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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I used to have a pebble back in the day, and then later a pebble steel. I’ve not found a modern smartwatch that is as good for my needs (partially because it doesn’t look like a smartwatch).

    I use a Samsung Galaxy wear, which also looks like a normal watch. I’m sure competing products are used a lot and you just don’t notice them because their styling is modelled off of dumb watches.


  • If people wanted them, they’d sell them here.

    Yeah depending on where “here” is different things are available. If people don’t buy them or if dealers make more money off SUVs, then they will be gone.

    Also seems they have bigger engines and clearly a larger physical footprint than my wife’s CUV, so that argument is gone as well.

    Size and fuel economy weren’t things I mentioned above, but yeah I agree with you. Usually station wagons, like SUVs, have different engine configurations which dictates fuel economy more than ride height. The fuel efficiency argument against SUVs is a little out of date, the smaller ones are shared chassis with passenger cars often with the same engine, so fuel economy is more or less unchanged (the aero is worse on an SUV, but the kind we are discussing it’s not really significant). By footprint I guess you mean length, which in the example I have is right, obviously height goes the other way. Smaller SUVs are more comparable to hatchbacks (eg Mazda 3 is the same as CX-30), I don’t think the mid sized car platform is as directly comparable to the mid sized CUV/SUV.







  • Mine is borderline unusable compared to my pixel 5.

    Is it summer and am I outdoors? Phone will shutdown due to overheating.

    Am I using Google maps and the phone is mounted in direct sunlight? It will throttle dark mode to manage overheating .

    Have I been using the phone throughout the day? It needs to be charged before I leave work.

    Honestly I’d say my p7p is the worst phone I’ve had in a long time, it’s hard to go back without considering how phones were for their time, but my instinct is that the last time I had a phone this comparably bad it was a Samsung Galaxy s3.


  • I’d trade my pixel 7 pro back for my old 5 in a heartbeat (were it not destroyed). Besides the better form factor and better android 11 UI on the pixel 5, which are admittedly subjective, the pixel 5 can do several things the pixel 7 pro cannot:

    • be used outdoors in summer (or in direct sunlight anytime),

    • get a through a full day without having to charge,

    • includes a better fingerprint sensor (more reliable, has capacitive gesture, doesn’t spit out blinding light, more ergonomic position),

    • includes a far better screen (curved edges with persistent glare are the literal worst - not to mention how breakable they are).

    • be placed on a surface without a case and without sliding around on some stupid frictionless and delicate glass back panel.


  • People always down vote when I point that out as well lol. Windows mobile was already moving towards icon based UIs pre iPhone, so while the UI was a definite improvement it wasn’t the revolution it’s made out to be. The iPhone 1 had no app store or 3g so was not good for emails and, back in 2007 when flash still mattered, couldn’t access most of the Internet where windows phone could. I’m pretty sure it was successful purely based on the iPods popularity, at least until the iPhone 3gs and app store came out and the iPhone became arguably a better smartphone than those that came before.



  • Which… gets back to cable. A decade or so ago? Pretty much everything WAS in one spot for about a hundred bucks a month. Get premium cable to get most channels and then spend extra for HBO or sports or whatever. And comcast and verizon both had a lot of VODs available too. Many of which didn’t even have ads. And the rest? you DVR it and then fast forward through the ads when they show up (… which is better than hulu). REALLY like movies? Get cinemax too.

    You’re projecting an American perspective, but I suspect you’re talking to an Australian.

    Cable in Australia has always been considerably more expensive than in the USA, and includes considerably less content. Except for movies, it was also never available adfree. It was changing in the last 5 years when I left the country, but it wasn’t even close to competing with the likes of Netflix on price or service and I don’t think there was any ad free option (despite the dramatically higher cost to consumer) - there was a whole media oligarch conspiracy to sink the national broadband upgrade because they knew they had the market cornered with their monopoly and streaming would disrupt that.


  • Money isn’t an investment, it’s a currency. Of course it’s a bad investment and investing in forex is barely a better investment than crypto (purely because there’s less risk of a sovereign currency devaluing to 0).

    Investing in capital, like stocks, property, equipment etc does not require someone to lose money for the capital owner to profit. If I invest in a stock, each year I’m paid a dividend based on the profits of that organisation - no losers required. I could later sell that stock at the exact price I paid for it and come away with profit from those dividends. What determines whether it’s a good or bad investment, is the ratio of profit to the capital owner compared to cost of the asset. Crypto generates 0 profit, so it has 0 value as a capital investment.


  • Money has value insofar as governments use it to collect tax - so long as there’s a tax obligation, there’s a mandated demand for that currency and it has some value. Between different currencies, the value is determined based upon the demand for that currency, which is essentially tied to how much business is done in that currency (eg if a country sells goods in its own currency, demand for that currency goes up and so does it’s value).

    This is not the same for crypto, there are no governments collecting tax with it so it does not have induced demand. The value of crypto is 100% speculative, which is fine for something that is used as currency, but imo a terrible vehicle for investment.


  • The reason I asked was because I think there’s a fundamental disagreement between what it actually is that people disagree about.

    Your earlier post suggests that your stance on abortion is different than that of the mainstream conservative narrative. This seems normal, based on how every vote on that issue seems to be playing out, there is a disconnect between the ideology that conservative leaders are pushing and what their supporters actually think. The exact same situation is true with affirmation action on the left - voters consistently reject it regardless of party affiliation or self identified political leaning.

    I’d hear people identify CRT as being closely related to affirmative action, in that it’s an actual policy that gives out some advantage (or seeks to remove some other existing advantage, if you have a different perspective) vs being some purely academic case study more like what a other response to your response described.

    Where I’m going with this is that depending on what you’re describing when you say CRT, it’s very easily possible that your position of opposing it is consistent with a clear majority of people who identify as “left”. The disagreement isn’t about ideology, but about semantics that is being exploited by a political class to drive support.


  • Ultimately if people want to debate you, you’re not obligated to indulge them. It’s good for discourse to put out your opinion in the way that you have (eg respectfully and without throwing barbs at everyone).

    That said, some of your points are hard for me to follow.

    I don’t have a perfect knowledge of exactly what’s on the left and right so please forgive me if I put something in the wrong category.

    If you can’t articulate the difference, how is it that you came to identify as one? IMO “left vs right” is an intentionally vague and poorly defined concept to keep people angry and identifying with a brand, more than a coherent description of ideology.

    I understand that left vs right ideally shouldn’t exist. The same goes for political parties. They do exist so here’s some of my views from both sides.

    I don’t agree with critical race theory…

    I hear so much about this. What does it mean? Can you give a real world example where someone is trying to implement what you oppose?


  • Socialism is defined by the elimination of the purely capitalist class, wherin workers own the means of production.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean that capital isn’t assigned for investment based upon market demand or that “EvEryoNe gEts pAId tHE SAmE” like others claim. Socialism in a modern economy can (and likely would be) market based, it just means that shareholders would be entirely made up of employees of a company (obviously this would lead to better conditions for workers, lower wages for executives and no dividend payments to people who aren’t working). Taking a more academic definition of capitalism, it’s entirely possible to be both socialist and capitalist. Few people are arguing against capitalism in entirety.