So. the FTC doesn’t have enough people now to do its job… great planning there.

Except it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.

Judging by the comments here, my wife and I are anomalies, but I love my Apple Watch. It’s helped my fitness goals, it’s far less awkward when I get a message and on-call notification than digging out my phone, and I can instantly hang up on spam calls/marketers and phone calls coming in when I don’t care to talk.

It also let us put our phone down and leave it somewhere in the house, which has greatly helped prevent doom scrolling and screen time (and increased my mental health). I don’t have to worry about missing a call or message, but I don’t have to have a huge screen in my pocket at all times. I honestly have been tempted to forgo a smartphone and just get an LTE watch instead to break that cycle, but my job requires it at this time.

All that said, I’ve got a Series 4. It’s now 6+ years old, still works fine, does everything I need and more and still lasts the day without battery issues. It’s been a solid performer and I’m keeping it as long as I can because that’s what you do with a watch.

I would legit pay $40+ for Firefox… it’s gotta make and keep some promises around security, compliance, configurablity and compatibility, etc. though. It also needs to be a decently long term purchase. I’m not doing it for every version they release, maybe a lifetime license or at least a 4-6 year cadence if it’s a bit cheaper.

Meanwhile Western Digital moves away from SSD production and back to HDDs for massive storage of AI and data lakes and such: https://www.techspot.com/news/107039-western-digital-exits-ssd-market-shifts-focus-hard.html

True, but 7 days isn’t enough time for that. I’ve gone weeks between purchasing the kinds of things Amazon delivers, so it’d just be normal. 2+ months is probably better. Especially if those months are Nov & Dec.

Definitely boycott Walmart. They’ve been horrible a lot longer than Amazon. I haven’t purchased from Walmart in a decade and a half and I see no reason to stop now.

While it wasn’t necessarily pretty and had its share of glitches, I quite enjoyed Arceus. It was a nice break from the standard patterns it’s fallen into.

Course I say that as someone who also enjoyed Sword and Shield after a skipping a few prior.

Graphics definitely aren’t everything, but they could stop it With the half finished games with glitches.

Elon Musk is probably the single worst thing for Tesla. Sure the FSD that drives into trains and lakes and people is a problem, but you can potentially fix or mitigate that with OTA updates and recalls.

If the Tesla board was smart, they’d fire Elon as before he tarnishes the brand even further.

In about 1 in 10,000 who get sick with measles and recover from it, the virus lies dormant in the brain for about a decade. It then can reactivate, causing a severe, progressive dementia called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is fatal within one to three years.

There is no treatment or cure for the disease. I have seen a couple of suspected cases of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, and none of these patients survived, despite our best efforts.

Unless you have a legit reason, Give your kids the vaccine, people! Do you want your kid to die a horrible death? Or feel groggy for a day or two and then live a normal healthy life? What the hell is wrong with people?

Sounds like a health problem.

More competition? LETS GO!

I wouldn’t bring paper directions unless they lead to and from a place that ISN’T related to you. Somewhere you know you can get to and from by heart but is a public place, for instance. Don’t give away a beautiful map from your home address To the protest.

You don’t. You don’t even really own physically purchased digital goods (like BluRays or video games). It’s a great time to be alive folks!

It’s entirely cash based. Sure, some parts are “non-profit”, but at the root of it, they depend on cash based services that can pull the plug at any time.

It’s also completely controlled, directly or indirectly, by localized political regimes.

Correct, except that more people buying used laptops will incentivize people to upgrade more often as they can depend on a strong secondhand market to recoup some of the cost of the new one by selling the old one.

I’ve used it the last few years to do Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/) and that’s been fun and challenging. Definitely recommend it. Better than trolling through a book of “now do this” examples if you’ve done other languages in the past.

Sadly, the deteriorating conditions are exactly what some groups want. Those are also the ones who can affect change, either with guns or money.

“$9-million” shouldn’t that be at least a “b” instead of an “m”?!

For other potentially worse manufacturers. I hate how far it’s all gone, but even buying a used/secondhand device is empowering the prior own to support one of these manufacturers.

Why would you have been okay with it enough to purchase one in the first place? As an American, it’s always been pretty clear that American companies are filled with horrible data management. They actively lobby against any sort of GDPR or equivalent data laws and regularly leak data with no real ramifications.