The reason used ThinkPads are so easy to find in good condition at bargain prices is because management in corporations just lease them for 3-5 years and continuously replace them even if they don't actually need to do so. They probably don't even know that they can last decades but accounting wants a lease, so they get a lease.
There isn't a similar "infinite supply" of used frameworks that constantly drives prices down
For work we need to give the user manual of the machines we sell in a USB drive. Because it's a 3mb PDF and nobody reads user manuals anyway we buy the shittiest and smallest capacity USB drives available on Alibaba in bulk (64-128 mb or even smaller).
They are so cheap that the plastic shell isn't even glued, it can be pried open with my nails. Because there's a 15% failure rate (either the computer reports it as empty, or the hash after writing doesn't match), I opened the faulty ones to check them. They're made with recycled nands from ewaste. Some chips are clearly resoldered from something else (glue residue from tore down stickers), others come from rejected production lines as the brand has been removed with a laser (for example, someone engraved XXXXXXXX over the SanDisk logo), others have numbers wrote with a marker.
Since november prices went up 70% "eh the nand prices went up because datacenter demand them".
Sure, ai datacenters are using 20 years old 64mb nand chips recycled from ewaste...
I tried Warp terminal because now that's bankrolled by openai's magic infinite money you can use your own openai api keys without a subscription. So I put one from my work account. I do a git commit (manually) and then it comes a prompt under it "push it, open a PR and switch to main?". I click yes, it used one million tokens for that... (And it took about a minute because it did like 20 requests, so there was no time saving at all vs doing it manually)
I wget something, it comes a prompt under it "now compare the hash?". Boom, another 500k tokens
I see a lot of kids trying to find a used deal at GameStop (now renamed to something else in my country as it went out of business) and also resell it when they're done while adults (except collectors) don't have time, just download the specific game that they want to play and didn't want to sell it in the future also.
The idiots thought that 6 weeks is 6 weeks from the intercourse, so "plenty of time to discover it".
Instead it's 6 weeks from the last period, meaning in most cases, unless you were actively trying to get pregnant, when you discover that you're pregnant the 6 weeks are already passed or almost passed. You can't even know that the pregnancy is ectopic before 8 weeks, because at 6 weeks the embryo is so small that you can't see it with the ultrasound.
And in this case, an ectopic pregnancy, the embryo is planted in the wrong position, so there are only two outcomes:
Surgical removal before the 8 week (technically a forbidden abortion)
Do as God intended and do nothing (at the 10th week the embryo dies because can't grow and after weeks of extreme pain the mother dies of hemorrhaging and sepsis)
So, maybe if the mother at the 5th week and half was experiencing some weird pain in the belly, and had a good insurance that covered a transvaginal ultrasound, they could discover the problem and schedule the abortion before the deadline.
If the mother didn't have a good insurance, just thought "well maybe my belly pain it's just a temporary problem because I'm a week late with my period", when the doctors discover the problem they will say "sorry we discovered the problem 3 days too late according to the arbitrary deadline that the legislators decided, you have two painful weeks left and then you'll die"
True story: as a kid I had a k6-400 MHz with 20gb HDD. Space was a constraint. I purchased state of emergency, it took 550 mb of space on the HDD AND it required the disc on the drive. I was shocked, what? All my previous games occupied a tenth of that, Virtua cop 2 was like 30mb. And installers usually asked if I wanted minimal or full install. Then I found out that there was a 500 mb intro.bik file. The useless intro video, the one that I would skip every single time was occupying 10x of the actual game and I was forced to have the CD in the drive as a DRM anyway... Why not load it from there?? Anyway, at the time they didn't do file checksum, so I copied rockstar.bik (1mb spinning rockstar logo video) as intro.bik and enjoyed my game.
Then later when playing on a much newer computer with windows 7 it wouldn't install anymore. It wasn't the game itself that was incompatible, but the DRM. Found a no-cd patch on gcw, then the game didn't require to be installed at all! I had copied the old drive on a DVD-r and the game would run very fine directly from the optical disc with ZERO install size....
But it wasn't too different as a concept: It installed everything on the local drive, then used the first CD exclusively as a DRM. Didn't optimize the install size to leave the useless FMV on the optical media as the earlier PC games were doing
At least did more honestly (clearly put a "DO NOT PURCHASE" label on the box) than a fake 50mb stub that just tells the user "there's a 200gb update to download, you need to go online and download it" that too many games are doing nowadays and there's no way to know if the game is actually included or the purpose of the disc is to be a DRM
The reason used ThinkPads are so easy to find in good condition at bargain prices is because management in corporations just lease them for 3-5 years and continuously replace them even if they don't actually need to do so. They probably don't even know that they can last decades but accounting wants a lease, so they get a lease.
There isn't a similar "infinite supply" of used frameworks that constantly drives prices down