Depends on your luck. I've had to repair my Samsung dishwasher 3 times in 5 years and yet my parents bought the cheapest possible model 15 years ago and it operates lawlessly and does a better job at cleaning.
The morse code of our age.
The Jehovah's witness of lemmy
If you can solder and heat shrink then search for "usb c trigger board" on ebay and get some for like $5. They will request either 5v, 9v, 12v, 15v or 20v. I've found for most older battery powered barrel jack devices a voltage that is an little under spec works just fine. Ive convertered everything in my house and now own a nice USB PD battery bank, life is good.
I have an LG washer and dryer on my IoT VLAN and funneled through a pi hole. I've been pleasantly surprised at how quiet and well behaved they are on my network. Hardly ever phone home and only connect to one or two domains. Something is seriously wrong with his dudes washer.
I work on consumer electronic ear buds. Frigging ear buds, and we support this...
Enocean has been making battery free wireless light switches for almost 15 years. I've personally used them for about 8 years and love them. They're a lot more expensive then the $1 quote in the article but still cheaper than an electrician. They work with a strike to a piezoelectric element to make energy and transmit the signal.
It's the same in the US. They offer you a total deal expecting to make money on selling the loan. If you pay cash they charge you more for the same deal so they make their money. Car dealerships in general offer no real value and just make things cost more.
Exactly by design. It's a lot cheaper to make people quit than to lay them off and pay a severance package.
There is nothing wrong with LED lights. There is just a big problem with cheap, poorly designed LEDs. You can use proper optics and control the light exceptionally well and put it exactly where its needed with very little spill over or reflections up. You can also chose whatever color and color rendering index (CRI) you like but all of this costs more money and municipal bean counters are drunk on the lowest bidder. So we get glare bomb blue light shows. I used to design this stuff so feel free to ask questions.
Everyone is very focused on recent history. What about the huge amounts of aging immigrants in the USA that migrated here for a better life in the 50s-70s from poor countries and no education? They just worked their ass off and reading wasn't a priority. My father was a poor shepard, no education and illiterate but he hustled and retired early and put me through college to be an engineer. It seems improbable but it is possible for someone to be illiterate and wildly successful and contribute a lot to society and culture.
Lockheed Martin pulled this shit on me 20 years ago. Applied for a job, did a quick phone screen and they invited me to their campus 5 hours away for an in person interview. When I got there they had a whole gymnasium setup with booths and about 50 people doing interviews and 200 bewildered engineers showing up hoping for a job. They never once mentioned it was going to be factory interviews. Fuck that and similar companies.