Well, he buys them for the same reason people buy Apple products: very performant, look good, and carry a lot of social status.

Otherwise, they make some very questionable engineering decisions for sure. On their motorbikes, you often have to disassemble half the bodywork just to change the battery; that's just beyond stupid. But like Apple, their products are kind of unique, so people deal with it.

BMW bikes have improved. It used to be with the last of the dry clutch flat twins that when the clutch failed (and it would fail), you had to remove the back half of the bike. Literally. As in not figuratively, to avoid doubt. The front half would be left standing, like some bisected cow artwork. Apparently it was a two day job.

Funny, I posted a pic to exactly that further down in the thread.

What is the probability that Monsanto has managed to pay everyone to say it safe.

Proving everyone else wrong is quite the incentive for a researcher. To me it's sound unlikely that no one else would jump on the opportunity of fame for proving that it's actually harmful. Money is something but that's not the primary motivator of researchers, otherwise they would be doing way more lucrative work with their intelligence.

I quickly checked the first study linked and it's a meta analysis.

It relies on studies in rodent that get exposed to amounts of glyphosate that are absurdly high. Equivalent human absorption would be in the gram range, to the point where someone eating 250g of bread everyday would have 1% of this mass ingested as glyphosate.

By this standard, things like vitamins and minerals are toxic as well.

It makes no sense, to me it looks like bad science.

You have not assessed the facts critically. The argument in favor of glyphosate's safety is that, as the herbicidal action is the result of disrupting an amino acid synthesis pathway that in animals does not exist, it is therefore harmless to animals. This argument is already fallacious: all it does is establish the mechanism by which it is harmful to plants. These studies evidence that glyphosate is harmful to animals and investigate the mechanisms underlying the harm. The fact that these experimental conditions are not the same conditions under which glyphosate is consumed in the food chain does not make it bad science, because science is concerned with knowledge that generalizes (e.g. biological mechanisms and pathways) and these mechanisms cannot be gleaned by reproducing the conditions already in place.

The comparison with vitamins is not relevant, and to bring it up suggests you are not thinking clearly.

I thought that from reading the first part of the first meta sample too, but in that same paragraph is mention of a second study that apparently did find relevant issues at low doses in vitro of human cells at environmentally relevant concentration levels.

In fact the purpose of meta analysis is to compare and contrast the conflicting research and results on a topic. It's very useful when forming a scientific view.

Yep that's pretty much it. And in France (I believe most of rich Europe as well), there are mandatory "social contribution" on capital gains which are collected directly by the banks. So if you don't have much money "working" for you, they will take a good part of whatever small gains you made.

So it doesn't go down, but the gains are so small it's kinda pointless. Of course, those who can save a lot every year get compounding benefits quite fast, but is a class that is becoming more rare every year passing.

The Vision Pro release is a complete joke. If Meta can't make it work for under 1K it's definitely not going to work if you only offer a slighter better product for 3,5K.

I believe that they are so arrogant that they think Meta just suck when in fact it is just a product category still looking for a valuable use case to the general public.

They market it for watching movies but most peoples already hate using headphones for too long and those are pretty comfortable nowadays.

Yep, Chromebook are basically a sufficient information appliance for most people. I think this is why Apple is going to try a cheaper MacBook.

The MacBook Air is nice but it still too expensive for most people that only want to browser the web, use social media and edit a few documents once in a while. Their advantage in chip power and efficiency is not enough because people buying this won't make use of the power anyway and will rarely use it long enough at once for battery life to matter that much.

As someone who bought and used various MP3 players before getting an iPod I disagree.

They were not technically first at creating a portable music player that relied on digital compressed format and digital storage, that's true. However before the iPod, you had either very low storage capacity, reliance on expensive memory cards that you would need to swap or hard drive based players that were unpractical to carry around.

Those solutions also had generally terrible user interface that made things like browsing the library or seeking in a track a pain in the ass. It was a moderate improvement on already existing solutions. It wasn't that much better than a MP3 CD player (especially after they figured out buffering to avoid skipping because of movement). I had a mini-disc player in parallel to the MP3s and it was generally a better solution: cheaper for managing a big library and it had compression. Physical media management was still a problem but that was also a requirement for MP3 player of practical size that used memory cards (and those were awfully expensive).

Then Apple came in with a solution using the newer 1,8 inch hard drive format with a starting capacity of 5GB, which would be bumped to 10GB shortly. It changed everything, it was practical in portability/pocketability, storage capacity and user interface. My brother bought an Archos player released around the same time and it was just a joke compared to the iPod (he got it because it was on sale for much cheaper).

So yeah, technically Apple was not the first to commercialize an MP3 player. But they trailed the earliest entrant in the market only by a few years (about 3) and they basically defined the market. Before the iPod, MP3 players were mostly a waste of money and a curiosity at best. The experience they would offer for the price was ridiculous. The iPod was expensive but it was a major improvement in every way, it made the Portable Media Player not only a possibility but something very desirable because it was useful and competent. The iPhone is basically the same story and before that the Mac (for DTP) and even before that the Apple II (for general computing access to individuals).

I feel that when people argue about Apple being late on innovation they are arguing in bad faith to justify current mismanagement (because they make a shit ton of money regardless). But it's basically splitting hairs. Yes Apple was never strictly first on purely technical grounds but they were always the first at creating a consumer product that would actually be able to achieve the purpose it was supposed to in a satisfactory manner.

Just think that they marketed Photos as a worthwhile replacement for Aperture as well.

I remember advising many photographs friends on using Aperture for photo library management. Now I feel so bad for ever recommending that. I mean Lightroom now has a stupid subscription, but using Apple software was kind of the point: avoiding the risk of software becoming too expensive or bad because the hardware premium funds the development of good software.

Now you get to pay more for the hardware but you have to deal with shitty or expensive software as well. Makes no sense.

Well that's largely theoretical and Siri needs largely more input than is worth the trouble. It lacks context and because of Apple focus on privacy/security is largely unable to learn who you are to be able to do stuff depending on what it knows about you.

If you ask Siri about playing some music, it will go the dumb route of finding the tracks that seems to be a close linguistic match of what you said (if it correctly understood you in the first place) when in fact you may have meant another track of the same name. Which means you always need to overspecify with lots of details (like the artist and album) and that defeat the purpose of having an "assistant".

Another example would be asking it to call your father, which it will fail to do so unless you have correctly filled the contact card with a relation field linked to you. So you need to fill in all the details about everyone (and remember what name/details you used), otherwise you are stuck just relying on rigid naming like a phone book. Moderately useful and since it require upfront work the payoff potential isn't very good. If Siri would be able to figure out who's who just from the communications happening on your device, it could be better, but Apple has dug itself into a hole with their privacy marketing.

The whole point of an (human) assistant is that it knows you, your behaviors, how you think, what you like. So he/she can help you with less effort on your part because you don't have to overspecify every details that would be obvious to you and anyone who knows you well enough. Siri is hopeless because it doesn't really know you, it only use some very simple heuristic to try to be useful. One example is how it always offer to give me the route home when I turn on the car, even when I'm only running errands and the next stop is just another shop. It is not only unhelpful but annoying because giving me the route home when I'm only a few kilometers away is not particularly useful in the first place.