As someone who has built multi-camera live broadcast systems and operated them you are 100% correct. There is color correction, image processing, and all the related bits. Each of these units costs many times more and is far more capable with much higher quality (in the right hands) than what is included in even the most high end TV.
I speak from experience. I spend approximately twenty years developing technology for broadcast, motion picture, production and post-production. That also included systems integration, where we designed and built all kinds of facilities. The largest I was personally involved with had a $65M budget.
Most people have absolutely no idea what goes into making the pixels on their screens flicker with quality content.
Back 30 odd years ago I was doing work with a graduate/post graduate chem-e/material science group at the U of MN. I was working with a PhD candidate who was working on synthetic insulin. Part of the project was attempting to use a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to image insulin at the molecular level. I hadn't ever done work with STM before and part of showing proficiency with the tool was to image Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite (HOPG) at the molecular level. As you can imagine almost any vibration will show up when you're working on the scale where you measure in angstroms.
To solve for the vibration issue the STM lab was in the basement of the building and the STM equipment sat on a multi-ton granite block that was suspended from the ceiling of the building. The building sits in the center of the U of MN campus right next to a major roadway so there were lots of opportunities for vibrations to enter into the structure.
One of the coolest feelings was the day that I successfully imaged HOPG at the molecular level. To point at the image on screen and be able to say "That's a carbon atom!" is insanely cool. I didn't end up staying in chem-e but the experience of working in a real research lab with highly intelligent and creative people has impacted my life in numerous ways.
> multi-ton granite block .. suspended from the ceiling of the building
That's fun to imagine. I've heard of vibration isolation for machines, using springs and such, but this is on a whole another scale. Sounds like the building must be designed for it specifically to withstand this kind of pull.
And to be able to take an image of an individual atom, what an experience.
Yeah I have no idea how they pulled off the structural piece. The building was built long before the technology was invented. It is a specialized building though. I was reading about its renovation/expansion in 2014. Apparently there are a couple 2 story labs to accommodate large distillation columns and there was additional vibration isolation work done because there's now a light rail train running right outside it.
Speaking of interesting building design, the chemistry building on the same campus was designed to channel any lab explosions upward. Apparently the roof will blow off but the building won't blow out and damage other buildings around it. Inside the building you die, outside you keep walking to class.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a bus driver who would always pull away from the stop right on schedule even if a regular rider was running up. His calculation was the 30 seconds spent waiting for one rider was an aggregate of many minutes lost by the riders who were on time for their stops. What looked cruel to one was a kindness to many.
A bus can easily carry 50 passengers. 30 seconds times that many is 25 minutes. That's a lot of aggregate time wasted indeed.
Also assuming this 30 seconds delay is not compensated later, it can influence significantly more people than the bus capacity. And if someone misses a connection because of it that's even more time wasted.
I had the same experience, loved my cardboard bricks. My kid never connected with them the same though even though my kid is big on building toys. Now they mostly just take up space, should probably give them away.
Screen devices can be a toy but it takes very intentional use of them.
My child has had an old iPhone se since 4yo. It has no network connection. I load music on it. It only has music, camera, and voice recorder apps. Like most toys it gets intense periods of play and then goes back in the toy box with a dead battery for weeks.
It's my assertion that the problem with tablets/phones as toys for kids is the endless stream of new content. It's addictive and never gets old. If you find a way to cut off the firehouse of new (and keep the addictive apps off) then they eventually become just another boring toy. Us adults could learn from this too.
I actually played mouse trap but my kid and their cousins do nothing with the game and love to just setup the trap. That game from the 80s has become a favorite toy of the gen alpha crowd when visiting the grandparents.
These are all good toys, my middle elementary kid really likes magnatiles.
That said, I still think Lego runs the board. My 40yo Lego is still in use, I still get pleasure out of it and my kid gets even more. My kid and I just finished team building the UCS millennium falcon and now we're having a blast playing with it. Soon it'll start being scavenged for other projects. I've never seen another toy equal Lego in replayability or in the vast array of ways it can be used. As a crusty old coot I complain about the seemingly single use pieces in new Lego sets and then watch as my kid uses them in new and creative ways in MOCs. No other toy we have has the same staying power and much to my wife's chagrin it's the yardstick by which I measure every other toy.
The data in the graph from this next post shows an inflation adjusted per brick price of .40 USD in 1980 vs a little above $.10 now. Perhaps more interesting is the cost per gram analysis which also shows a large drop.
I think people tend to romanticize the past and underestimate the effect of inflation across decades. One thing that may contribute to the idea that Lego is now too expensive is that the average sets seem to be larger and more complex now. Even if the bricks are cheaper the sheer quantity of them will inherently raise the set price. That may explain why the data in the Reddit post shows average median set cost having risen even while per brick cost has decreased.
Tip: Look for someone selling their grownup children’s Lego collection. I recently found a couple selling their children’s old Lego collection in Facebook Marketplace. I got an enormous bag of them for just a few bucks. It was a headache to filter out the garbage in them (small non-LEGO toys, unique pieces that were not really useful, a few mixed mega blocks, broken pieces, etc) but it was worth it, my children love them!
Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...
Years ago I worked on contract for a large blue 3 letter company doing outsourced server management for the fancy credit card company. The incident in question happened before my time on the team but I heard about it first hand from the server admin (let's call him Ben) who had been at the center of it.
The data center in question was (IIRC) 160K sqft of raised floor spread across multiple floors in a major metropolitan downtown area. It isn't there anymore. Windows, Unix, Linux, mainframe, San, all the associated fun stuff.
Ben was working the day after thanksgiving decommissioning a system. Full software and physical decommission. Approved through all the proper change management procedures.
As part of the decommission Ben removed the network cables from under raised floor. Standard snip the connector off and pull it back. Easy. Little did he know that network cable was ever so slightly entangled with another cable. Not enough to give him pause when pulling it though. It wouldn't have been an issue if the other cable had been properly latched in its ports. It wasn't. That little pull ended up pulling the network connection out of a completely unrelated system. A system managed by a completely different group. A system responsible for credit card processing. On USA Black Friday.
Oops. CC processing went down. It took far too long to resolve. Amazingly Ben didnt loose his job. After all he followed all the processes and procedures. Kudos to the management team who kept him protected.
Change management and change freezes were far more stringent by the time I joined the team. There was also now a raised floor infrastructure group and no one pulled a tile without their involvement.
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