okay so…tomorrow is just not important?

Again, reread what I wrote: I made no comment on the long term efficacy of tariffs. All I said was that when a presidential candidate says “we’ll make China pay”, it’s factually incorrect.

Are you really just completely ignorant of the purpose of tariffs?

Re-read what I wrote:

the immediate effect of new tarriffs is making Americans poorer.

Do tariffs work? Maybe. You also have to remember that China will retaliate and impose tariffs on US good, so overall the effects of tariffs are rarely a net benefit for anyone - which is why they’re rarely a good idea.

But the fact remains that the day after tariffs are applied, Americans lose access to cheaper goods. That’s just a dry fact.

Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.

Just in case I had to modify something in the tester’s control software, I figured I’d install i3wm and Vim. It didn’t take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.

So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

Honestly in my opinion it is time to remove all tariffs on EVs under 25k and let anyone who wants to fill that slot in.

One essential thing bears repeating: it’s not the manufacturer that bears the cost of tariffs, it’s the customers. Or said another way, if BYD cars double in price in the US, it’s American customers who will pay the difference.

A certain presidential candidate loves to beat that drum but consistently fails to mention that the immediate effect of new tariffs is making Americans poorer.

Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.

Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.

To evade taxes of course.

Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?

It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?

It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.

I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.

I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.

But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.

What if you don’t want a Pixel? Or a Fairphone? Or one of the very, VERY few cellphones that you can install a deGoogled OS on?

There are precious few ways of escaping the Google monopoly. I own a Fairphone running CalyxOS, and it happens to be the phone I want because of its excellent repairability. So lucky me. But if I didn’t want a Fairphone, nor any Samsung phone, nor any Chinese cellphone, and certainly not a fucking Google phone - because I’d rather cut off my left nut than give Google money to escape Google’s surveillance, that’s just too rich for me - then I’d be SOL.

My point is, if you refuse to be Google’s bitch, Google backs you into a corner. Just because you’re happy with the corner doesn’t mean you’re not stuck in a corner.

Google “might let me” do something…

If that doesn’t summarize everything that’s wrong with this fucking monopolist, that controls YOUR device that you paid with YOUR money but ultimately isn’t yours to do as you please, I don’t know what does.

The only thing that makes Google a bit tolerable in the mobile space is Apple, because Apple is even worse. At least you can (still) sideload stuff in Android - although Google is about to make that impossible very soon too.

Fuck the monopolists.

Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for many years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.

It’s a problem if you need a fucking banking app for example, and the bank won’t let you sideload it and you’re running a deGoogled OS. Then you suddenly need a backup phone with the full surveillance Android just to do banking.

I’m not talking about the poor: as you say, they’re tired and the assaults of ultra-capitalism are relentless.

I’m talking about the middle class which, in the eyes of the ultra-rich, is just as insignificant as the ultra-poor, and is really only a few paychecks away from the same fate.

Middle class people happily ignores the fate of their fellow man in the street, bow their head and say nothing, believing if they don’t make too much fuss, the ultra-rich will maintain the status quo and they won’t do too badly.

That’s us. WE should pick up the pitchfork. We have the energy and we have a good reason, because really, we’re just slightly better than the poor and we pay a lot more taxes than the ultra-billionnaire sumbitches. But we don’t.

And poor people still die homeless in the street.

You’d think pitchforks would sell well. But apathy seems incurable, as people appear to have internalized staggering levels of inequality as a fact of normal life.

I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy

It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.

If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.

If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.

Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.

No device made to kill a human is humane

Yes but some are more inhumane than others. That’s why the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons exists, which lists the following protocols:

1. Non-detectable fragments: weapons specially designed to shatter into tiny pieces, which aren’t detectable in the human body. Examples are fragmented bullets or projectiles filled with broken glass.
2. Mines, booby traps, and other devices: This includes anti-personnel mines, which are mines specially designed to target humans rather than tanks.
3. Incendiary weapons: Weapons that cause fires aren’t permitted for use on on civilian populations or in forested areas.
4. Blinding lasers: Laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness.
5. Explosive remnants of war: Parties that have used cluster bombs in combat are required to help clear any unexploded remains.

Thermite is a protocol 3 weapon. So again, while I understand that Ukraine is desperate to defend itself, using that stuff is not great.

Implying he is mentally unwell based on the 10 minute videos

Kind of like, oh, I don’t know… implying a Lemmy user you know nothing about has a unhealthy “parasocial” relationship going on with a random Youtuber based on a single post 🙂

he chooses to upload and then spreading this unfounded rumour across social media is really disrespectful and dangerous behaviour.

Don’t reverse the roles: he’s the one who puts himself in the limelight. If he didn’t want people to make public coments on his very public videos, then he shouldn’t make his videos public.

I think you might need to take a step back from what seems like the parasocial relationship you’ve developed with the guy. I have seen far too many instances lately of “fans” of YouTubers getting overly concerned

I’m not a Youtuber’s fan and I have no relationship with Louis. What I see is another human being who seems to have begun a slow slide into incoherence. Being concerned for another human being is called empathy.