rant over "inflation is negligible, the economy is sound....yadda yadda....."

[Fummins]

Although many school districts have had iPads and Chromebooks for quite some time now, I think many have updated this past year in response to students doing more via a device of some sort. Younger students also have devices now, too! Many homes have updated their devices in response to all this, too. Upgrading WiFi, printers, & everything else associated with all this has also been impacted. It's probably driven the price up for some things, too.

I just retired from teaching this past year, but I can honestly say that I saw 7th grade students who didn't know how to hold a pencil correctly when writing. Handwriting had gotten terrible in school. Not claiming mine is great. If you wanted to send a secret message in code, just write it cursively.

Wow, why did I not think of that......we had to buy a computer for our house this year. I'm sure a lot of other people had to as well this year when schools were closed, and now they're closed again for a while here.

I don't know when they stopped teaching cursive here. I learned typing, and cursive in elementary school. Most of my friends in their 60's can't type with both hands, they just use the chicken pecking method lol. But they all know more about confusers than me.

Edit: I'm an idiot, apparently they do teach it here. whoopsie doodle.

[PityOnU]

Yeah, now is a pretty shyte time to be buying anything tech related.

I currently work in the Xbox team at Microsoft, but worked for Intel prior to this. Intel CPU's have been uncompetitive (when compared to AMD) for some time, and it was plainly coming to light late 2019/early 2020. Despite this, Intel stocks continued to soar. I asked a few of my coworkers about this, and their response was that even though Intel had become second best, the demand for chips had greatly outpaced the supply for either Intel or AMD, so in many cases it was either Intel chips or no chips. So our ****ty 14nm++++++ chips were still selling faster than we could make them. All that demand was a knock-on effect of COVID.

I will be interested to see what will happen with Intel stocks after all of this is over...

[Fummins]

I'm interested in the Fisker stocks(if they're successful this time) and one of the battery ones where they're working on a solid state ev battery technology? quatum something?

[PityOnU]

I'm interested in the Fisker stocks(if they're successful this time) and one of the battery ones where they're working on a solid state ev battery technology? quatum something?

Tech stocks are a pretty safe bet these days - especially software-centric companies that don't actually have to, you know, make any physical products. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, pretty safe bets.

If I were a betting man, though, I would buy up stock in CDPR right now. It's sitting at ~50% of its prior high because they botched the recent launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on last gen consoles. The thing is, though, that was pretty much expected, and probably won't effect the outlook of the company in the long run. Regular and massive post-launch patches are the norm these days. So my guess is, give it 6-12 months and it'll bounce back to what it was previously. They'll still make a ton of money off the game and their (growing) platform, GoG.