I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).
This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.
Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.
Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.
In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.
The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.
>> Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.
Possibly the reason the OEM price is so high is because it is backed by huge liability insurance (e.g., you get into a Jacuzzi and get electrocuted). I'd pay for that assurance. By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things:
1. They use more expensive processes and materials.
2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts.
3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.
#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.
But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.
There's also
4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)
5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.
Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)
I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.
This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.
>> I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The part goes from $30 to $280 due to 5 or 6 factors, which you've outlined well. Insurance is one of many factors. Insurance isnt high because they expect things to go wrong -- insurance forces better QA/QC and overall processes so there isnt a payout -- all those precautions raise the price. It aligns everyone to focus on quality outcomes to prevent payouts.
>>By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
> They also have sufficient insurance that a payout doesn't tank their company. I don't think their risk avoidance translates into your risk avoidance.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications. Also, insurance companies will not payout (and hence bankrupt the company) in cases of fraud or gross negligence.
The system is not perfect, but it exists to align interests.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications.
Those certifications aren't worth as much as I thought they were. I just took apart a UL-certified power strip with scorched plastic, which is a significant fire hazard. It had an LED that was fed from the 120V line through a 15K 0.5-watt resistor.
a UL certification will hardly be the only one in place for a commercial insurance firm to guarantee a jacuzzi. Just imagine the risk of electrocution.
Just look at it from a retail standpoint -- perhaps you have car insurance.
- (where I live) You are forced to have a driver's license
- (where I live) Even if your spouse claims not to drive, they wont insure me unless all other adults in my household have licenses
- i'm forced to pay more if i drive an unsafe car vs a safe one
- I can pay less if I have a LoJack or other safety device
- I can pay further less if I take a driver's safety course which runs 5hrs long
- I can pay further less if I install a OBD-2 device sharing my driver behavior
- I risk having my insurance cancelled If I do something bad (DUI)
- I risk having no payout if I do something illegal
Also for kids at least, sometimes they really will be happier with less choice. Sometimes kids make bad decisions and limiting choice to good options is helpful.
Additionally the inverse is true. Sometimes kids choices are restrained, and they really would like to do a thing they are not allowed to, and gift cards offered them away to do that. Case in point: my tween figured out that we don’t let him buy in game currency for any the games that we do let him play, however, when a relative gives him a gift card, we let him redeem it, making gift cards incredibly popular gifts.
I’d seriously been considering trying meshcore out, as I live on several hundred acres without cell service, and I’d like some means of communicating with my family. So far CB radios have not worked as they are large to carry day-to-day (particularly for the kid). This seemed like a solution - and fun to tinker with. Apparently not.
From what I've read, success depends a lot on line of sight. If you're on flat, open land, you'll likely see much better range than I did.
There's a neat tool in the MeshCore app (available in the web version[0], too) that shows line of sight between two points on a map. You can click the three dots in the upper right > Tools > Line of Sight. It will show you how good line of sight is between those two points, accounting for changes in elevation.
It's also possible a good repeater would make more of a difference. I'm hoping to hear feedback from other MeshCore users about that.
Sadly not flat and not open. But more far flung repeaters are an option as I have electricity further from the house.
However the TDeck being hard to use makes it unlikely the kid would carry it. And bad UX in general makes it hard on my wife. It was mainly the bad UX and lack of open source (no hacking for me) aspects that put a damper on things for me.
This is going to be painful for people in a way which I haven’t seen discussed here yet.
A year ago I went on vacation with my family, and the kids wanted to watch Netflix on VRBO‘s TV and so I logged in to my account on the tv. And of course I forgot to log it out when I left - so, predictably, the next people decided they hated my taste and went through and deleted all my likes and dislikes, and rated I swear 100 teen romances. I somehow got my account logged out of that TV, but the account was trashed and unrepairable so I lost about a decades worth of history and started a new one.
Afterwards, I thought I should’ve just cast from the kids iPad. And now that won’t be possible.
Interestingly, I have yet to find I have the horrible feedback problem people are talking about in this thread with my APP3, but I do in my Honeywell syncs, about 1 day in 3.
And as I wear glasses all hearing protection in the earmuff style block less noise than the APP3 - though I normally wear both.
The number of times I’ve opened FFmpegs man page must number in the hundreds. I think I’m a pretty good conceptually, but I can’t remember all the flags. IE that –s is frame size, while -fs is file size.
And while that man page does have some examples, these days I tend to ask an LLM (or if it’s going to be simple Google) for an example.
That's why the recommended practice with shell usage is to write a script (or alias or function) and to use the long version of the flag in the script. Instead of having a complex invocation of ffmpeg, you'd have `flac2mp3 -q low file`.
I’ve had two cases for this in the last month. Not that I have access to an agentic browser.
* We decided to buy a robot vacuum, again. And we decided on a particular model that yo-yo‘s up and down in price by about $200 every month. We ended up buying it off of Amazon because of camelcamelcamel, but if I could have easily tracked prices and bought elsewhere, I would’ve. And I would’ve considered using an antigenic browser to do that for me – if I could trust them at all. One model number and I know the price I wanna pay, I just don’t want to check a bunch of storefronts everyday
* kids going back to school – and he has a school supply list. He’s up for a new backpack and a new lunchbox, and a bunch of back to school clothes - so those we’ve actually been shopping for all summer. But the wooden ruler, the three sheafs of college rule paper, etc. I don’t wanna shop for. I actually had chatGPT scan the paper list, and then get me either direct links, or links to searches on walmart.com (they are more than an hours drive from us, but they do deliver to my wife’s work). Then I created a cart and had them deliver. ChatGPT solutions were not bad, I only switched one or two items for a version my kid should have versus a version I should buy. In the moment, I probably would have trusted a bot to do this, though retrospectively I’m glad it went the way it did
I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).
reply