Over the past year, an ongoing and severe drought has parched most of Mexico, draining reservoirs and leaving parts of the country grappling with an acute water crisis. Since mid-March, scorching temperatures have led to at least 26 heat-related deaths, according to the nation’s health ministry. The double-whammy of weather...
For many years now, almost the only way to find tech-related answers was to add the word “reddit” to your search. Before the Rexodus ofc.
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Google itself has admitted how bad it has gotten, and in response they decided to voluntarily reduce their profits and return everything back to when it all worked… - no I’m just kidding, they said wait a bit and AI will save us all, somehow (from ourselves?).
An “Appeal to extremes” argument specifies that extremes are all that exist - no middle ground allowed. Similarly, the “No true Scotsman” one says that likewise, nobody truly disagrees, at least nobody who matters. Next, why would we consider it okay to use slurs, even/especially against bots - it’s not like saying anything like that will change their minds, but literal children are watching the exchange, and it could change theirs?
Anyway: they will do their thing, but what you are responsible for is doing yours, so your response to them is 100% on you. Do with that what you will.
I have a question, seriously: why are we looking to the President - the Chief Executive Officer - to define our policy? Isn’t he supposed to only implement the policies that have been enacted by Congress? Despite how Rs tried to portray Obama, and how Trump would act if given half a chance, the role of President isn’t identical to that of King - just how much leeway does he even have here? When tRump tried to insert himself in the opposite manner way back in the day, we impeached him - the President can propose but not define policy, right?
On that note, he did try to halt funding to Israel. Republicans in Congress overruled him. Ofc the reality is far more complex than what I am portraying here, b/c while he must enact existing policies, again he also should propose new ones too… which he isn’t doing much of. But how could we even tell the difference between Biden attempting to “work within the (existing) system”, set forth by our behind-the-scenes overlords and Congress + Supreme Court (heavy sidenote: with its current make-up, that Trump put into place), vs. him not really caring that much about the issue at all? Or really, at the end of the day, is there even a functional difference between them?
I don’t know. I truly don’t know. All I know is that while Biden may not be as liberal as people would have hoped, tRump is actively anti-liberal. And those are our two choices. :-( If we want better, perhaps we need to put forth some effort to make it happen. Like step up and actually run for office - and then dodge all the literal death threats + attempts that would result from conservatives for doing so. Otherwise, we get whatever they offer to us - they meaning those who will actually act rather than simply talk. Which remember, Biden is one of them, and he even has already made it to the short-list of the only two candidates who matter, which isn’t nothing!
Can he though? Well anyway, he definitely could do more, no question about that.
What bothers me is this entitled thinking, like “we deserve better candidates” - okay, yeah, obviously, but we won’t get those until we make them. AOC, Bernie, there actually are several who are good, but apparently for some (whatever) reason they aren’t “viable”? Hence why Biden is there, instead of one of them.
(And you even ran - damn that’s impressive! To be absolutely clear, I am not calling you one of these “entitled thinkers”, b/c you actually stood up and tried to DO SOMETHING about it, first-hand - kudos!)
Biden offers the good that can be done, rather than what should be - to use the Batman phrase, the politician that America needs, rather than the one it deserves… or whatever?
There is also that phrase, attributed to Otto von Bismarck, that “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” Put another way, the whole thing is a matter of pragmatism, instead of idealism.
And in every other situation, Biden has been the pragmatist. Gas prices, unionization of railway workers, inflation, etc. So I wondered if he’s doing something similar here too, even if it looks like 10-D chess to us, and based on his other past successes (that the media refuses to highlight, b/c they are “boring”), I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But my knowledge on this matter, especially lately, is shaky, so I could definitely be wrong there - perhaps this issue truly is the dividing line. I need to stop talking about that until I read up on the matter some more.
Though one thing that won’t ever change is that in the next upcoming election, we still only get the two choices though - Biden vs. Trump:-(. It’s like: imagine a robber steals your wallet, and offers you either the cash or your ID cards back (apparently the credit cards aren’t on the table for negotiation), but what they want in return is for you to say “please” - what do you do? Take one, or the other, or just walk away and leave both behind? Fighting the US government does not seem an effective option. We can cry about it, maybe go away and train for decades (as Batman did:-P) with the thought of perhaps getting revenge, but in that moment, our choices are limited. As I understand it, that is pragmatism.
But it’s become deeper than that lately. Like, even if vaccines did have a risk of harm, so too does the disease it is meant to protect against - and like, the risk of harm from a horrific disease such as Polio would vastly outweigh a small risk of even actual, full-on, literal death from taking the vaccine. It’s a cost-to-benefit trade-off.
On the other hand, conservatives not only made it a point of pride to not wear masks themselves, but they went so far as to work to prevent people form putting masks onto their own faces - what happened to the “freedom” aspect there? Nobody is that dumb, as to think that having flunked out of high school, they now “know better” than PhD+MD scientists with literally decades of experience doing world-class research at top-tier institutions.
It’s so far beyond “alternative facts” these days - even they know they’re lying (e.g., about all of Trump’s many trials), but at this point they simply do not seem to care. Trump “tells it like it is” (no he doesn’t), that’s it and that’s all, no questions (allowed to be) asked.
And judges, and journalists, and election counting officials, and engineers (tbf whistleblowers like at Boeing and for train safety may be a different style of targeting, more profit- than politics-driven), and remember the arson of Bernie Sanders house, and the guy with the hammer at Pelosi’s, plus all the random people who simply get shot b/c an angry young white man was radicalized, and we should not forget the good police who try to hold the line against the bad ones, and get harassed (possibly killed) as a result.
Also, many doctors and nurses either died or left medicine altogether - some literally left society itself behind as they headed for the hills (mountainous regions farther away from the denser population areas) - due to their experiences during the pandemic, especially from people coming in with guns threatening them to save their loved ones, who ofc at that point were well past saving (a vaccine != a cure).
The USA has not been a first-world nation for a long while (and not just b/c it’s an outdated term).
This is what we get when we want BuT oUr FrEeDuMs ThO. Disinformation is deadly. I wish we would remember that the next time Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets out the home address of a fellow congressperson, which surely was not intended for any kind of… “harm”, goodness gracious me, why, perish the thought!
Not in its current form at least - this pot is boiling over. Then again, climate change may end human habitation in most areas on earth by then too, so there’s that to consider as well:-P.
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer....
I find it so sad to see The Guardian of all news organizations join in on this bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThO bullshit. Fortunately it looks simply like a poorly written article, but that’s little comfort for the damaging effects it will have regardless, e.g. in my trust of The Guardian articles henceforth.
Also, it’s not just that, when it combines clickbait headlines with the first half of the article working to obfuscate the Truth with correct but irrelevant facts - beatings will continue until moral improves - even if the second half tries to sound more balanced. Is Fox News going to be the goal now, even if only for the first half of every article, going forward?
Average people, who don’t own stock (or if they do, don’t rely on it as their primary source of income) could care less about bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThO or even the theoretical underpinnings of inflation, and care far more about their current job security and cost of actual food. Whether the proper term of “recession” applies or if it instead is some other word that should be used to describe it, either way the economy is “not good”, so hyper-focusing on uneducated people not knowing the technical definition of “recession” doesn’t seem to be helping the situation any? Even if it sells advertising space for this article:-(.
The AutoTL;DR summary, with no title and much of the rage-baiting removed, is much better than the actual article.
Searching for product recommendations has become harder and harder over the years. I used to google or browse reddit for reviews, used them to create a shortlist of products and then actually dig deeper and compare them....
I haven’t found a way. I too used days of research, going to a physical store to try something when possible/applicable, YouTube reviewers, many many websites that used to be trusted, plus Reddit reviews. They all lied, or maybe I’m doing something odd to cause my own problems? Or both:-).
And even when they did not lie, about their past experiences, in one case the company itself ended up betraying its entire userbase so bad it made an international sensation and the cofounder left the company in protest - OnePlus I’m looking at you regarding the 7-series updates. I will never purchase a OnePlus product again in my life as a result, which is doubly sad bc nowadays they once again seem like good devices, and triply so bc I know of nothing else remotely like those “flagship killers” of old - that whole genre of phone is just over now, and they were merely the last hold-out.
You have to somehow be an expert in every little thing these days, and when you do find something you may want to consider purchasing more than one of the item to avoid having to go through all that again when the first one breaks, if that makes sense for the situation (for a keyboard I dunno?).
If only after doing all that you could share what you found with family+friends, to spread the love and avoid the same pain all around!? But in reverse, would you trust the reviews of your family members & friends - how sane are they, when it comes to this stuff? We want reviews from people better equipped to do so than we are ourselves, not average or below:-).
Which is why I’m saying that depending on the cost you may want to just roll the dice and see, and also expect to spend even more days of research, and also go back through historical archives of Reddit forums as much as possible. The goal of all capitalism is to take your money, period. The likes of Amazon and Google have truly enshittified the act of internet commerce:-(.
OnePlus phones no longer use Oxygen OS - it has been supplanted by Color OS, the same as used in Huawei phones.
With the cofounder having left OnePlus (to start Nothing phone!), and the demise of Oxygen OS, and the ending of the offering of “flagship killer” models, the company has entirely rebranded itself these days to be a “full flagship” along the likes of Samsung and Google and Apple, though ofc far behind all of those.
They are half-decent phones, reputedly, i.e. possibly worth replacing the OS on just to get the hardware for the specs, though the other cofounder - the one who remained behind - has a history of alternately playing nice for a few years then betraying the entire user base, then rinse & repeat with newer customers, so for someone who does not want to replace the OS with a custom ROM I would not recommend them.
My own phone’s update (7T) was so buggy (it made a minor but noticeable international news sensation) that - I kid you not - I thought that the device might literally explode. I quickly turned it off and it did not, but it got REALLY hot for awhile. After researching, the solution was simple: boot the device into recovery mode and wipe the temporary cache. But WTF OnePlus, you couldn’t have had the update do that automatically rather than scare people like that? And I think that melted some internal shielding component b/c even after replacing the OS the phone has never behaved the same - I can no longer hold it in my hands anymore for more than a few minutes at a time b/c it literally hurts and even makes red marks on my skin. My device went from buttery-smooth scrolling - a phone I LOVED, and raved about to anyone who would listen, proudly showing it off - to a piece of crap in less than ten minutes, due to a buggy update rollout. :-(
My update experience seems worse than most, but I am far from the only one, when the company decided that their most popular model - the 7-series - simply was not worth maintaining anymore, as they dropped support for Oxygen OS from the 6-series and older models, and switched to the Color OS for the 8-series and newer models, leaving the 7-series delayed for a long time whether the company would do anything at all for us.
i.e. Carl Pie left for good, solid reasons - not just to start a new thing but to leave the old bad thing behind:-|.
Yup. I mean it was, prior to the update. I wonder if I might have caused any of the issues b/c I delayed installing it for months, but I kept hearing so many sad horror stories about the update that broke everything, that I knew it would cause problems. But I was applying for and then starting a new job at the time, so replacing the phone OS was not something I wanted to do at that time.
The 7-series just basically fell through the cracks between where the older 6-series got one last update and newer 8-series were promised to get a few future ones, but they short-changed the 7-series updates both in number and SUBSTANTIALLY in quality too:-(. People felt really betrayed at the time. And then ofc most everyone forgot, just like what happened at Reddit, and Google, etc.
I think Carl Pie may have taken a bunch of programmers with him during all of that, and the company must have already decided to switch to Color OS (though they had not announced it at the time, yet it seems more clear in retrospect), so they did not have the programmers that they needed, and it would be a short-term job if they went and got them, so instead they simply… didn’t do as many updates as originally planned, and the 2 that they did do were so crappily deployed that I literally wish that they had offered zero updates rather than what they did. It didn’t quite “brick” my phone, but neither did I have a phone that worked even a tenth as well as it had previously, prior to the update.
And the thing is, OnePlus has a history of doing stuff like that. My brother warned me, and I didn’t listen - “naw bro, they’ve changed, that was the past, etc.” I fooled myself there, thinking that any bad changes would simply prompt me to swap out the OS with a custom one and I’d be fine to continue forward with the nice specs. I did not count on their update process being SO BAD that it literally damaged the hardware on my phone:-(.
Australia reported its first human case of avian influenza on Wednesday in a child who authorities said had been infected in India but made a full recovery, while a different highly contagious strain was found on an egg farm....
In many rural areas, they have run out the mom & pop stores, plus people will pay for convenience, so I expect that they expect to totally get away with this.
People traveling between cities will opt for the comfortable, safe, familiar places. And sheeple that go to McDonald’s just do what they’re told. I imagine the CEO would not risk their shares unless they thought they’d get away with doing this to their poor customers.
A lot of businesses do this, purposefully aggravating their customer base, and then say - it’s Biden, he made me do it. So for a Magat, going to McDonald’s might even be a source of pride!? (Except delicious Chick-fil-A already occupies that niche!?)
The brutal heat in Mexico is causing howler monkeys to drop dead from trees (wapo.st)
Over the past year, an ongoing and severe drought has parched most of Mexico, draining reservoirs and leaving parts of the country grappling with an acute water crisis. Since mid-March, scorching temperatures have led to at least 26 heat-related deaths, according to the nation’s health ministry. The double-whammy of weather...
Using Google whilst Duck Duck Go is down. How long has Google been this bad?
So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years....
New Dehumanization Tactic Dropped (lemmy.cafe)
If everyone I disagree with is a bot it permits me to curse them down and to call them slurs, right?...
Conservative Owns the Libs by Paying $4,000 a Month for His Ford F-350 (thehardtimes.net)
Kat (sh.itjust.works)
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off (midwest.social)
Colorado GOP calls for all children to be pulled from public schools (www.9news.com)
Harassment of scientists is surging — institutions aren’t sure how to help (www.nature.com)
As researchers increasingly face many kinds of attack over their work, there is debate about how to support and protect them....
Captain! Even Xelo never had such thoughts about me. You may energize. (lemmy.world)
Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden (www.theguardian.com)
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer....
How do you search for honest product recommendations?
Searching for product recommendations has become harder and harder over the years. I used to google or browse reddit for reviews, used them to create a shortlist of products and then actually dig deeper and compare them....
Australia reports first human avian flu infection (www.reuters.com)
Australia reported its first human case of avian influenza on Wednesday in a child who authorities said had been infected in India but made a full recovery, while a different highly contagious strain was found on an egg farm....
McDonald's is getting rid of self-serve drinks and some locations may charge for refills (www.cbsnews.com)
me_irl (lemmy.world)