I used to have a similarly priced Withings smartwatch clone; worked very well for years until I switched to a new phone and the app turned out to be gone from the store and the log in servers were offline. Without the app you can't get notifications or even sync the time and the watch is useless. Yes, well-known brands also discontinue software, but with a cheap watch like this, it's almost guaranteed to become a paperweight in a few years.
Now I have a real Withings, at 10 times the price of the fake, it honestly offers only a marginally better experience.
Living was always expensive, in developing countries, goods are still expensive but so is living. Save for subsistence farmers, but those are a minority in all but the poorest countries.
Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug.
Consider this too next time you read about a billionaire supporting charity (besides their motives likely being tax breaks). For example Zuckerberg donated $75 million to a San Francisco hospital, which was plastered all over the news. Proportionally it's less than what the average person spends on charity a year.
Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.
I found several websites switched to 'press here until the timer runs out', probably they are doing the checks while the user is holding their mouse pressed, it would be trivial to bypass the long press by itself with automated mouse clickers.
You are confusing installed capacity with power used. The consumed power is going down since the early 2000s, but since the generated power by most renewables depends on the weather and season, more reserve capacity needs to be installed.
I feel that we are employed above of all to be available when it matters rather than to do a certain amount of work for the hours you are paid for. Compare it to a workshop with some tools, you buy a hammer not because you use it for 8 hours a day, but because when you need it, you can't do without it. If you go a day without needing to use the hammer, it doesn't mean that having the hammer in your shed is a waste of money.
If the company cared only about getting certain amount of work done in the time they paid for, they would hire an external. And continuing the analogy, it's usually more expensive in the long run to rent a tool even if you use it only a couple of times a month, as well as having to get used to unfamiliar equipment, having no records of how well the rental tool performed earlier.
There appear to be few good apps left that do not use a subscription model, and when they do, more often than not they charge at least €5/month, or a yearly €40 subscription. I remember around circa 2012, apps like Nova Launcher and Titanium backup were considered expensive, at €7 or so. Another example, I have a grandfathered subscription on Sleep Cycle for €2 a year, if you would take a new subscriptions it's €30 a year.
>Too bad you used the same phone number that you have on file with the university.
Regardless of the legitimate discussion on cheating, why would a lecturer have access to student phone numbers, either directly or after asking the student affairs office to link them to names? The further I got in the article, the more it seemed like Reddit-style creative writing.
A similar thing is happening in inorganic chemistry. On https://materialsproject.org probably the majority of materials are 'discovered' computationally, by using DFT simulations to determine if and how stable any crystal structure would be. Using this database, AI can be used to find suitable materials for any application. [1]
Now I have a real Withings, at 10 times the price of the fake, it honestly offers only a marginally better experience.