock in? Of the laptops I’ve seen where you can swap the keyboard, which is actually quite a few but in a really dodgy looking way, the keyboards look very different from this. Point for looking WAY easier but might take it away again if this keyboard really is proprietary.
• Swappable memory: I’ll give you that many notebooks solder this in but its easy to find a regular laptop with swappable memory.
• Streamlined display repairs: Much like the keyboard this looks awesome and WAY less jank than normal way you have to do it but it also looks like a proprietary part.
• Modular cooling system: I don’t really know enough to say on this one, most laptops have a cooling system you can take out with similar form factors but I doubt they’d work well with random parts from other machines, then again I doubt this laptop would work well with random parts from other laptops either so your still probably locked into buying the correct one from ThinkPad.
• Modular ports: This is actually pretty awesome, though again where else am I even going to get these modular ports.

Ultimately its still good, the stuff that’s already common has been made way easier and some new options have opened up for repair and replacement, I can’t really blame thinkpad for being the only ones providing this hardware when they’re the only ones making a laptop that would use it in the first place, its still an ecosystem lock in to a degree though even if its not an intentional one. It would be nice to see some competition in the space.

Instant death is less cruel and also doesn’t give them time to carry out any spiteful revenge killings in their final moments.

Ok but how long is it going to be supported? If they abandon the idea its just a particularly expensive regular laptop, even if they keep supporting it you’re locked into ThinkPads ecosystem. It’s not truly repairable until its a standard that doesn’t rely on the benevolence of a single company.

idk much at all about networking (beyond a home network) but if someone wants to begin building an alt-net I’d be willing to contribute a rasberry pi to the cause and leave it running 24/7.

Bombing peace talks feels like its become a pattern under Trump, makes me wonder if anyones even going to bother negotiating with the US after this.

I can see it, not through being overthrown but by immense incompitence as its run by people who are so detatched that they don’t even really understand where food comes from and so up their own asses that they genuinely believe chat GPT can perform complex real world tasks.

Wasn’t it recently proven that the metals introduced into the upper atmosphere by satellites burning up depletes ozone? Its not a problem yet but maintaining constellations on the scale of cumulative several gigawatts of data centre would leave several tons of satellite burning up every single day. CFC Ozone hole is gonna look like a cloudy day in comparison.

The positive is that lasers are undodgable by any means other than random jinking at distances where the light travel delay is significant which can force your enemy to waste all their fuel or die.

Dependso n the area, in remote areas amazon can be WAY cheaper so long as you pass the free shipping threshold even if the items themselves are more expensive.

Honestly kind of huge? 3D printing can allow for really complex geometries that just can’t be practically produced via other methods which could result in more efficient motors or designs with new and desireable torque curves.

I’d argue that the Trumps implication that the US can disable many of these weapons remotely is already a perfectly valid free market reason to not buy them, I mean who wants a back door built into your self defence apparatus?

Also the Human brain is still on par with some of the worlds best supercomputers, I doubt a Tesla has that much onboard processing power.

I mean the end goal of AI is to monetize access to information while obsfucating the pre-existing free information so there’s no real conflict there?

That’s kinda scary honestly, but I guess feeling like I have no intrinsic self worth and thus being extremely skeptical about any entity thats nice to me all the time finally has an upside!.