That should put paid to the myth that Trump is ‘the antidote to all the wars’.

I always thought that the argument ‘no wars were started during his presidency’ was bullshit.

Lucky Number Slevin

Man On Fire

Syriana

Equilibrium

And for some solid Australian cinema: Mystery Road

Thing is, I am actually Gen X. Early even. And I look at the Boomers and see the generation who kept pulling up the ladder. They got free education and privatised it to make it expensive for us. They got free healthcare and privatised it to make it expensive. They got into the housing market for cheap and started using it as an investment and speculation vehicle, making it harder for each subsequent generation to get into it. They were pretty much the last generation in which it was possible to raise a family on a single income. Climate change is front and center of mind in my generation, we’ve known for over 30 years what’s coming. When you look at those who most fervently oppose climate change action - all old fogeys, and I say that being very conscious of the fact that I am approaching ‘old fogey’ status from the perspective of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

I can only imagine how todays teenagers and young adults feel…

Teenagers today were born in the aftermath of a global financial crisis, are seeing war after war after war, grow up with the knowledge that the world is going to shit and the older generations aren’t willing to do anything about it. They see everyone pull up the ladder behind them, the ‘fuck you I got mine’ mentality is everywhere.

And TikTok is to blame for their mental health?

Specific to subway surfing: I’m 46, and I know this stuff happened when I was a kid. There were no social media back then to show you, but somehow kids still these got stupid ideas. It seems like social media is just the new video games are the new comic books are the new heavy metal is the new whatever scapegoat society wants to use to blame for its own deliberate shortcomings in bringing up the next generation.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with it being an interest-free loan, if it serves to keep a business over water and saves jobs. To me that’s an appropriate use of taxpayer funds. I’m all for taxpayer subsidies if they are balance-positive to the taxpayer, i.e. jobs are preserved and the subsidies result in meaningful economic activity.

What’s bad is when otherwise profitable businesses use threats of job cuts and closures to obtain taxpayer bailouts so they can keep paying big bonuses and shareholder dividends. A lot of that happened through COVID, and the taxpayer threw billions at big business for very little in return. So maybe restrictions on layoffs and such would need to be written into a system like that. The punitive aspects need to incentivise the intended behaviour and strongly disincentivise the wrong behaviour.

Isn’t that pretty much the short version of what I said?

Big corporations begging taxpayer bailouts and then using them on bonuses and dividends. It’s a humongous waste of money that does nothing but enrich the wealthy. Most of the time it doesn’t even save jobs.

If, as a large corporate, you want a bailout from the taxpayer, then the government/state will take a portion of your shares in escrow, equivalent in value to the amount of money you’re asking for or getting. Those shares (in case of publicly traded companies) are withdrawn from the stock market, become non-voting shares and are frozen at their price at that time. Within a to-be-determined time period (five years maybe) the corporation, if it gets profitable again, can buy back all or part of the shares from the government at that price per share - thus returning money to the taxpayer. Anything that’s left after five years, the government can do with as it sees fit - sell them at market price (thus recovering the spent money), or keep them use them to vote/control the company.

There probably is a lot wrong with this proposal. But something needs to be done to discourage big business from hoovering up taxpayer money like it’s going out of fashion. Most of the time the taxpayer is getting absolutely no value from that spend.

Ask that question again when it’s a site that you need to use.

I watched the first one and know a lot of people who did. I even know people who went to see the second one.

No conspiracy detected here.

It would be more compelling if some US states weren’t also openly and unabashedly engaged in active voter suppression.

Both can be true. He can be an idiot who got paid to destroy Twitter.

The USB transfer speed claim is misleading to say the least. The iPhone 15 was already capable of up to 10Gbps transfer speed (USB 3.0 support). You could quibble over the fact that the included cable didn’t support that (if only the USB-IF could get its shit together), but to claim the hardware doesn’t support it is a lie.

Also, non-US iPhones support both physical SIM and eSIM.

Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it.

It’s not that cut and dried.

A look at the postmarketOS devices page reveals:

• “the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI” (aka what you need a phone to be); Device count: 5, not a single one of them the kind I can go into a regular phone shop and buy

• "Devices that have had a lot of work put into them, where regressions are actively fixed, and the port is overall in a pretty good shape (read: your experience will likely be bumpy and not overly smooth); Device count: 28, largely older devices (pre-2018, so again not something I can just go and buy, and exotics like above; There is a lot of orange in the features table)

The rest is under “Testing”, and the best summary of that status I can find is “All the devices in this table can at least boot postmarketOS. To monitor boot progress, you must be able to receive output from the screen, a network adapter, or a serial port”. So there is a total of 33 devices right now, largely exotics and older devices, that you could reasonably use with postmarketOS for any purpose other than testing and tinkering.

I am what you’d call ‘tech interested’. I tinker with Arduinos and solder electronics as part of my hobby. I do a smidgen of self-hosting and similar, though I am not nearly as far into the weeds as many people, and it’s not my key interest or activity. The thing about a phone is, I need it to work, because I need it for work. I don’t have time or compunction to go through the process of installing an OS the manufacturer doesn’t want me to install. I don’t have time to deal with a non-polished UX or capricious apps that need workarounds to install on a ‘non-standard’ OS (for lack of a better term). I know that’s not the fault of the OS, but a choice made by phone manufacturers and app developers, but that doesn’t make it any less real or an issue for me.

I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn’t have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.

The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.

And yet every time Apple announce a new product or feature, Android fans are here with their ‘welcome to the past’ memes.

No country exists in isolation. Why wouldn’t it be fine to discuss events in another country even if you don’t have a direct stake in it?

sew

Pronounced exactly the same as sow, if you mean the right sow and not the other sow, which is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

More recently, probably a wireless handheld controller for my model railway.

Model railway is a hobby for people with lots of time, space, and money. I generally fall short on two of those, although lately there is a bit more disposable income to go around. Last year I was able to splurge on the control setup that I always wanted, which is a stationary controller - basically you sit at a table and control the trains with two rotary controllers and a touchscreen for a number of other things. Looks a bit like this.

But since it’s stationary and my layout is fairly big, sometimes it can be a bit cumbersome to test something that’s five metres away. So I decided to also splurge on the matching wireless handheld controller, an Android-based device with another rotary controller and the ability to control almost all aspects of the stationary device.

Did I need it? Hell no. If I had waited a few more months, a perfectly suitable free smartphone app would have been available that I could have used for the purposes intended. But am I loving it? Fuck yes. Irresponsible to boot, but no regrets, not for one second.

You need some salsa for that chip on your shoulder, or is there another reason why you’re getting so personal?

Don’t answer. I don’t actually care.