2xpress

Wish they would have elaborated more on what kind of supply constraints they are facing. Is there a limit to how many microchips that they can order that they can't manufacture themselves? Seems to me regardless of the supply constraints, if they raise the price by $20 to $50 and pass that money on to the suppliers that would positively motivate them to increase the supply.

>> Where units do appear, bots often attempt to scalp stock which is then resold at higher prices elsewhere. Many Approved Resellers have implemented single-unit limits to combat this, with Adafruit and others going further and enforcing two-factor authentication – we’re encouraging other Approved Resellers to consider this route.

For as long as the price is artificially constrained, what is there to prevent secret mafia deals between reseller insiders and the bot farm operators, or what is there to prevent the bot farm operators from infiltrating the resellers, and quickly gobbling up the supply as soon as it is available, to sell at market prices for the easy profit??

Comment · 4 years ago

I've had this happen to me when the SD card would snap in 2 inside the SD card holder on the PI. Happened twice with the CanaKit PIs, once for PI3 and another time for PI4, with the SD cards that came in the CanaKit. I just put Raspbian on some fresh SD cards that I bought separately, plugged them in, and everything was back to normal. I think the overheating was from the short circuits inside the snapped SD cards.

Comment · 4 years ago

Can be done with RP4 8 GB. Make sure to use the 64-bit Raspbian https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/ for much better efficiency, a USB3 SSD, and that the power supply is supplying sufficient amps, or the CPU will down-throttle.

Comment · 4 years ago

Indeed, RP 4 with 8 GB is a very powerful versatile product, needed for all kinds of industrial and commercial uses, where it would in turn build more value for the rest of society, generating wealth. Attempting to restrict this product to only some specific privileged group will not only be futile, but harmful to the whole society, including that privileged group, as the wealth that could be generated will not be.

The current big problem is that 2 years of Coronavirus pandemic and the active Russian beligerance have created unprecedented economic disruption, effectively ending the prosperous times following WWII. We are no longer living in the same world, and expecting things to be cheap and plentiful is no longer a practical frame of mind.

The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way.

It is too bad that there is really no viable alternative to RP. The current competitors do not provide good ongoing support and are only compatible with specific versions of the Linux kernel, or modified versions of the Linux kernel. I suppose eventually a credible competitor will rise up maintaining good support, without any fair price manipulation BS, and with less weird hardware quirks, and everybody will just switch over to that platform.

Comment · 4 years ago

Indeed, if the demand exceeds the supply then the prices have to go up. This way more money will be available for the manufacturer to increase the supply. This is the basic law of economics, and anybody trying to play games around it will only make things worse and end up in poverty.

Comment · 4 years ago

One way to make it less likely to get caught up in a mass-location harvesting case is to disable GPS on phone, especially on a non-de-googled Android phone. I'd also recommend paying with cash whenever that is an option. Another biggie is not to vote for politicians supporting public surveillance laws, and to cast an abstention vote when no anti-public-surveillance candidate is available. The abstention sends a signal to other prospective candidates that the election-winning politicians are not un-defeatable by a candidate better aligned with the voters who abstained.