The fact they made it possible is impressive in itself. Sure it’s not competitive for the latest games or such, but society is more and more reliant on smartphones, so having a local option is valuable in itself.

It’s a bit like countries making their own planes instead of buying the F-35, which is better and cheaper. They looked stupid at the time, until Trump came back and it turned out strategic autonomy had value.

As for the price, probably it is due to small production ; but also simply underlines how we got used to not paying the “true” price of things, by moving production to places with cheaper costs & labor.

Loads of fossil power use gas turbines that do not involve steam :x

My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.

It is your opinion town centres are dying from not enough parking space?

This used to be the mainstream opinion back in the sixties, but nowadays basically any “revitalisation” programme will be removing asphalt, because small business health has been shown to be correlated with how well connected the area is to public transport, and how pleasant it is to loiter in.

it’s France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship.

It didn’t “end” with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today’s strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn’t be replaced in a day.

“4 chords” is a cool mashup but it’s not really a valid point in this conversation.

The songs in “4 chords” don’t use the same 4 chords, because they are higher and lower than that. So you might say they use the same progression, but that’s not true either, because they’re not always constantly in the same order. So the best you can say is “it’s possible to interpret pitch- and tempo-adjusted excerpts of these songs back-to-back”, which isn’t a very strong claim.

In fact there’s a lot of things separating the songs in “4 chords”; such as structure, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics, or production. Another fact is that it’s perfectly possible to use these four chords in a way that you’ve never heard before and would likely find bizarre – it’s a bit of meme, but limitation really can breed creativity.

This isn’t to defend the lack of creativity in the big music industry. But there’s more to it than just saying “4 chords” to imply all musicians do is follow an established grid.