The equivalent of this would be interrailing through europe... travel via train to one country, stay for a few days, travel to next, stay a few days, and continue, all with a single ticket: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass
I mean.. some people would prefer to live next to a forest or grassland, but nope, houses were built there, because people needed somewhere to live. Now that's not enough, and larger buildings are needed, and that includes socialist buildings.
I live in a former socialist country (well, part of a country, the country does not exist anymore), and when we needed more housing, we designated the land in the city to be for housing, ie. large socialist buildings. Then 1990s came, no more socialism, capitalism now, and no more large building projects, no new neighborhoods. So now, we have cows and cornfields in what would be prime realestate because the government won't change the zoning, all three neighbors there complain and apartments that used to be 120k eur maybe 20 years ago are now close to 500k eur.
If you want to live next to cows, move to a village, thousands want apartment buildings there, to live in a city.
Not really, merchants can pay everything on your behalf. Amazon US, Amazon UK, AliExpress and eBay US all do that. There are companies who you can outsource all the shipping, taxes and duties logistics. Even Amazon itself does that.
> But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison.
Depends.
Here in the balkans, for some reason, Louis Vuitton bags (the ugly brown one with lighter/gold lettering) have become popular with 'the kids' some years ago.. those bags normally cost as much as a modern laptop, some even much more, but due to chinese manufacturers and local market sellers, you can get counterfits for 10-30eur, depending on the design. Are the materials, seams, zippers, metal parts (well.. metallic painted plastic), etc. worse? Sure. But from far away, it's hard to notice the difference.
Now, due to the huge cost difference between the original and the fake and easily obtainable fakes, most of such bags you see in the street are fakes.
Since it's hard to tell them apart, people just assume it's a fake bag, when they see someone carrying it. I personally know people who are pretty rich and buy expensive stuff "just to show it around", and they don't buy those bags anymore, because no one thinks it's an original bag. A 100k mat black mercedes? Can't fake that. 30k gold watch? Sure it can be fake, but few people wear watches nowaday, even fewer notice them, and very few people assume that the watch is fake. But a 3k louis vuitton handbag? In whatever shopping center or larger cafe/club you go with that, there will be a couple more girls with similar, fake ones.
Undercutting the competitors is done when a business is working close to cost and a slight anomaly (eg. competitor that doesn't have to make profit, is subsidized or is cheaper for some artificial reason) makes them go out of business.
A stick of ram, made for $10, that used to cost $20 is now $100 due to the AI bubble (numbers pulled out of my ass)... you'd have to bring the prices down to $15 or even less to make those companies fold, but you can earn much more if you sell your ram at $80.
When did any manager get promoted for keeping software stable?
Just look at google and their chat softwares... you either make something new, or someone else does and you're left behind... be it ads in their start menu, spyware "AI", or paid solitaire.
That pays for itself in 20 years and most of those customers won't have better choices in the next 50. The core of that infrastructure will probably oitlive most people on the team. Sounds like a good long term stable business.
That's actually an example of the very long-term strategies that are common in that industry. There are still active phone lines which were installed over a century ago.
How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?
Come to slovenia, the buses here stop at every stop.
I know you bought a ticket for a train from the main station in ljubljana, and when you come there (and only then and there, not before, not online), you'll be notified that your train is leaving from a track a 10 minute walk away, because the station is being renovated.
And sure, you were a responsible traveller, came early, so a 10 minute walk is no problem... there are supposedly dots on the asphalt showing where to go, but they're already wiped off, so some granny or a college student will probably point you in the right direction.
So after you walk all that way to the right train tracks, and the train should already be there, you'll be notified that there is no train. Why? Someone jumped infront of the train somewhere. When? A few hours ago. But hey... there's a bus that will take you with your train ticket.
Where is the bus? Back at the main station, 10 minutes away. Surely you were very responsible and came not just 10 minutes early but 20 minutes early, because the bus leaves at the same time the train should leave.
The only thing worse were the international trains in the early 2000s through the balkans... you'd be in Zagreb, croatia, waiting for a nighttime international train towards ljubljana, slovenia, 5 minutes to departure, and dingdong, announcement, it says it'll be 10 minutes late. Wait 10 minutes, so 5 minutes until the delayed departure... dingdong, 20 minutes late. Ok.. 10 more minutes... the display shows 30 minutes. I mean... you could risk it and go for a coffee or something, but it's not worth walking all the way to a nicer bar and back if you only have 10 minutes until the train.
...and then, when the delay says 50 minutes, you get a phonecall from a friend, who's on that same train (travelling from thessaloniki), and she tells you that the train is ~6 hours late and that they just crossed the serbian->croatian border (5-6 hours away from zagreb).
In slovenia and neigboring countries there's a huge mesh of probably hundreds of nodes, some connected via radio, some via mqtt with people only working on expending the mesh and nothing else....
the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.
Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.
This is a big point; in the nyc Meshtastic network there are well over 1000 nodes now (up 10x in the last year) but in the public channels nobody has much interesting to say beyond testing
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.
Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family.
Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards).
However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner.
The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model.
The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.
I used the word "split apart" to express that Hungarian is not a Slavic language. If it was a Slavic Language then there would be no split between its neighboring Slavic languages, but a dialect continuum instead.
The equivalent of this would be interrailing through europe... travel via train to one country, stay for a few days, travel to next, stay a few days, and continue, all with a single ticket: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass
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