Depends on your definition of con-man. He has been arrested and charged for tax evasion. As far as I know he isn’t “conman” as such as having conned/frauded say viewers or so on out of money.

That is the weirdest thing. I can understand bottom of the barrel economy brand going “The initial cash is small, but we will nickle and dime you on the service fees and show ads. What can you do, afford a different car? Don’t think so.”

Premium brand like BMW? What you smoking there in Bavary?

Your customers can afford to choose another car. Your price is high enough people expect smooth nice experience. Not annoying ads or clear pointless cash grabs like charging for already installed seat heaters. Sell the trim package or not.

What people will accept is “okay the maintenance and service at garage costs, if one wants to maintain this in nice condition”. Those suspension bushings, dampers, springs, tires and so on still need the normal amount of premium garage priced maintenance.

yeah, well usually district heating is a thing in places where heating is major energy consumer. Russia, Nordic countries, Canada and so on.

More temperate places don’t have district heating, since the heating need isn’t intense enough to warrant it.

The network is expensive to build, but the vast economies of scale make the actual on going heating more efficient and cheaper. Whatever the heating source might be. Be it fuel burning boiler or industrial scale heat pumps.

well mostly they say they don’t negotiate. In reality more often than not, they actually do negotiate in the end. Then they claim it was one time exception (and then do it again next time also).

However given a century of military history, anyone signing up for US military service ought to expect high probability of dying in a very stupid war far away from home.

“Our client dictator is getting little too uppity” or one persons ego, stupid both.

Specially in Nordics. Social corporate responsibility is a very long tradition in Nordics, specially with due to stuff like co-operative customer, producer or worker owned companies, state enterprises and so on.

Including leadership teams behavior. Companies do get flack for what kind of persons they hire as leadership, since it is (pretty reasonably) assumed their mindset and worldview affects their conduct while leading the company.

Plus not only is he leader, he is owner so again money to company’s pocket is in the end money to his pocket.

One can’t claim “we are responsible company, while having opposite kind of CEO/leader”. It is his private matter he has these opinions, what isn’t private is him being company leader. Company doesn’t want his private opinions affecting the company, get rid of him as leader.

It would be one thing, if he was “lineworker” employee. Then person can have private opinions don’t affect company. However he isn’t mere salary employee in the depths of server hall lifting and plugging in servers to racks and cleaning cooling equipment clean. He is company leadership.

Well point 1is classic salesman ship. “Investors, get in on the ground floor, this thing is going to the moon”.

Also in labour relations “Unions, workers accept this worse deal for you or swear on my grandma’s grave we replace you with soon to be super powerful AI”.

There is no way of knowing will or will not LLMs radically improve and lead to radical change. Since we have no way of knowing does someone say resolve the hallucinating and being confidently wrong issues. Not atleast with current probability models, since that random number throw (that is necessary for the whole thing to work) has that chance to land bad. There is no way without fundamentally different base model to give hard orders like “never do that”. There is always the chance 1% and 0,1% throws happen.

I went immediately “they started making opensource print heads… since that is huge effort”… Oh it is just a carrier assembly for HP inkcartridges. Sure hack refillable ones, but still the main printing part is from big corporate. Waiting for the moment of “HP implemented backward DRM on their cartridge. HP cartridge only works, if it hears correct attestation from the printer.”

This all is based on them hacking a corporate part and that is newer sustainable open hardware route.

Using a print head a maker sells as just “We make printheads, what you do with it after is your business. We exactly sell these as industrial parts from people to build printer around (or whatever other device you have use for ink depositing thingie in)” fine. That is normal.

But “hey we made open inkjet printer”. “So you figured the vast tasks of designing and manufacturing inkjet print heads?” “No” “You found a suitable standard industrial part to build around, less amazing, but still okay?” “No” “So what did you figure out or provide to table?” “We hacked HPs part”. Soooo everyone using this is still paying HP tax and who knows HP might shut this whole thing down one way or another.

edit: Not to mention it is not like it is some impossible task to get inkjet printheads, like all legit and so on. One web search later leads for example to KonicaMinolta industrials website for their catalog of “Here we sell just the Inkjet heads, incase you want to make a printer. Here is the spec sheet how to run it.”

Ei, vaan laki toimiin niin kuin pitää. Riittävän pitkä “alennus” on vain kuluttajalle käytännössä uusi matalampi perushinta ja se näkyy sitten tuossa. “Ei sinun tarvitse heti sinne kauppaan juosta, tämä hinta on ollut tällainen jo pitempään. Kutsutaampa sitä alennukseksi tai ei”.

Sitten vain tietysti kuluttajan vastuulla on verrata, mikäs on tämän kaupan hintataso kilpailijaan verrattuna. Sitä ei tarvitse kauppiaan hoitaa.

The EU proposal actually talks about this. ICC has no jurisdiction over Crime of Agression. Actual starting of the war. Since by accident/intentionally nobody gave ICC that jurisdiction/ Russia is hardly going to volunteer to agree to give it jurisdiction

ICC can handle the individual war crimes, crimes against humanity.

Cruiseferries. When ferry operators figured out, hey we can up sell all of these ferry travelers for extra profit.

Well the safety has gotten better since 80’s and 90’s. sadly exactly due to the sinkings. More compartmentalising, stricter automatic safety measures and alerts. For example actually mandating on bridge “hey captain, your barn is open” alerts and so on. Mostly getting rid of the dangerous upward opening visors, which own buoyancy is constantly pulling it open.

Well there is still the overcrowded small ferries issue. Which is down to old worn out ferries badly maintained and overloaded. nothing one can do about that. One can sink any ship by exceeding carrying capacity and not maintaining the things that should be watertight, watertight.

So it was a normal cruise. Norovirus and cruiseships, name a more iconic duo.

Well it wasn’t exactly same. I bet the previous year he didn’t say that part about it being the same show. 🙃