TV is cheap because you are the product. CEOs want you to see their ads, their propaganda.
Gas is expensive because they have not yet found a way to stop car-owner from leaving the sofa in front of TV
But they do have ads at the pumps
Tvs are cheap because manufacturing costs came down. They were cheap before they were smart
Both are true. Manufacturing costs went down significantly, but non-smart TVs are bow more expensive than smart TVs bu over $100.
TVs harvest user data which is monetized as well
Car companies could learn a lot from the printer industry.
If production of cars and oil were the same companies, cars would be as cheap as TVs and gas for them would be 10x current price.
How have TVs gotten so cheap. It’s gotta be shit.
They stopped making them out of gasoline.
Boy you are gonna be shocked when you learn about where plastic comes from.
i mean they do have less plastic than before.
I’m guessing it’s all advertising deals and spyware. Oh, and the TV is still shit.
Yea, TVs are all “Smart” now. But they don’t have any truly new or useful features, they just record your conversations and transmit occurrences of keywords as “usage and diagnostic” data. I guess now they can use wifi to do occupancy scans of your house too, so that’s fun. Oh and they use Bluetooth to scan for nearby devices that are willing to cooperate in case you don’t put them on the LAN and they transmit that way.
Anyway, TNG has left Netflix. Can you fucking believe it?
TNG left Netflix like eight years ago… 🦜Yarrrr
My blu-ray set is still on my shelf.
Telly is a TV you can pre-order, which is completely free but apparently pays for itself with all the ads it will display lol
Nearly all tvs are smart tvs that make money with showing ads and selling data. Any loss on the hardware is made up on selling customer data and ad space. The tvs would be amazing if they didn’t come with smart features.
Is there any way to lobotomize these smart TVs? Even the specs on a cheaper mid-range would blow my current dinosaur out of the water
Never connect them to the internet
You want your favorite streaming service on there? Get an older (used office) PC, load it up with (your prefered flavor of) Linux, get a bluetooth keyboard mouse combo, hook it up to your HDMI port, and go ham.
Some TVs even let you turn them on directly to a specific HDMI port for a bonus fun time of never having to see the TVs menu.
Find out the streaming service limits the quality then stop paying for it and pirate that shit instead.
Don’t connect them to the internet.
True, I’ll probably end up going that route when this one dies (assuming they don’t all require sign in and heartbeats at that point)
Was hoping for something like a FOSS OS just for the convenience of keeping jellyfin up to date and cleaning up the useless baked in apps.
This probably exists, or at least I hope it does
Use an external media player. Personally, I use a roku routed through a pihole.
Iv stared coming across some that’s not remotely an option. They require a logged in account before they accept any input.
If you attempt to use a DNS ad blocker they also just stop working. Its fucking toxic.
Wow. Fuck that.
I’m actually curious enough to buy one to see how bad they actually are now.
Right back to the store then.
Fuck around and get a chargeback.
Not really, the smarts are integrated into the control circuitry. You can’t bypass them and turn them into simple, dumb displays.
Depending on the model, you can block the TV from the internet and leave it on set to one of the inputs and the smarts bits won’t bother you again. Other ones are more intrusive and pushy about it.
did this happen recently? i got mine in 2019 its enormous and all it does it turn on and lets me play xbox
2018 is about when it started but it was a very small number of tvs. By 2020 it was a common thing but it was a dedicated line of tvs from each brand. By 2024 it was all cheaper tvs basically. And now it’s basically every TV and even some monitors.
The non smart TVs are almost as hard to find now as finding a smart one was in 2018. And monitors are starting to have smart features and ads even among the highest end offerings. But unlike tvs they arnt any cheaper for it. Its stupid.
The build quality is not great, they saved on backlight heatsinking so the LEDs will bake and delaminate, causing dark spots, discoloration etc.
TV?No, it’s just a big display
TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it’s not just the “oh, they have advertising now” thing.
Source: I worked in electronics retail in the late 80s/early 90s, and in one of the world’s largest consumer electronics firms when my career proper started.
The TVs in the window of the local electronics chain store (or in Walmart) were sold at practically zero margin, or more often than not at a loss. The retail chains would basically hold a gun to the CE companies heads and tell them if you’re not willing to sell at a loss, nothing you make is going in the window display, or worst case we’re not selling you at all.
The retail chains didn’t care because all their profit was in selling accessories and unnecessary extended warranties. The CE companies hoped that they could make it up by selling you the more expensive model they actually made a profit on once you were in the door, or by selling you a VCR or whatever as well.
This is why the TV companies were always looking for a “next big thing” (flat-screen, ultraflat, widescreen, HD, 3D, 4k, 8k…) to differentiate the “next model up”, which is to say the model the store would actually allow them to make a profit on.
This particular race-to-the-bottom mutually assured destruction business model is also the reason there is practically no consumer electronics manufacturing left in the West, of course. And why manufacturers grasp at stuff like advertising.
Shame, I particularly miss Panasonic and Sony
TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it’s not just the “oh, they have advertising now” thing.
Yes, and the cost of making them keeps dropping. When you were selling TVs in 1991, a 30 inch TV cost about $500 in 1991 dollars. The technology back then just basically made it complex and labor intensive to manufacture, and they were so heavy that it actually took significant number of human labor hours just to get it from factory to store to the specific store’s display. Merely putting a 30 inch TV in the window of a store was probably a 2-man lift.
Whereas today it’s a bunch of robots in cleanrooms automating production of high volumes of solid state LCD components to where full color displays can be put in cheap appliances, and finished 30 inch TVs being thin and light enough to be moved with one hand while sipping a coffee with the other.
I’m not surprised it’s much cheaper today, even a tiny fraction of the time period you’re talking about, even when back then they were selling at a loss.
I try to always be nice to retail staff, because I remember well the sheer misery of having to stand sandwiched in a too-small window display cabinet, scraper in one hand and bottle of weak vinegar in the other, scraping the bloody advertising stickers off the glass (that were stuck on with a glue stronger than cement) with a roasting hot halogen floodlamp about 1" from your head, just because a new range has come in… Particularly soul-destroying if it’s that time of year when the same 5 royalty-free Christmas songs are on permanent loop in the background.
And yeah, you make a very good point. Sheer size/weight and cost of shipping would have been a huge chunk of the price of those old TVs! Not to mention the cost of healthcare for all the staff who put their back out dragging the damned things to and from The Cage… ;)
They externalize their true cost to the environment and laborers.
Don’t forget ads! They’re also subsidized by the ads they’re definitely going to inject if you use the built in OS.
Usually the cheap ones are so cheap they don’t even do that.
In both cases. We don’t pay nearly the real cost of gasoline.
💯
TVs are made from components that are made through almost entirely automated processes at such large scales that the underlying raw material and cost of shipping become the main driver of cost. Paradoxically, that means that TVs that have gotten thinner and lighter use less material and therefore have a lower floor of how little it can cost.
Once a production line is set up to make the components, each additional one produced costs very little, so making high volume runs is the key: lots of shared parts between brands and models, very long production runs to minimize the cost of redesign or retooling or downtime.
They’re single use and throwaway, with the bonus of spyware. Like everything made today. Everything.
Gas is cheaper than milk, Thats kinda fucked considering gasoline is finite
The fuck? Milk is 2x to 4x cheaper ($0.50-$1.00) than the most common gasoline, Natural 95 ($2.10) here. I thought you’d get something from those crazy “Got milk?” dairy subsidies…
(Multiply by 4.5 to get US units rather than liters)
2x cheaper is a crazy way of saying half as expensive.
It’s fewer syllables, what’s the problem? And yes, milk is cheaper here than the same quality in the US (despite our 12% VAT) so I don’t see why “cheaper” next to it would feel wrong…
And don’t forget that we don’t get the crap “regular” gasoline with as low as 87 octane rating, the lowest widely available one is 95.Similarly, 75 % of milk drunk here is UHT-treated, as opposed to 10 % in the US.You don’t have much better gasoline there it’s just that you use a different unit for measuring the octane. They aren’t actually much different
Well it’s partially true.
87 AKI is widely available in the US as the minimum octane rating. That translates to 91 RON. I’ve never seen anything under 95 here in Estonia, or at least not this century. 95 and 98 are the only commonly found numbers. 98 is available in the US too, as 93 AKI, but not everywhere as I understand.
because expensiveness is a scale that starts from 0 so you always know how expensive everything is. cheapness works the other way, so there’s no starting point. that means there’s no way to quantify how cheap the first thing is, in order to double that. in your example gasoline would have to be the least cheap thing possible, which means nothing can be more expensive.
it’s like saying someone’s twice as short as someone else. half as tall makes sense, twice as short is a weird way to say it because how short is the first person?
“Cheaper” means “less expensive”. 2x cheaper means 2x less expensive, or less expensive by a factor of 2, or 0.5x as expensive. I can say 2x shorter, 2x slower etc. and I don’t see a problem. The adjectives “cheap” and “expensive” don’t relate to a number quantity called “expensiveness” or “cheapness” but “price” or “cost”, which is what the factor applies to, and the word specifies if it’s an increase or decrease. Everyone I know would understand that it’s the reciprocal of the original price, although I get that in a country whose president can say he slashed proces by 500 % without instantly having to resign, fractions and percentages might have to be specified but that’s longer to say for the same number of significant figures.
Yes, I can find people debating “two times cheaper” (English) but not “zweimal billiger” (German) or “dvakrát levnější” (Czech), in fact the phrase is often used in promotional material. The only results suggesting it’s wrong are English Reddit discussions’ automatic translations to German or Czech, and Google’s AI summary that cotes them.
I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it. Similarly, I provided the metric value and conversion rate, it’s Americans who need to practice mental math.
I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it.
I doubt anyone doesn’t get it, it just sounds twice as unnatural to a native English speaker.
Whatever, I’m not convincing anyone with my use of metric and username. I’m avoiding some other weird phrases though, for example you won’t usually see me type “14 days” in English although Czech speakers prefer it to “2 weeks” (idk why, it’s the same number of syllables).
Yet more prof of the insanity of our capitalist system. Fuck this gay earth.
you think cows are infinite?
Yes it’s called breeding. You can’t breed more gasoline
Jurassic Park says otherwise 😉
Actually, Bloomberg Finance recently warned about how the cattle replacement level is precariously low in the US. It takes a minimum of a one-year forecast to gauge how many dairy cows will be born to reach milk production status, and apparently farmers are having a difficult time with all the debt and limited resources hampering them. Because of the US’s red meat addiction, we are currently at best only at minimum replacement, which is really concerning until the nation reduces some of its cattle consumption; otherwise, beef prices will continue to rise…
Well we’re talking about maintaining cows for food at a sustainable level, the US is stupid in all aspects and should not be considered. The rest of the world isnt greedy and fat like Americans.
As far as I’m concerned the US is an isolated dictatorship like NK so their numbers are al over the place depending on who is dear leader
this is one example the sort of nuance was hinting at. cheers
it takes limited resources to breed the living beings youre talking about
Food and grass are also growable
so youre just going to act like you dont understand at all huh
So wait tire saying they aren’t? Or are you still insisting petroleum is renewable? Milk is renewable, gas is finite, so gas should not be cheaper than milk. Thats a pretty easy point
Visit Japan or the EU and their fuels prices make the USA cheap. It is odd in the USA, most people are concerned about fuel prices, but healthcare costs are far worse.
Healthcare is only for the weak. I am one if the elect; god loves me, so I won’t ever need to think about that.
Tell me about it. Why is cost of gas what we focus on
Because you pay for gas every couple days with your credit card, while you pay for healthcare rarely
Idk if I’m winning or losing as someone that pays for healthcare way more often then gas…
…DAYS?!
i drive to work every day and i refuel like every other month.
#autoorientedinfrastructure
A large portion of US adults don’t understand the difference between simple and compound interest.
Many are living with less than 1 month salary as savings.
This results in a largr portion with neither the mental space nor capability (or both) to worry about 6 months down the line when they have to worry for 6 days down the line
The tv should have always cost more. That’s part of the problem. America drunk on cheap consumer goods.
I disagree. America has heavy subsidies on gas prices.
I can’t believe how cheap TVs are. I think I bought a 22” CRT 25 years ago and it was easily over $200.
E: a CPI check says a $220 monitor in 2000 is $435 today.
They’re cheap because they use extensive tracking to make up the rest of their money
Compare any tv to a monitor of the same size and feature set
Yeah, they’re selling you an ad platform. It won’t be long before they start leaving off the HDMI ports.
Why not?
Oil is a product manufactured by millions of years of stratified organic stuffs and high pressures, it is a concentrate of energy.
TV is not as useful.
Gas is a cheat code to decades of stored solar energy. It won’t be cheap for ever. Once you mine up all that shit it’s gone.
Look at WV and their coal. Use to have 12 ft coal seams. Now all that’s left are hard to reach low quality 1-2ft seams. At some point it’s not even worth the energy to extract.
There are people who believe the earth regenerates and creates more petroleum… In essence it will never run out
There’s probably a step g correlation to flat earthers
It will! Just not within human life spans that’s my answer usually. Alot of their thoughts are grounded in something real. Its easier then telling them they are flat out wrong usually.
Unless it’s the flat earthers
It probably won’t to my understanding. Most fossil fuels are from large organic material deposits (usually from plants) underwater or in low oxygen environments where they aren’t disturbed/don’t decompose. Basically the conditions for fossil fuels to be remade don’t exist anymore so we really aren’t getting any more
There’s definitely location on earth where they will get generate again. Plus climate change only really means the extinction of all human life as we know it. Everything else will carry on, it’s not the first large level extinction event.
The conditions that created it are likely to arise again. Most oil deposits are actually from innumerable numbers of planktonic life that built up on the ocean floor. Coal is from plant matter though.
Point is its generally easier to redirect then reprogram people, with enough nudges they’ll start to see they are being lied to, or at least will know not to bother you with that specific subject anymore
Gas would be more expensive if it wasn’t subsidized.
Yeah gas should be a lot more expensive.
Lol you can see where the “I did that” sticker used to be…
Wonder if it was an old Biden version or a new Trump version.
Are you paying for the cheap tv by bringing hostile spywear into your home?
It’s possible not, I suppose.
I neither, can I pay double for the Tv without the poorly named smartness in it?
I ride an ebike. Can someone explain the picture on the left? Is it some sort of tax booth for car ownership?
Your bike has zero impact on the environment. Good for you
The metals used in the frame and battery magically floated down from heaven. Also the tires and plastic parts weren’t used from petroleum …not at all
Not zero, but dwarfed by a car. An E-bike is hands down way more eco-friendly option
The production impact should be still smaller than the production of a motorbike
There was a recent article detailing how if you put a lot of miles on your ebike you’ll need to replace the battery and it’s surprisingly expensive.
But I agree with the other downvoters that you can’t just say “but bad thing” you have to put them into perspective. And your parent comment didn’t claim ebikes are perfect or even good. Just that they literally don’t use gas.
Now think about solar power.
