Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here.

I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.

But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.

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SkyeCA 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is?

It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.

	▲	shiroiuma 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.

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duskwuff 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.

I've heard reports that these are actually surprisingly good. I wouldn't want to use one in a production environment, but for homelab stuff they're an incredible deal.