To be fair, the UK is essentially aiming to be America 2.0
Many countries are trending more expensive (Belgium went up 30% house price in 4 years) but the UK is on another level of the wealthy literally owning all property and purposely leaving tens of thousands of houses empty just to spite the working class.
Not even the constitution. They literally break or say that “it was a mistake” for a majority of the constitution and pay judges to twist the meaning to fit their corporate donors’ wishes.
They literally want corporate feudalism where the only laws are those made by daddy corpo.
Small batch (10 or so) fully integrated and assembled PCBs of the type of Airgradient without testing, without a case, and without any certifications will run you probably around $50 per piece. That is without any development time, no 3D modeling time to build a case, no software, engineering hours, testing, etc… Just raw BOM cost.
Boards are cheap, assembly service at low quantities is expensive. Making 10 PCBs by hand is also an option, but at a low $50 hourly rate, it would probably take 6-8 hours to hand assemble if you factor in 10% board mistakes with hand assembly. That brings you to $80ish per piece with no software or case.
The other way you can do this is hiring out very low income countries through fixed-rate contracts via fiverr or Upwork. But you will maybe have to shell out around $1000 to get people to actually take the contract, in which case it is only 30% cheaper than the airgradiant kit for vastlt lower build quality.
Much easier to work with modules and jumper wires, test it yourself, and solder when needed. Soldering station and supplies is $50 total and with modules you can probably get it done a bit roughly for $50 per piece total, but the benefit ia your free time costs nothing money-wise and you learn a lot.
Yes you can do things yourself for much cheaper than commercial products. The keyword is yourself. You often times can’t hire someone else to do it for cheaper than a commercial product (with exceptions).
They don’t want people to innovate. Innovation is a buzzword that they use to market themselves as something other than parasites.
Most companies want to safely follow market trends to suck away large profit margin with minimal payout to workers. If they make a product that doesn’t work, they just assert that it does and that the customer is wrong.
That’s also why they intentionally quiet fire seniors like in the article. They don’t give a fuck about quality or innovation. They want the cheapest labor possible while hiking service/product pricing.
They don’t want employees to be happy. They want them to be cheap and exploitable.
That is literally the base form of businesses in the flawed reality of capitalism.
Lol this was one of the earlier nature valley bar, before their single packed one. They were around 15 years ago at least. Always been packed per 2 with the hope that you will just eat 2 at a time