> Because insurance would then just lowball the cost of everything.

They do. Many, many billable items are priced to the limit that insurance will pay. Insurance and providers have agreements on the prices they can charge for certain procedures or supplies.

It used to be the norm that insurance would pay their maximum and leave the rest to you. Sometimes the provider would waive the difference, sometimes it was billed to you.

The cost of healthcare is 100% an artefact of insurance price fixing and absolutely nothing else.

If you're launching a fleet of drones, discretion is probably not a major concern.

A coded sonic pulse could have exceptionally long range. Sure your enemies would detect it, about half a second before they detect the drones.

A more practical concern is simply temperature and how long the drone's power supply can survive in the cold ocean.

Your main challenge will probably be measuring the distance between neighboring drones as accurately as possible. AIUI you could recover signal from unevenly spaced receptors IFF you know precisely where each receptor is.

After that it's just a standard computational problem which is (IMO) far less interesting.

Or they can't afford to sell the cards at consumer prices. If they take a loss in the consumer segmet, they can recoup by overcharging the datacenter customers.

That's how this scheme works. The card is most likely not profitable at consumer price points. Without this segmentation, consumer cards would trail many years behind the performance of datacenter cards.

I made that choice several years ago. All new PCs I buy/build are AMD only.

The hardware is a bit finnicky, but honestly I prefer a thing to just be broken and tricky as opposed to nvidia intentionally making my life hard.