we have the money

With the way things are going for the lower and middle classes, that’s a bold statement…

When ‘next gen’ (eg. PS5) becomes the new ‘current gen’, then the old ‘last gen’ becomes retro.

Probably safe to assume that the streaming app on your phone is collecting the same data about your viewing habits, whether or not you Chromecast it to another device.

I honestly think it will not live up to the levels of hype that the community will build itself up to.

Coupled with my suspicion that the single-player game will be as barebones as possible, with the goal of funnelling as many players into the next iteration of GTA:Online as quickly as possible, to sell more Shark Cards.

The good news is that in the end I’ll either be proven right, or pleasantly surprised.

Well, at least you can expect it to be a long supported, overpriced accessory! 🤣

If/when it happens, so be it - I’ll eat crow. But for the time being, Apple at least has long set/surpassed the standard for support lifetimes.

At some point, you just have to have a little bit of faith that not every company is going to immediately screw you over the first chance they get; otherwise you’ll never end up buying anything (new or otherwise), with the fear that the moment you do - they’ll drop support.

I mean, some companies do deserve that level of scepticism - but honestly, for all their other faults Apple is not one of them.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to hate on Apple, but not supporting their products long-term is not one of them.

Eventually they stop providing new OS updates, but they don’t brick/abandon devices.

Hell, I turned on my old iPhone 5 recently for the first time in over a decade and it happily connected to Apple’s servers and updated to the last supported OS version.

Even now that my Apple Watch isn’t receiving any more major OS updates, it can still interact with my up-to-date iPhone 14 without any issues.

I’m still using an Apple Watch 3 that I got in a bundle with my iPhone X from my telco.

I need to charge it twice a day for ~30 minutes each, but it’s still chugging along.

I think I’ll finally upgrade to the new generation this year, but at that point it will be 7 years old - which is commendable for tech.

Wait, isn’t this just the plot of that Sam* Rockwell movie - Moon?

In general, I would love for any OEM to step in and provide similar build quality to a Mac… doesn’t even have to be Lenovo (who IMO are a pale imitation of IBM’s line of laptops).

Democracy is fragile, and requires buy-in from a majority of politicians to maintain.

The GOP have been evil for longer than you’ve been alive; and their grand scheme has always been “to shrink the Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”. They are not in a position to do it.

The Trump presidency brought to light a flaw in the existing systems, that a lot of processes and regulations weren’t sufficiently bound by law, but rather protocol.

In that, one bad actor with support from their political party could ignore norms and standards set previously to withhold judicial appointments in an election year to deprive Obama of a seat, and then completely ignore that precedent when it happened again to Trump, giving him a 3rd appointment after one term.

Could/should Biden try something similar? Perhaps, and in some ways he is (student debt forgiveness) - but he now faces an uphill struggle against an openly hostile Supreme Court which has already proved to have no care for precedent either (e.g. overturning Rowe v. Wade).

Just remember, it takes a lot less time to destroy something, than it was to build it in the first place.

Because the side that benefits from voter apathy is relying on that exact ‘wall of noise’ media coverage to disenfranchise enough voters to get their preferred candidate in.

The amount of damage that Trump was able to inflict upon the United States in his term (3 Supreme Court picks, countless lower court picks); he will deliver a killing blow if given the opportunity.

As hyperbolic as it sounds, this could very well be the least legitimate Presidential election should he succeed.

“Both Sides Bad” is a 4Chan-level talking point concocted by the right, to obfuscate all the good that has been implemented over the past four years - even without all the roadblocks the GOP keeps putting in the way.

I’ve used similar services to this in the past; not because I couldn’t afford something up front - but because I wanted to amortise the purchase across a pretty short (8 week) period.

Why not just use a credit card? I did. As a semi-regular user of the service, it was set up in such a way that it would bill the first 25% of my purchase after 2 weeks, and again every 2 weeks after that.

So not only was I getting an additional interest-free time stacking the 2 week period with my CC’s billing cycle; but I was earning loyalty/rewards points with both programs simultaneously.

You likely just need to enable TPM through the BIOS (each manufacturer calls it something different).

I’m in a similar boat, but am going to use W10 EOL to probably jump ship to Linux - if not at the very least switch to Windows 10 LTSC.

I mean, all recent coverage seems to have been about Boeing planes…

…but stuff like this is likely more due to shoddy maintenance than production faults, right?

It’s just that everyone is hyper-vigilant currently for anything that goes wrong on a Boeing flight currently.

This should be an actual case of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.

“Why would I teach when I can make just as much money manning a grill?” Puts pressure on school boards, and empowers teachers unions to finally lift teacher salaries in order to not have a massive staff exodus.

This continually is the case in Australia, where our minimum wage is indexed every year; most employers tend to pass on the increase % as a minimum.

But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences That’s what this is, though.

Take a step back and consider for a moment the absolute mayhem TikTok was able to cause through one single push notification to their US user base (>170m, over half the adult population). That is not a power that should be wielded lightly, and definitely not one in the hands of a foreign adversary ready, willing and capable of weaponising it at their whim.

Think of the power that affords them to put their finger on the scale when it comes to the critical upcoming Presidential election, not just directly - but through slight manipulations of the algorithm to engage one political cohort and disenfranchise another.

We can agree that there is at least a slight difference in having your own (or a friendly nation’s) Government tracking you, versus allowing a competing nation to have direct access to over half of the adult US population (as per their recent push-notification stunt), as well as a robust collection of their interests and preferences.

There is a reason China has banned most US-based software in the mainland (Meta, Google, etc.); in favour of self-developed alternatives. This is just treatment in kind; it’s not an outright ban, rather a forced sale to prevent more of that user data falling into dubious hands.

Baby Boomers can’t die off fast enough; it seems very reductive to blame this entire situation on them, but in simplest terms they are still the largest voting bloc and they are the last generation to swing more conservative as they aged.

Millennials and Zoomers aren’t off the hook, though. We need to not let apathy take over; every election is important, because there are those who are looking to take away your rights at every opportunity they get - and we can’t let them win, ever. For the sake of all of our futures - vote like your life depends on it, because it actually might.

A damned shame; literally one of the most reasonable (no pun intended) political platforms…