One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can’t use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the “government shut down the internet” kind of scenario.

Which, I suppose if you’re already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn’t a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of “consumer” devices with encryption very much still has value.

It’s a bit niche, and I’m probably one of the few people who daily drove them when they were a thing, but bring back Firefox OS phones - they were a bit ahead of their time, but now that every app is a browser window anyway it’d probably be fine, and people are craving a mobile OS alternative to Android and iOS.

Sure, I’d personally prefer something a bit more powerful, so maybe a joint project between Mozilla, and a linux phone distro like PostmarketOS would be cool. Or (since I’m already in fantasy land) depending on hardware, considering Valve’s work on ARM for the Steam Frame, maybe a partnership with them.

Granted, it’s been close to a decade since I daily drove FirefoxOS, there’s always a chance I’m remembering things as better than they were. I should dig my old FirefoxOS Phones out and do a bit of a retrospective look at them.

“Low-energy beverages” sounds like a dumb Trump insult for caffeine-free diet soda.

He wants a hemisphere, would make way more sense to claim the northern one rather than the western hemisphere. He just needs to have someone help him understand that he’s not getting the best hemisphere.

Andy Serkis? George Takei?

… oh nevermind, found the one you’re talking about.

I’d argue America has shown it’s the one country that other countries do have a right to interfere with. After ~70 years of being the drunken, overconfident, asshole that’s ruining the experience for everyone at the bar because we’ve decided we’re the bouncer. On some level we’ve kinda made ourselves everyone’s problem.

It’s not a perfect analogy, because in a bar everyone else could just leave, and that’s not an option when you’re sharing a planet.

Do they not teach reading clocks in school anymore? I remember like a quarter of first grade math being nothing but learning to read an analog clock. Surely if you’re a school and discover a bunch of your students are lacking in a basic skill, that’s a failure on your part as educators, not somehow a fault that your students don’t have clocks at home. You said the 90s though, which was when I was in elementary, so maybe I just got lucky to have a school that assumed they had to teach us everything.

Something I was taught in film school 15 years ago was that communication happens when a message is perceived. Whether the message was intended or not is irrelevant. And yet here we are, “communicating” with a slightly advanced autocomplete algorithm and calling it intelligent.

The thing is, I think if he would just wear that saucy Hugh Hefner meets Scrooge look he wore recently, and owned sucking horse dick. I think the nation would get over it.

Even if he owned sucking off Bill Clinton, we’d mostly go, “I mean, yeah, he’s a real charmer, who among us can say we wouldn’t?” At this point, I think being a pedo creep to kids with Epstein is the only sex scandal that could actually damage him. So few of his sex scandals have really stuck (aside from some real financial penalties in the E. Jean Carroll case).

He blew a microphone on stage when it stopped working in the lead up to the 2024 election. He’s got some instincts from somewhere.

That’s honestly more of a problem than a feature at this point. The GPL at least protects open source projects as a “public good” and forces corporate users to contribute their changes back to the public (in some manner). All permissive licenses do is let corporations leech off the community without a requirement to give back.

Yeah, but honestly getting rid of coins is an admission that inflation is high relative to 40-50 years ago. When pretty much every government wants to keep that fact out of the public consciousness. Especially the current US government who wants to both claim we don’t have inflation at all, and are the ones getting rid of the penny.

I’ve been saying we should drop the penny for almost 2 decades, but I still kind of look at getting rid of the penny as a sign of our current government’s abysmal handling of inflation.

Marry a database. These losers falling in love with AI don’t know how to be a real technophile.

Squatters rights?

It’s the physics that make it look uncanny. Just the weight of that much liquid puts significantly more stress on flexible plastic. The only way it could still look like a puffer jacket would be if it was made of hard plastic which would be then impossible to put on or take off. Now I’ll admit I’ve probably had more experience with bagged liquids than most other Americans, considering I’ve worked with bagged milk in the food service industry, and I also prefer to take the bag out of box wine like Australians do. So maybe that’s why just the general shape triggers the AI alarm bells for me.

They’re just applying their business tactics to Christianity now. They realized that religion wasn’t going away as fast as they hoped, and have fallen back on the old embrace, extend, extinguish playbook. I doubt they’ve realized the power of religion to drive them certifiably insane during the “embrace” phase.

Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.

Also, when donating to local food pantries, remember that donations of money go farther and feed more than donations of food. Food pantries have access to economies of scale and can buy food cheaper than an individual can. So you’ll increase your impact if you just donate your cash straight to the food pantry, rather than going to the grocery store to buy food to donate. In addition, the food pantry will be able to more accurately supply what people actually need and stock what they are short on, rather than you just guessing.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.