Basically, because we don't own our devices. We are allowed to use our devices by the good graces of the manufacturers that charge a premium for them.

This really needs to change. I remember the preinstalled app antitrust suit(s) in the early 00s. Those need to happen again, but likely the EU will have to as the US is entering a dark age, and the US will continue to have inferior everything to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future.

Anything to distract people right now, it seems. Like any one individual can do anything about it. Carriers weren't even transparent on their outages that were likely a result of trying to defend against this.

Never saw a need for accounting between a couple. The couple is a team, pay the bills, live life. Who cares. Just always seemed like per-charge accounting and "keeping track" is an easy fiscal path to tit for tat complaints/annoyance/arguments. Might as well map how much electricity each person uses at that point, who flushes the toilet the most, etc.

Each should have private charge and checking accounts if for nothing else than gift buying. Have a joint account for most of the money, especially important if one or the other becomes ill or dies. Otherwise survivor access becomes tricky instantly.

Not poo-pooing the methods of others, the more complex methods just seem like overhead, but if they work, they work.

Why?

Of course that's a rhetorical question, but media has all been bought and paid for by corpos. The same corpos that now realize their lives can be easily deleted for all the evil shitty things they do, so of course all the corpo media is going to be unnecessarily biased to the positive for one of their own.

It's accurate proof that the corpo media needs to be ignored in general if it hasn't been obvious so far.

America needs real journalism, now more than ever. Sadly, it will probably be underground.

A subset of America. Life isn't all or nothing. Electoral College helped a bit, although he barely did win the popular vote this time thanks to the abstainers. By raw population numbers (including those that can't vote) only 22.9% of the US population voted for him. (32.1% of eligible voters, less than 1/3.)

"Coming to you next Tuesday, T-Mobile Tuesdays Nazis, Magenta Edition!"

The "Weather Modification Activities" bill sets out that "the injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of a chemical, a chemical compound, a substance, or an apparatus into the atmosphere within the borders of this state for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight is prohibited."

So, taking it at the closely-adjacent letter like how Repub trash interprets everything, all industry in the entire state must cease, including power generation.

21% of the state is also of Hispanic or Latino descent and growing, but yeah, predominantly white.

Death Stranding vibes.

It goes much further back than Pres. Obama's first term. Dems have always virtue-signaled for at least the last 30-40 years, and then blamed the repubs when something they promised doesn't go through, even when they're a majority. All the while insider-trading themselves to profitability. A handful of them stand up for the party's purported ideals, which is just enough to make it seem the party might care. It's all a sham.

That being said, Pres. Biden's administration did an admirable job cleaning up the mess left behind by Orange Man 1.0 when entire offices were devoid of employees, paper trails, documentation, state. They took too long to appoint an FCC chair, however, and didn't even attempt to find a way to fix the DeJoy post office problem (which arguably would have been difficult.)

But then, now, dems seemingly have been silent about the results of the election. They're acting like the police did in 2020 after George Floyd's death and silent-quit. One would like to hope they are attempting to do anything to ensure as little damage to the country takes place in the next 4+ years as possible, but, in a messaging vacuum, Occam's Razor should apply, and they're likely doing nothing.

So many states have questionable voting security, and it'd be comparatively easy for a relatively smart person to inject temporary code patches on tallying machines, provided they could get the necessary signing certs (if the companies even cryptographically sign their code). It would only take a simple binary patch to execute only on a certain day/time to flip arbitrary votes, and otherwise never. Especially if that Starlink at swing locations thing was true, it could reroute DNS requests when the machines are online for updates, send them to some other IP address to download what looks like a valid patch to inject the sleeper code. (Completely speculation here, no actual evidence, and many pieces would be needed to get through a "trusted" system like the web certs as well, but man would I want to play with one of those machines and 100 ballots for a weekend.) It'd ostensibly be a 100% hands-off process and those "secured" locked down machines would do the dirty work themselves.

If VW can figure out how to cheat emissions tests and otherwise act "normal", flipping a vote bit is babytown frolics.

That's probably the most disappointing thing about all of this, learning that most of those in governance really don't want to try.

Less than 1/3 of American voters voted for the orange man. The rest were apathetic or thought virtue abstaining would "send a message".

Edit to add actual numbers. 32.1% of eligible voters voted for him. 22.9% of the total US population. We need to stop this all-or-nothing mentality. A tiny fraction of the population voted him in, while the rest tried (31.0%), or did nothing. That 32.1% is only true if the votes were legitimate, which seeing how fragile the voting system is across the US, it may not be, and we also may never know.

Link to Windows is pretty terrible except for basic SMS. Really wish Microsoft would stop trying to make it the iTunes of Android.

On Macs in the 90s, it was the easy and fun thing to do, especially after the Fonts folder was created.

Sadly, no, it takes, as I recall, about 2 minutes for oxygen starvation in the brain to make it fade out.

Got one of those LIDE scanners back in the day in college. It was USB-powered so I could go to the university library with my laptop, and scan book excerpts to PDF instead of having to pay copying fees. OCR so it was searchable too. Was so dope. Still have it, bet it still works.

WEEKEND PROJECT!

The one time I ever had an outage on my municipal fiber ISP 8 years ago, shortly after install, was just that the installers misaligned the fiber in the port outside. At 4 or so in the morning, I randomly woke up (I think I sensed the internet went out) and Internet was dead for an hour or so.

Next morning, 11am, city truck rolls up, fixes the fiber, and leaves. I never filed a ticket or anything. Hasn't blinked since. I asked them how that worked. They said, the low light was alerted on their end and a service ticket was auto-generated.

Early on, Netflix (back when it was worth paying for) wasn't working one day on the fiber, since we had recently migrated from DSL with 800kbps uplink that would starve out voice calls while browsing TV for a show. I assumed it was the muni ISP. No, it was Netflix themselves, for everyone.

It's weird having Internet as a utility, as it should be. It just always exists and works.

Nothing but Google‘s is allowed to.

https://www.retailmenot.com/blog/walmart-layaway.html

Walmart actually just stopped layaway entirely in 2021 for BNPL.

FWIW, MailOnline is terrible at journalism. I'm sure this site referring to that is at least as bad. Thanks to you for doing the research!

But the anger/annoyance hits are plentiful!