Umm… With 2 free computers and nothing on them.

Run down the list and install all the different distros. Test them out for a few weeks then onto the next. Pretty soon you’ll one that you prefer.

Originally shareholders received a part share in the total profitability of the company. A dividend was the main source of income from investing.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that buying and selling shares of a company to other investors was usually more profitable than dividends. Its a hell of a lot easier to lie about potential value of the company than it’s current reality.

So for the past 100+ years the market value of the shares are often separated from the reality of the company. The value of the shares only exists because people or automated programs are willing to pay the amount. This is how companies who are operating under a huge deficits have increasing stock prices.

Since the value of the shares can be so easily manipulated, market manipulation is the normal way investors make money today. It also means that major stockholders don’t give a fuck about long term value of the company, the employees, or the damage to society & the environment they cause. They only care about making quickest profits, then passing the dumpster fire they created onto somebody else.

Keep paying them but use it less = more profit.

I have been working through deleting reddit comments. Then reddit repopulates them because they are hit by a Google search. So so I go through and delete them again.

When reddit blocked my favorite mobile app, I bailed. So I am now on connect for Lemmy. It works almost seemlessly now with a few bugs. It’s basically the same user experience as the old Tapatalk for forums that they made almost 20 years ago now. A good user interface is a good userinterface.

It only works if you paid for the very first new vehicle in cash. Save up for 2 years and cash out the subsequent vehicles as well. Then the numbers pencil out.

If you to take a loan out it’s fucking stupid.

After 2 years at 10k miles per year, historically you have lost 20% or so of the value of the car. With a 5 year loan you have paid the principle down to around 63-64% of the original value.

This means you can trade in the car for more than what you owe on the loan. The difference is a partial or total down payment on a new vehicle.

Lenders strongly encourage this behavior. Due to the amortization schedule 2/3rds of the interest is paid during the first 2 years. So people who do this with loans are always paying the highest intereston their vehicle.

The best thing to do finacially is to buy a car with 20-30k then run it for as long as possible. Once the cost of a common major repair is more than the value of the car, get another low mileage used one.

How about today’s, random complete freeze. Had to hard reboot then spend 30 minutes watching it trying to “fix the issue”. It then failed to find anything. So I had to force it to reboot to windows. Then it worked fine the rest of the day.

While it was down, I was working on my 11 year old, budget laptop running Mint.

I disabled it as soon as they were launched. I also disabled the quick reply, reactions, and to text messages etc.

Yep I did it. There is still some annoying bits of it floating around that you can’t get rid of.

The phones in the midrange are getting to be better than the top end ones in my opinion. Decent enough build quality for the phone to last 3-4 years. Expensive enough that the bloatware is reduced. If the company does do a modified launcher it’s generally pretty clean.

I am liking the OnePlus 13R I picked up. Stable UI, decent battery life, and not a bad price. The stock launcher does a pretty decent job.

For my work phone I have a Pixel 8. I really regret buying it. I had to disable 30 different bloatware apps. Plus I have 4 apps that I have rejected all updates because they can’t be disabled. I also installed a launcher because the stock pixel UI is trash. The hardware is solid and works well once you clear out the buggy bloatware

Apple made a major fuckup with IOS26. I upgraded my iPad and felt nauseous from the blur effect almost instantly. I can’t completely get rid of it, just make it less horrific. Their “new” multitasking options I am not even bothering to turn on or try to use yet. This is like their 10th edition of multitasking. Let’s see if they get it right this time. Then I will bother to learn their “simple” process that usually involves having to read a manual and remember half a dozen new commands. Fuck it still takes me 2 or 3 attempts to get the the home screen without a button.

There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.

Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.

Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.

Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.

This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.

I have “purchased” thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It’s a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

This one is extremely difficult to fix as well. Ad companies bribe politicians with reduced price advertising for political campaigns to prevent laws being passed to regulate them.

Lol me either. Their services are not nearly as good as the unauthorized streaming sites.

As somebody who grew up with one, root cellars suck.

There is always something rotting in them that you have to throw out. So you get a nasty rotten vegetable and dirt smell going all the time.

Add that in to the brined pickles/cabbage that was fermenting and it was nasty.

Running to get some carrots in the middle of the winter when it’s -25C out is not fun either.

There are assholes in every society.

There is also cultural norms that are in conflict. Tourist commonly fail to adapt or even notice when they are violating them. Which tourist are the worst often depends on which culture clashes the most societal norms.

The cycle of megacorps- this works in most industries with a lower barrier of entry.

First the industry begins as a bunch of small competing startups that build a shit ton of absolute trash. Eventually a few companies find the right formula and start to find some medicum of success. Innovation is rapid but quality is low.

Next the industry consolidates in a feeding frenzy of mergers and aqisitions. During this time innovation is high but demands for quality is also high. New startups are constant as the forming megacorps pay high prices to control innovation or suppress competition.

Then the consolidation reaches a peak. At this point innovation almost completely ceases as megacorps refuse to pay out any more. Quality rapidly decreases as the few remaining megacorps try to maximize profits. The entire industry turns to shit products and high prices.

The only thing that can save the industry from stagnation is government anti-trust action breaking up the megacorps into smaller competing companies like in the second stage.

A cheap SSD upgradeand a PS4 plays PS4 games the same way a PS5 does.

Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.

That’s why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.

That’s why I have it uploaded to a cloud service but I have the entire collection backed up on my phone, 3 computers and a few miscellaneous SD cards.

Having a collection of music in files that I own has been my go-to for years. Currently VLC says I have 701 hours of music in files on my phone. That’s only 29.2 days worth.