The article is poorly written. "Scammers are using cellphone's Bluetooth option to hack the pump - and get it for free." is all the detail you get. My cellphone's Bluetooth doesn't have that option.
The reasoning is well established at this point. It was started by the Nixon administration to reduce the amount of left and left-leaning voters, particularly black Americans.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
— John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.
I'd rather just focus on the 10% that is the detailed content, versus 90% hype, but to each their own. I don't need to be told for 3 hours that every minor feature is an Earth-shattering event.
Yeah this is an extremely limited use case with very few data points. It doesn't take into account corporate discounts, spot instances, reserved instances, savings gained from replatforming/rearchitecting to *aaS options. The author here must have very limited enterprise cloud experience.
I started drinking Japanese whiskey because it was a better value than Scotch. Now I drink Scotch again because it's a better value than Japanese whiskey.
> I think it's pretty obvious that on the whole, quality is generally proportional to cost.
There are numerous examples that this is not true, and is a very common consumer misconception. If you found a LASIK place that charged $50,000 for the procedure, doesn't that make it a better quality procedure by your own definition? What about $500,000?
Expensive wine comes to mind. It's easy to find examples of consumer perceived value in the wine industry. I can get a $20 bottle of wine at Costco that costs $40 at a nice restaurant. I'll still pay the $40 because it adds to the dining experience, but at the end of the day I'm drinking the same $20 wine. Natural diamonds have massive perceived value but you can get a lab produced, flawless version for a fraction of the price. Consumers put a higher value on natural diamonds because of clever marketing and decades of supply chain manipulation to make them seem rare.
> Different surgeons use a variety of different equipment and have widely varying levels of experience.
That's true and definitely something to consider other than just the cost. The cost of something shouldn't be the sole indicator of the quality, so telling people to stay away from cheap LASIK centers solely on cost is not giving a complete picture. It's going to vary from center to center often times regardless of cost. Here's a good read on perceived value: https://moneyandvalues.blogspot.com/2008/03/psychology-of-mo...