Compared to prices and complexities of similar sets, this is on par. This bonsai tree is more expensive per piece, but you could buy a dozen for the price of this new Death Star.

If you don’t like little trees though, then you wouldn’t buy that. Same for not liking olives, you probably wouldn’t want a Greek salad. That doesn’t make those things disgusting, nor unfortunate that they are being sold. It’s just not for you, and that’s okay.

The World Map has eleven elements with a count over 100, four of which count over 1,000, with the highest count being 3,064.

The Eiffel Tower has twenty two elements over a count of 100, with the highest count being 704.

This new Death Star on the other hand has only four elements over a count of 100, with the highest count being 191.

I agree it’s quite the sticker shock, but it’s not as if Star Wars hasn’t dominated the high end Lego set market for many years. While the Eiffel Tower is much cheaper when considering price per piece, it stands in a category of its own both in terms of size and style.

Even so, comparing a wall decoration, a historical building, and a futuristic spacecraft is largely pointless as they aren’t likely to attract the same audience. People will buy what they like. Lego is a hobby, these days more for adults than children. It’s not right to gripe about people enjoying themselves.

Is Signal equivalent in scale to iMessage or WhatsApp? Does it come preinstalled on devices as well? All three are tools, I agree, however one of these things is not like the others. The average toolbox will have Phillips and Robertson screwdrivers, but not a Torx type.

Signal takes at least a grain of interest to even get a user to install it, whereas iMessage is already there ready to go and that suits most people just fine. The question I asked was based on my incorrect assumption that centred in the Venn diagram of people whom bother to use Signal, read a technology forum, and look at an article about backups, there would also be an overlap with people that already had a backup solution in place.

Your Marlinspike comment notwithstanding, thank you for demonstrating that I was wrong. I should have remembered most people just want to drive a car, not concern themselves with how or why the wheels go round.

It does strike me as funny that some fixate on the ‘why bother’ question when viewing what amounts to be another person’s hobby.

Well my point was not that every random maintenance task under the sun gets done and ticked off a mile long list.

It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.

From your comment and a few others, it’s evident I was wrong in this thought. Among other things, it seems some people don’t want backups at all, which is a bit surprising to me. That’s why I asked the question.

Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?

Personally I’d find it useful to create backups by year so the process doesn’t take twenty minutes and wouldn’t create a massive backup file.

A couple years ago I had to make an effort of sending gallery links instead of sharing images and video directly through Signal since my backup file had grown so large. It’s a bit arduous.

I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.

Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.

Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.

Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.

The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.

In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.

On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.

I like this guy. He’s on track to finally pin lung cancer on the tobacco industry. Any day now.

I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.

This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.

• alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
• automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
• increases simply as stock begins running low

Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.

It’s a bleak future I’m afraid.

2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price

I cannot wait for the status quo politicians around the world to parrot this headline as a talking point.