Especially the HDMI and jack are just silly to drop.

Only in a two-party system. Locked in a two party system is the death of it. At least introduce multiple rounds, to democratically elect the 2 contestants for the final round…

Derek: https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/60655-derek

even the little bits of grass around the peaks in foreground could actually be used. I’m amazed how risky cows behaviour is regarding to the abyss, and goats somehow are just completely not afraid of heights at all and hop around on 400 meter cliffs like a walk in the park. So you can grow food (meat+milk) on mountain sides during summer

thanks for the links!

I dislike the fact even more then the idea.

Called a bank recently.

They: "please say in a word the subject your call is about so we can immediately connect you to the right department "

Me: “LOAN”

They: you said “limits on your cards”, 1 for yes 2 for no

I tried 3 times, gave up. They won, I guess.

Money isn’t gone, resources are gone.

Been using searx a bit recently and it often is the 1 thing I’m looking for as the top result.

hmm, you’re gonna hate it but the reason is “because edge is already there” pre-installed

If you properly use firefox personalised the way you want it, it gives you shitty unusable websites in Europe too. Banking says no, newspapers being buggy to unreadable with certain script blocking or cookie refusal, disable adblock to continue windows etc, it all exists here too. I always try ff. If really needed I open the shitty site in edge and afterwards return to ff… Also public (tax payer funded!) flemish radio and tv for example is completely unusable in ff with proper settings, works “perfect” in edge or chrome. German and Dutch public TV and radio works fine in ff tho.

After some decades they just become so incredibly gross no one without a hazmat suit would try cleaning it again, so they’re replaced.

That’s already the case. Facebook etc have been walled gardens (or prisons if you prefer) for decade and a half now.

That’s 61 cm and 305 cm for like 95% of the world.

So… just making sure I am understanding this properly: centralized service monopoly by one government backed provider…? Doesn’t that got quite a communist ring to it?

I don’t think you’re very sincere, but I’ll try to explain how this is not communism and how this works in many countries.

People still have to pay for using the service. Depending on how often they ride, how far they go, etc. A fair, yet subsidised price. What the government does is create a “scenario”, a map if you like, with dots and lines and wishes and logical connections on which likely many people travel often. They identify which cities, which services, etc they want connected, and basically write out a TENDER to which many PRIVATE COMPANIES can participate. Sometimes, it’s a 1 take it or leave it big package deal. Sometimes, it’s split into a “main network” which will be run by a state controlled company, and local and regional networks, for which tenders are created and for which different companies can participate. They usually “win” a tender for quite many years at once, because it costs a lot of effort and money to get services started. It is quite far away from communism. But is does force a private company to not only exploit the few very most profitable connections, and ignoring all the others. Which is exactly what Uber is aiming for: only the profitable lines, 0 others. In a point of view from a society as a whole standpoint: it is still valuable to have more people use the bus instead of their own car, for many reasons, even on lines that are not profitable but require subsidies, for example also because it is still a lot more economical. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper for 20% of people using the bus, than to build yet even more highways and lanes and force people to buy their own vehicles. On top of that, it is the governments’ job to deliver basic services to all people. That is what we pay taxes for. What good is a hospital, a library, a school, if the people who very much need it, for example people too impaired to drive a vehicle and too poor to pay uber, can’t reach these services? Busses make sense, subsidised busses often make sense (not always, some places overdo it running empty busses too often), Uber is for sure not in it for providing a service to society, they are in it for destroying the service system for all and only taking the profit from some and fuck other people.

Uber will only cherry pick profitable routes for profitable customers, stealing them from public transport which will become more expensive as a result. Public transport is a public service available to everyone for a fair price. Uber is not public transport. Uber starting busservice somehow signals they want to move into that space, but they will never be servicing the poorest towns. Parts of PT being privatised by uber probably is bad news for bus passengers on less popular routes.

rustbelting makes voters transition from democrat to republican. you could argue that they actually benefit from declining industry, so of course they’re going for it

You don’t have a tax for owning “abandoned” housing (inhabited by noone)? There should be.

google controls the portals through which many people search. Defaults will always be google when people are using android and or chrome. Yahoo, infoseek or altavista never had anywhere near a grip on people like google does today. It takes effort to change now, while in the olden days you just had to change your 1 start page on the browser, things are a lot more embedded and thus customers locked in. Thinking it will switch over to a better alternative like it did back then, purely because it is a lot better, is a bit naive I think, unfortunately.

chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.

you’re better off teaching your kids how some things work, what might be safe to do online and what might be less safe, what possible implications for right holders and creators there might be if you pirate (and that those right holders and creators are often not the same people). Teach them to think for themselves if it’s worse to pirate a 35 yo movie you can’t find on dvd anymore, or a brand new movie that’s still showing in the local cinema. All of this is better than just telling kids “piracy is bad mmmkay!” and then letting them roam free so they start pointing and clicking utter bullshit and using a virus infested os.

Tldr: educate children, talking about piracy is part of it.