I would say people in countries with poor or non-existent public education are more prone. The USA’s public education system was eviscerated in the 70’s I think.
I would say people in countries with poor or non-existent public education are more prone. The USA’s public education system was eviscerated in the 70’s I think.
As early as the 60s, but really the 80s. Through the 70s US had some of the best public education on the planet. The move to privatize education started in earnest under Reagan (in California, as governor), and then further under Reagan (and every president and congress to now).
Specifically:
• calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students
With Reagan, it was because Republicans at the time thought there would be too many educated poor people. One of his advisors (Roger Freeman) said:
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat…That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college]…If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.”
He was basically worried about a revolution because of it.
They are talking at the dinner table about doing things that are against my self interest. I don’t want those damn kids learning that. Therefore cut education
Rather that you know the market place of ideas that I espouse; as long as they match what I believe.
That last one hits hard. The state must subsidize intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity gave us everything from electricity to modern governmental theory to the mathematics that would later turn out to allow wireless communications. Curiosity without a point is extremely valuable.
And it should be noted that even in late medieval Europe the state funded intellectual curiosity. The nobility were the state and many either were curious themselves or would patronize intellectuals
Childhood indoctrination is a big part of it. I have been told by my 8-year old niece that she’d like to save me from drowning in a lake of fire. She was genuinely scared for me. It’s literal child abuse followed by Stockholm syndrome.
Your young niece sounds a lot like my elderly family. They’re conscious that they “just can’t let go” despite being very progressive and open to new ideas and they’re aware of that.
When I was about the age of 12, I had a new friend who asked me if I believed in God. I said no, and then she told me I was going to burn in hell. That was my first introduction to religion.
I don’t remember ever speaking with her again, but I still remember that interaction crystal clear and where it happened 20+ years later.
Desktops have a lot more bang-per-buck than laptops, and are significantly more repairable/upgradable. Laptops make a lot of compromises to squeeze everything into a portable form-factor that runs on batteries. However, only you can say whether that outweighs the space/portability benefits of a laptop, for your use-case.
I’m a sysadmin, I work with Linux every single day, and I say to you: do not go Linux. It isn’t designed for what you want it for; it’s somewhere between the hobbyist/industrial spaces, whereas you want and need something consumer-focused. Get a nice straightforward Windows box.
Macs are also decent, though they’re even more bucks-per-bang than laptops, and there aren’t mac versions of every application; you’d need to check what’s out there.
Operating systems come with the computer if you’re buying them retail; you can buy them separately if you’re building from parts. Linux is free to download.
Laptops can be ergonomics hell; tiny keyboards, little screens right at desk level - if you’re working at them all day, a proper monitor and keyboard are de rigeur - at which point, you may as well have a desktop, unless you need to take your computer with you when you go places.
Brands, ehh. HP and Dell are decent, but whatever. Or if you’re a getting a desktop, you could build your own and save a packet, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole of complexity to dive into.
You need SSD, not HDD. HDD is slow as hell, physically fragile, makes annoying grunting noises… just don’t even consider it. SSD is unbelievably faster and better in every respect. A little more expensive, but worth every penny. Don’t go less than 500GB, preferably 1TB.
RAM, you need 16GB at the bare minimum; consider 32GB.
Monitors: preferably 27", at least 1920x1080, consider 2560x1440 or even 4k. You don’t need high refresh rate, you do want an IPS-type panel. Having two monitors will greatly improve your quality of life, if you can swing it.
CPU: there’s a million and thirty different ones out there. Just get something released in the last couple of years, you’ll be fine in most cases. There’s usually a shoulder in the price-performance curve about 75% of the way up the rankings; that’s the optimal place to buy if you want something that will keep you going a good while without getting ridiculous.
His advice is fantastic but I have to mention 1 thing… HP is TERRIBLE. I’m a repair technician and we get so many of these damn things, it’s like 10% to 20% of our business, and we repair iPhones, androids, iPads, Mac’s, PC desktops, laptops, gaming PCs and even vintage computers.
This is because of how HP laptops are designed. All of the components and hinge assembly are attached to this thin flimsy plastic palm rest, it has the rigidity of a wet newspaper. During use, opening and closing, the plastic flexes constantly and over time the plastic gives, snaps and the laptop can no longer stay open.
Not only do they break frequently but the repair is expensive. Since everything is attached to the palm rest a technician needs to gut, then reinstall every component onto a new palm rest. Around 1-2 hours. Troubleshooting and testing afterwards also takes longer, as every component has been “fooled around with” there’s a high likelihood for mistakes.
It stings when I have to tell customers that the repair for their $500 laptop is like 250 or 300$.
Oh: if you’re doing fancy-schmancy 3d industrial CAD stuff for designing car engines or the like, you’d want to make sure you have a nice GPU, which is typically in the ‘gaming laptop’ category if you’re going laptop.
However if you’re just doing ordinary diagrams and stuff, then onboard video will be absolutely fine.
All of that is solid advice. As someone who builds their own PCs for gaming, runs Apple laptops for when I leave the house, and was a former Linux user in a past life, I will add that if you choose that the laptop format is the right choice for you, don’t write off Apple immediately, budget permitting. Yes, they are expensive. They compete at the high end laptop space, not at the low end. If you have a strict budget then yes, better value can be found from other brands. However, in the high end space, they are very competitive for what you actually get. Pros are great battery life, high build quality, and one of if not the best trackpads on any laptop out there. I don’t know the specifics of your situation, but Apples accessibility features are also excellent. Yes, they gouge you on RAM and SSD upgrades, which is inexcusable. However, last time I checked, Microsoft with their Surface line and Dell charge the same upsells, in one case for Dell, even more egregious. So we can hate on the industry as a whole for that.
All that being said, for the absolute best value for your money, it’s 100% a desktop PC.
As much flak as I may get for this, I also second the Apple rec for laptop hardware. Install whatever OS you want on there, but in general their build quality is very high. I have a Macbook Pro that has been going strong for 11 years now. It’s no longer my daily driver and the battery life isn’t what it once was, but it still works really well.
Ironically, I can’t speak to the build quality of the newer laptops because my current one has lasted so long, but I believe they are still up there.
With all the die hard Linux enthusiasts in the fediverse, it’s nice to see such a sane and reasonable take. Linux is great for hobbyists and for specific use cases and I’ve been there, but it doesn’t really make sense for the general consumer who just wants shit to work.
Japan’s current fiber-optic commercial internet connections use optical fiber transmission windows known as L and C multi-core fiber (MCF) bands to transport data long distances at record speeds. Meanwhile we (USA) have fiber back to copper and Cat3 for the last few hundred feet in most cities at best making the entire idea into a bottle neck.
Cat 3 is a thing and is basically unshielded twisted pair. You can abuse it quite a bit from its voice grade days to cram a few hundred megabits of VDSL over it if it’s only from your house to the curb.
The first thing you need to do is not personalize societal failure as your personal problem. Don’t put too much on yourself.
If you’re looking to donate, partner with local groups who are making a difference. They’ll know what the local needs are right now. It’s a neverending problem, but certainly more acute right now.
It is though but not only his fault but we as individuals form a society and we are failing our people by doing nothing about the politicians , corporates etc
On top of knowing the needs, such groups, generally, have the means to utilise the money more effectively dollar for dollar than an individual because they can buy wholesale and have deals with different companies.
IR blaster for smartphones. I still have one on mine and I can use it for tons of stuff, not just as a TV remote.
I even worked for a company who made lots of IR based products (taps/faucets, accessibility stuff) and it was amazing how many people had to buy the dedicated remotes for these products for extra money.
When I asked them if their phone has an IR blaster, so they could just download a free app and use it instead. “I have an iPhone” was the most common answer.
I don’t know about the ID and drivers license, but banking is no problem as you do not root the phones anymore. You can even use the google wallet if you want. I think the only thing not there is the google safetyNez verification, even tho you can install apps through the playstore. So I don’t know if the apps can determine if there on an official build or not.
Edit: Please take my words carefully as I’m only in the experimentation phase myself. All I really can say is: my banking app and PayPal work no problem
I agree the software is bad. All my phones bought after nexus 4 was made by Xiaomi. They give option to unlock bootloader and flash custom rom.
Not all the phones get official lineage os support, but almost all snapdragon versions get custom rom support.
I gave my Redmi Note 4 to my mom, which is 6 years old and running latest OS with recent security patches. None of the other OEMs were supported upto this period (just give exception to Samsung Galaxy 2).
I do have a Xiaomi phone and as I mentioned I am actively using the IR blaster, but the majority of regular users will not even think about checking the specs when buying new tech.
They will just go for the latest iPhone or the current trending android bestseller.
Yeah, I didn’t include my Enpass extension, as it’s more like a plug-in.
I also excluded TamperMonkey because I solely use it to sell my Steam cards and become filthy rich. Already 34 cents into my first million.
And last but not least: an extension that auto-upvotes YT videos from my subscribed channels because I’m too lazy to do it manually and YT can’t be bothered to assign a key to it.
In my experience enabling some of the annoyance lists broke several websites and it took a while to realise why. I do use the cookie consent list but no longer use any annoyance lists.
One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).
We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.
For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.
people around me are starting to realize that firefox is the go-to browser nowadays. my dad has actually been using it since he bought his current computer. and i’ve switched back from opera gx due to concerns of me being in a walled garden of advertisement.
The big issue is that by adding more and more features, a browser has become an operating system and so complex that you can’t hope to make a new one from scratch.
The last “new” browser engine (that wasn’t built by a corporation) was KHTML which was stolen harvested first by Apple for Webkit and subsequently by Google for Blink. KHTML then rotted without support.
The most recent attempt was to build Servo in Rust. Mozilla “ran out of money” (they depend on Google for their existence), and it’s already rotting.
Didn’t lose my smell or taste but after the initial flu-like stage of my infection was over I didn’t really get any better. And my doctor made it worse by telling me to power through and start working again. Nowadays I can only leave the bed to go to the toilet.
I’m about to participate in a study with some experimental treatments. Stupid thing is that I have to do an exercise test at the beginning so that they can measure the effectiveness. I took a shower last week and that’s left me in pain that will persist over the next few weeks. I shudder to think about what that exercise test will do.
But Portal taught me to do everything for science.
my mother. asked her to stop bringing up my rapist in conversation with me. she said “ya know other people have problems too.” Then she went and had holiday lunch at his house. that was before I was set to drive there for christmas, so instead I stayed home and did nothing. Turns out christmas is just a regular day.
Penguinz0. His content was garbage when I discovered him so I just avoided him but one day I got recommended his old commercial parodies and it was pure gold. His videos about Kate cooking were also great too. Nowadays, he’s a drama youtuber. He scroll Twitter, read about a random scandal, do the bare minimum research to not sound like a fool and then make a video about it.
I’m on the same boat. But my “what the actual fuck?” moment came when (for those unfamiliar with it) YouTuber Idubbbz came out with a sincere apology for many of his videos that used extremely racist or ableist terms. While aware that his apologies did not automatically translated into being forgiven by the memebers of the groups he insulted, Idubbbz still felt it was important for him to apologize.
And in this situation, Penguinz0 just said that “Idubbbz shouldn’t have apologized and it felt like he was exaggerating the whole thing”. Way to inject yourself in something that did not involve him at all. Also, that really told me the kind of person Penguinz0 is: someone who dismisses others suffering when it’s not his place to do so and someone who just goes off his own gut feelings alone.
The level of self awareness in the idubbz apology blew my mind. I was an edgy teen and grew out of him, and while it took him a bit longer than me, he came around too. Was a weird and cool moment.
Same here. Had the worst bottom feeder energy to it. Just scraping up shit and shitting it out, with the worst possible takes he just takes up all the oxygen in the room. Charlie isn’t much better than XQC.
And you know the rest of the reasons when at the first start your minesweeper app needs to have access to your photos, location, camera and microphone.
It didn’t age well in some respects (misogyny, racism, borderline sexual assault), but it’s a great watch and the envisioning of a dystopian 2022 through the lens of 1973 is fascinating.
e: your comment inspired me to rewatch it and the 30 year old man living with his father is spot on.
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