It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

There are so many things you can do to make these cheap printers reliable that I really could not list them all. When it comes to bed and first layer issues here are the biggest ones

Make sure your X gantry is tight and not sagging. The eccentric nuts on the guide wheels should be set so that there is very little play. If you lift the left side it should not move much without raising the gantry.

Tram your bed with the screws almost bottomed out. Loose screws mean that the bed is moving more and will not likely hold a level for long.

The bed must be warm during abl. these things warp and twist like crazy when you heat them. You will not get good results on these cheap ass beds if your machine measures its shape cold.

If you are not using a pei coated sheet to print on buy one asap. It is a superior print surface and a huge leap in print technology. It’s less important with pei, but it is worth noting that the print surface must be clean. Oils from your fingers mess with adhesion to the print bed.

Those are the big ones. There are like I said a million little things you can do. These things can be made into reliable work horses but it takes A lot of research, work, time, and often money to make them such. My ender 3 has cost me more than a prusa would have, which is pretty dumb tbh. On the other hand, it’s mine and there is no part of it that I do not understand. I like my printer. It’s very fast, very reliable, and I made it that way.

One more vote for the SKR mini e3. Best upgrade you can do for one of these printers.

Fascinating. A whole hidden world.

Man I have never understood what people are doing to make money with a 3d printer. It’s an incredibly inefficient manufacturing technique if you need quantity of a part. So, how does that business even work. Who the hell is buying all those… green rectangles? What are they for??

3d printed plastic guns are real in a sense but not in any practical way. I am not sure why so many people think this is a concern. If I have a box of ammo, I can probably go into my shop and come up with a way to fire it. I doubt I would use my 3d printer in that project though. There are better ways to makeshift a weapon.

Unemployment is at record lows. Some sectors are hiring a lot more people than the tech sector is shedding. It’s not really complicated.

Job sectors come and go, grow and shrink. Imagine how silly I would sound if I said: “there is almost no work for horse cart builders but the gov says that unemployment is at record lows, how can this be?”

It sounds like they solved some problems with mixed reality stuff that nobody else has been able to solve. Getting pass through to be perfect is a pretty big deal if you care about this stuff. It also sounds like the UI they designed is very good.

The price is completely outrageous, this thing is not going anywhere if they cannot get it down to 1k ish. And let’s be real, nobody really wants to be in a headset. And the culture is not going to accept people in headsets they way they did phones.

I guess hats off to them for making the best headset device on the market. But, I still think the headset market is a dead end.

The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.

This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.

The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.

It’s an interesting argument but I think it is stretching things too far. Also isn’t a little anthrocentric to assume that our relationships are unique and different than all other living things here.

A pine tree drops needs that are so acidic few other plants can grow near it. Is it damaging the ecosystem?

Our relationship with bovines is weird right. probably the most successful large mammals on earth. Their success is completely due to being a great machine for turning grass into human food. It’s symbiotic in a lot of ways: we clear pasture and kill predators for them, but also, we eat them. Great for the cows and us, sucks for the trees and wolves.

Ants and aphids have a similar relationship. Great for the ants, and the aphids, not so much for the plants.

If you want to conflate human economics with the natural world, you would have to admit that nature is the domain of the most ruthless of capitalists. Christ, the whole point of a lot of leftist thinking is that we must “rise above” our animalistic nature.

What annoys me about this meme is that it is the same relationship that underpins all business relationships. I understand you are not happy with the state of things but showing a drawing of “capitalism” at work in nature isn’t really making the point you think you are making.

This might as well be a pic of two guys in suits trading on a stock exchange floor with the same caption. Or add this to a caption to a pic of a lion eating a baby gazelle while its mother watches from the tree line. What point are we even trying to make here??

Nah I get it. Calling your customer an investment was just a little too naked for me, so I made a joke.

Investments? Do customers cost you money? That’s now how any of this is supposed to work. I’m not sure the CEO of HP knows anything about business. Dude, the customers are supposed to give YOU the money.

They upset and turned away people who were not willing to pay. Not a big loss. In the meantime they added tons of people who would pay if given a small push.

I have never really been sure how exactly “the internet” thought they would be punished for this move. It seemed kind of bullet proof to me. Like, sure you’re leaving and never coming back, but you were not really a paying customer and never would be.

Consumer VR is over, it didn’t work. nobody really wants it, at any price. Wtf was Apple thinking? This should have been scrapped and left for dead. Good money after bad.

I have put this on the internet so it can age like fine milk if this thing manages to find an enthusiastic audience. I feel pretty good about my odds here though.

Criticism of Israel and Hamas seems pretty neutral. Praising Israel seems pretty Islamophobic and praising Hamas seems pretty antisemitic.

This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.

The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.

More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.

We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.

When we start making excuses for violence we abandon any hope of a peaceful world. There is always some slight that requires reprisal which will begat further reprisal. No party in this conflict has the strength to resist. No part has the moral high ground.

Might as well hunt down Churchill and Truman’s descendants and murder them to avenge their grandfathers casting the first stones in this conflict.

Did we used to conduct war in a way that was safe for civilians? I’m not aware of that history. The war in Gaza looks like war to me. The same way we have been practicing it since we picked up our first sticks in anger. Murdering civilians is a consequence of war. The “good guys” fire bombed Dresden and nuked Japan.

I would give more examples but being honest I am straining to think of other wars in human history that were worth fighting. I am drawing a blank. All of it is pointless slaughter. At least in Gaza you can understand that the Israelis were provoked to war. Can’t say the same for the US in most of our wars.