The quarterly earnings report takes precedence over not destroying the planet.

We absolutely have the ability to fix this planet, it’s just too inconvenient. People would literally prefer famine, disease, war, and death to going without comforts and conveniences.

It’s just greed. They throw in god’s name to relieve themselves of any personal responsibility.

You took that out of context.

That was intended to mean, as I said, in a modern context. As in you cannot get there via public transportation today. This conversation has nothing to do implementing transportation, this has to do with what we have and how accessible smaller towns are.

So were you looking to be angry or something?

I really don’t know what you’re on about. I stated what we have today. Period. My comment has nothing to do with “propaganda” or rail history in the US. Did you even reply to the right comment?

Depends.

If you live in a very rural area it can be more than an hour by car to some of these things, 50 miles or more, other items may not exist at all like public transportation. Inter-city public transportation is all but imposable for smaller locations, difficult and lengthy the greater the distance and size differential in locations.

I used to live in a metro area. Everything was within 10 minutes walk except medical care, but walking to the subway would get you to top tier medical facilities in about 15-20 minutes. Getting to nearby “bedroom” communities was also pretty easy thanks to a commuter rail.

I now live in a suburban area that has OK bus service but it’s not very convenient to where I live at all. Everything is within a 10 minute drive, and unfortunately a car is necessary due to the lack of sidewalks in many places. It does have light rail to a major metro area, about two hour’s ride, and then you can access the metro area major transportation network to all nearby areas and further away. Probably about as good as it gets in the US.

Nearest store of any kind - 1 mile

Full serve store - same

Library - .75 mile

Bus stop - 1.2 miles

Small park - .5 miles

Large park - 3 miles

Access to light rail - 4 miles

They’re not wrong, but you’re not either. Nothing is perfect all the time and the OP statement really leaves a lot out. Been married for 20 years. Would do it all again. That’s what matters.

Interesting reading the responses here. I set static addresses all the time and have had zero issue over a decade +.

She should have barebacked it instead.

Unpopular opinion…

Man, I wrote a whole WoT about this. Deleted it. Fuck the cheaters. I don’t know why it’s so hard to stop them. The kind of people that will DDoS a company for blocking them are the same ones that will cheat. No gold star for any honest players that DDoS, either. If there’s a server problem or a bad patch that prevents me from playing my first thought isn’t to DDoS the company and fuck up everyone else’s game in a fit of petty revenge too. That said, it’s sad that honest players are the only ones harmed after the cheat coders found their workaround so quickly.

Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.

That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.

Huh, even the most “aged” and high-karma accounts seem to top out under $1k, average for a well-used account seems $300-500, and most for way less. Wonder how many sales are actually made.

A race to see what will kill the most of us first. The plastic or anthropogenic climate change.

Even though your edit clarified it, I wish we’d stop calling them “exploding batteries”. The battery isn’t the explosive, it’s the explosives that were hidden in the device. I’ve already encountered far too many morons describing conspiracies where the big bad government could make your iPhone explode.

Think I kinda agree with this. Yesteryear’s software took training and experience, and business either hired or trained that experience. Now businesses don’t want to waste time or money on training, so thy hire experience, contract it out, or find some kit that is “easy” with minimal learning curve.

Wanna know why prices everywhere went up so much? They had to pay all the advertising companies for the billions of ads they’ve been trying to force us to watch everywhere, from tv to internet to roadside billboards. So the consumer had to pay.

(No, not really, but it sure feels that way)

You’ve reiterated pretty much what I said, but directly contradicted some of the most obvious points.

Not sure what a “cute girl” has to do with anything, I gave a pragmatic explanation. Do you treat cute girls like they can’t handle realistic information?

Your idea is to reduce functionality of popular devices. That’s not going to work. Like I said, if you want to play in these businesses’ little proprietary gardens you’re going to have to play by their rules. If you want to be a Luddite, great, but for the vast majority of people such limited devices will never be adopted and any business producing them will either be niche expensive or fail.

Oldest house is 1702. Definitely not super-old, there were earlier structures, but this is the oldest one left standing.

I grew up with computers since the ‘70s. I know this golden age well - and the golden age of the internet before it was monetized, tracked, ad-ified, walled off, etc.

We’re never going to get the old days back.

There’s always some business that’s going to insert itself between what you want and you and try to extract profit from it. Doesn’t matter if it’s tracking you or subscription fees.

I hate being taken advantage of like that, but unfortunately if you want to play with some of their toys you have to pay.

Just do it judiciously and take control where you can.

I build my own PCs. No pre-loaded crap. I download driver-only software when needed, not bloated corporate-ware like what HP or canon does to pester you about ordering ink. I have several Linux boxes doing free things for me like running a 3D printer, running a CUPS print server, running openHABian, a Jellyfin server, and the best of all - Pi-hole (block ads, block devices from phoning home). I run Firefox with all the ad blockers and anti-trackers. Facebook containers and YouTube ad blockers.

But I run windows 10. Why? Because it was free and it works. Take advantage of the system that takes advantage of you. I also run it dual boot with Manjaro, for all those tasks windows might make difficult.

My LAN has a separate network for all IOT and similar devices so they can’t see the rest of my network, and most are blocked from phoning home as needed. They don’t get to sell that data.

I take advantage of all free good software; Gimp, LibreOffice, OBS, VLC, 7zip…

Some things we’ll never get back, like ownership of top-tier games that have to phone home.

Anyway… like I said, there’s no way to wind the clock back. However, with effort, you can control what you can and at least not give them what they’re trying to extract from you. Be in charge of what you let them have. It’s really all we’ve got.

They all suck anymore. Google fell the furthest though.

And it seems like it completely disregards search modifiers like quotes or the minus sign at this point. The modifiers are overridden by the algorithms pushing preferred sites, or Google just gives few or no returns as if there are no sites featuring your search criteria, which is completely false because it’s perfectly happy to return paid sites with the same but incorrect search term.

Everyone thought AI was going to kill us via some Terminator-like Skynet.

Nope.

It’s just going to let us kill ourselves via greed and accelerate destroying the environment.