AnyOldName3

I didn't read it as the OP expressing their own opinion, but instead sharing what the majority of voters in their area think.

The $5 Windows keys have never been legitimate - either they're just people selling keys they've generated with a keygen or bought with a stolen credit card, or it's students reselling free keys they've got from Dreamspark or a sysadmin selling keys from their employer's enterprise licence, which, in Microsoft's eyes, are all piracy. An OEM copy of Windows 11 Pro is about €150 and can't be transferred to a different motherboard, and a retail copy which can be transferred is about €300. A one-time purchase copy of Office is about €120 (it's also available as a subscription). These machines either have at least €270 of software on them, or €0 worth of pirated software on them.

It can't be legitimate because licences for the bundled software cost more than the machines are being sold for. Also, the hardware included isn't officially Windows 11 compatible, so selling it with Windows 11 installed is misleading the customer into thinking they're buying something much more recent than they really are. For a decent number of people buying these, they're likely to own something just as new already, and could get a free upgrade to Windows 11 by doing the same configuration tweaks as the sellers did.

Plenty of people think they're already getting more than they need and anyone who says otherwise is just pretending to be ill to get a free ride at the taxpayers' expense, and could just get a job if they wanted. The right wing press pushes this narrative and people fall for it.

Thermal paper is generally not recyclable, which is another downside.

Someone might have thought it was so obvious that it didn't need stating and would just ruin the joke. Alternatively, someone who was somehow unaware of the song and assumed that would be the case for nearly everyone else might have overconfidently decided it was a stretch without looking at the first line of the song.

The tories cut funding from the department that decides whether asylum seekers have their claims granted or denied, so there's a big backlog of people who can't legally get a job to support themselves and can't legally be deported, and feeding and housing them is expensive. The right wing press blames this not on the fact that they're all in legal limbo until the backlog is dealt with, and not on the fact that decades of foreign policy mean that there are lots of people in danger unless they flee who have English as their only extra language, so would only be able to get a job after asylum was granted if they were in the UK, but instead on the myth that the government is required by things like the Human Rights Act to provide people a life of luxury if they come here and people are coming from safe places for a free multi-year holiday. Because humans are not rational, people believe the myth, and if the myth were true, it would obviously be a good idea to stop providing luxury hotel accommodation at great expense to the taxpayer.

Turning the dehumidifier on ten minutes early means there aren't ten to twenty minutes where the shower's running with no dehumidification where condensation is able to settle on all the walls unimpeded, and the extra condensation takes a couple of extra hours to dry out again. Regardless of whether my family try to turn off the dehumidifier prematurely (and I only mentioned that as why I'd originally set a hygrometer up to graph the humidity in the bathroom, not as an ongoing problem), if that happens several times a day when someone showers, that's more than enough dampness for black mold to form.

I've got a textured PEI bed and when I've printed TPU, the adhesion has been perfect, i.e. good enough that the part wasn't going to go anywhere unless I wanted it to, but still easy enough to remove when the print was done and the bed had cooled. I guess it could vary from filament brand to brand, so it's possibly worth trying the same brand as I used, which was cheap Geeetech stuff. It's £8 a roll, and I've used their cheap PLA for ages. I wouldn't recommend their ABS+, though, as it seems to break down at the lowest temperature that gives reasonable layer adhesion.

So you think the reason a hygrometer can't detect humidity ten minutes before it exists in order to start cooling the dehumidifier's compressor to the temperature it needs to be to start working is human error?

I was going to share a graph from when I put a DHT20 hygrometer in my bathroom to prove to my family that the humidity was the cause of the mould and they should stop turning the dehumidifier off when its built-in hygrometer said it should be running, but unfortunately, it was long enough ago that Home Assistant decided I no longer need my one-every-ten-seconds readings and now only shows hourly readings, which aren't enough to prove my point here. You'll just have to take my word for it that when I did this test, I was surprised to find that although the humidity at the other end of the room started rising quickly after the shower was turned on, it peaked fifteen or twenty minutes after it was turned off again because diffusion without something like a fan or a draught moving the air around can be really slow.

My bathroom's a weird shape as it's long and thin and has a weirdly high ceiling at one end, so it's not going to have typical airflow, but it is a real bathroom that really exists, and I did have data in the past showing it dried out faster if I manually turned the dehumidifier to maximum (so it would run even if its hygrometer said not to) ten minutes before turning the shower on than if I did it immediately before turning the shower on. Whether I'm going to shower in ten minutes is something I can know but a hygrometer can't. This isn't even really related to whether the dehumifier is smart as mine isn't and I can operate its switch as easily as I could operate a smart switch, and my shower isn't electric, so there isn't a switch I need to operate before using it that could be made to do two jobs

Again, I’m not sure what components were used in the older model, but given the age I’d be very surprised if the electronics it uses would be more expensive to manufacture than the newer one.

That's fundamentally where you're going wrong, then. 1980s electronics (for a dehumidifier, it wouldn't even be electronics, it'd be electromechanical) are often much more expensive than modern approaches, and even when they're cheaper, it's typically not by much. Over time, it's got cheaper and cheaper to precisely make small things, but the costs of materials haven't meaningfully gone down, so the 1980s approach costs about the same as it did back then, whereas digital electronics have plummeted in cost. Now, anything where the best approach was electromechanical rather than electronic is almost certainly cheaper to do digitally.

Take toasters for example, most toasters don’t have a timer at all. They have a little piece of metal almost touching a contact. When you turn the toaster on, that metal heats up and it bends until it touches that contact, ding toast is done.

Another great example of being out of date. Fifteen years ago, cheap toasters almost always used a bimetallic strip and the dial controlled the position of the contact it touched so it would have to bend more or less before it disconnected. In nearly every modern toaster, however, you'll either have something like a 555 timer and the dial will control a variable capacitor that changes the frequency of an oscillator to make it count slower or faster, or it'll have a dedicated toaster control chip like the BCT5512 and the dial will control a potentiometer that a capacitor drains through. Mouser list the PT8A2511PE toaster controller for £0.111 in bulk, but the cheapest bimetallic switch they carry (which is too basic for a toaster because it's got a fixed switching temperature) is the F13A17005L360100, which is £1.93 in bulk, more than seventeen times the price. (I suspect they used to have cheaper ones back when toasters still used them, and they've been discontinued now toaster manufacturers have stopped ordering them.)

But it’s cheaper and simpler to just do it the old way, and for many applications, that’s fine.

A lot of the time, the old way is more complicated and more expensive. Technology doesn't just let us do things we couldn't before, it also lets us do existing things in new, better ways, and being cheap is one of the most in-demand things. It's lower tech to hire ten labourers with shovels for a week to dig a hole, but it's much cheaper and faster to hire one labourer with a digger to dig it in an hour.

Hell, I’m certain there are dehumidifiers on the market that don’t have any kind of humidity sensor at all. Even simpler…

Having no sensor at all is certainly the cheapest way to do it, but we were talking about ones that do have a sensor, and whether, once you've opted to have a sensor, there's any major cost to making the device smart. If you're aiming so low-end that you don't even have a sensor, then you're clearly not concerned about the marketing benefit of extra features, so wouldn't bother making it smart.