My apartment complex wants me to download some third-party app just to pay my rent, instead of using their perfectly serviceable web portal. I assume they’re getting a data harvest kickback that’s buried in several layers of fine-print legalese, which will be used to send me targeted spam and junk mail. And that data will be sold and re-sold to other parties ad infinitum. Whatever they can collect about my personal life, for sale to any asshole with enough cash in their pocket. Fuck that. I shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit just to keep a roof over my head.

Arguing in bad faith?

I almost pulled the trigger on one of these during Amazon’s recent big sale, but there was a trend in the user reviews that troubled me. I went with a Samsung unit instead. No regrets.

I can imagine the conversation.

Elon: “I own this website, and you’re telling me that I’m not allowed to see this person’s profile or activity because they blocked me?”

Good luck getting a massive narcissist like him to understand why every user should have that right.

Founded in 1973. It’s not a coincidence that we started to see establishment pushback organizations popping up in this time frame. Because in the 60s, people of color started voting en masse after generations of systematic suppression. The civil rights movement empowered them to express their political views like never before. The word “Heritage” in this context means “white people.” When they say “traditional American values,” they mean “no gays or mixing of the races.” When they say “limited government,” they mean “weak regulation.” When they say “individual freedom,” they mean “freedom from consequences,” specifically for white males. When they say “the war on drugs,” they mean “the war on black people and liberals.” And so on. They’re speaking in code, and their very name is a code. But it’s easily cracked if you’ve been paying attention.

Yeah, cows are adapted to eat grass, but that doesn’t fatten them up. So we give them corn and whatnot instead. It’s a generally unhealthy diet for them. As in, they are literally more prone to disease because a grain diet impacts their immune system.

When you offer a cow grass in one hand and grain in the other, they will always go for the grass.

The clip was part of Guldbrandsen’s documentary, A Storm Foretold, released in March of this year.

So there’s nothing actually new about this video. It’s just that Donald forgot that someone filmed the slimy inner workings his re-election campaign when it came time to mount a defense, and he doesn’t have any good lawyers to help him avoid painting himself into a corner again. Hell, he probably lied to his lawyers, too.

Be careful, most cheap NVMe drives have low endurance. Llike, not “Oh, you’re just hand wringing about nothing,” endurance ratings but an actually and relevantly low number of terabytes that can be written before the drive becomes failure-prone. They also usually lack a DRAM cache, so certain operations can be as slow as a mechanical hard drive, thereby negating the major advantage of opting for solid-state storage.

That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.

I’m saddened by the phenomenon because there’s plenty of evidence that the audiences for these most of these games hate the experience, but they can’t stop playing because they’ve become victims of predatory psychological tactics designed to keep them addicted and their wallets wide open. These publishers and studios literally hire psychologists who specialize in generating this addiction, using models optimized to prey on their own users as much as humanly possible. It’s sickening. The sports games are especially shameless about this. Ruining people’s finances and their core sense of financial responsibility to fatten their pockets. I don’t know how they sleep at night. Sociopaths, the lot of them.

Since when did we need to flip a coin on issues like this? Spoiler: We don’t! There are plenty of resources to go around.

If anything was a waste of time, it was this poll. Go home, Pew Research, you’re drunk.