Sure, but the comment I was replying to made a direct comparison with Russia.

Well Russia is currently bombing a European country which I personally consider much worse than an embargo.

Basically everybody with that choice jumps.

I don’t know what to tell you

Well, you apparently don’t know the cause of his experience, so duh …

Doesn’t seem very likely to me given that cheap feature phones likely use cheap older parts while flagship smartphones state of the art components.

That reminded me how a local wanna-be influencer did a smartphone detox for a week, immediately after the completion she posted an FB story: Part 1 - Reflection, how eyeopening the experience was, how much time she suddenly had for the things that truly matter etc. Subscribe to not miss the Part 2!

the flip phone lets me make phone calls from my basement and many other places that the smartphone cannot.

Why? The smartphone supports everything the flip phone does. Honest question.

The only way I see around this is a really aggressive cap on rent. Like, once a rent is established, it can never be raised, for any reason, ever again

We have something like that in my city. The rents grow, but are bound to the inflation. The dynamic is similar - the old contracts are vastly cheaper than the new contracts. That has several downsides:

• young families can’t afford good apartments, since they will need to tap the new-contract market which is expensive
• old people have nice large apartments for very little money. Sounds good at first, but then you often have situations where a single 80-year-old has a 100 m^2 apartment in the downtown, while a young 4 member family is in a 60 m^2 while paying more money. Even more perversely, the 80-year-old can’t move out, because they wouldn’t be able to afford a smaller sized apartment with a new contract.
• old contracts become a form of property in itself and are sold on “black market”, inherited etc.
• old contracts are not let go even if the apartment is not needed at the moment. So apartments are often empty, waiting for the kids to grow up, or used only occasionally (the family has a house outside the city and only occasionally spends time in the city).
• you’re heavily disincentivized to move (to be closer to your work, family, get a bigger apartment for growing family etc.) because your old contract would get cancelled, and you will need to get a much more expensive new one

I think laws need to be changed to make owning (not building) real estate unattractive as an investment. Something like wealth tax (every year you pay X% of the property value) aimed at real sector specifically, with very progressive structure / exceptions for single homeowners.

That should help in a lot of cases. Then it also depends on the demographic development - many places will actually see drop in the population in the coming decades, that should make housing cheaper. Areas with growing population - there it may not be possible to stop the price increase completely.

A lot of that is because a) protests, formalities, FUD and b) lack of scale (each plant is built as one of a kind). Same for price.

With a bigger scale the construction and prices would lower significantly (as with anything done at scale), but for that we have too much populism, fear and emotional driven propaganda and gullible voters. Nuclear power always had the potential to fix the humanity energy needs relatively simply, it’s sad how we got to this point.

I still kinda disagree. We’re talking here about engineering role after all. I have a colleague who is a code wizard, but has kinda problem with (under)communicating. He’s still widely respected as a very good engineer, people know his communication style and adapt to it.

But if you’re a mediocre problem solver, you can’t really make up for it with communication skills. That kinda moves you into non-engineering role like PO, SM or perhaps support engineer.

But I would say this - once you reach a certain high level of competence, then the communication skills, leadership, ownership can become the real differentiating factors. But you can’t really get there without the high level of competence first.

I’m not sure if the competence is really in the last place. I’d say it’s on the equal level. Great communication and ownership of the problems means little if you can’t really solve the problems.