privacy and security

I’m not really sure how much my OS affects that though. If I remove that avenue, cool, but I’m still signed in on my browser and YouTube and various other apps, so to really protect my privacy and security, wouldn’t I need a whole slew of other changes to actually be effective? Credit bureaus, which I never even asked to have involved, can’t even keep a lid on my shit. How secure and private can I really expect to feel just from changing my phone OS, and is that warm fuzzy really good enough to justify moving from something that is working exactly as I want and expect to something that is, in a word, uncertain?

Not trying to attack you or anybody with these questions, just kinda frustrated that any time I’ve tried to look into it, all I find is a vague statement about privacy without any real elaboration, or worse, a bunch of speculation that the guy running it is unstable or something. Idk, it just feels a little like the wave of people screaming the praises of crypto.

I used to loudly support Google Fi when I switched to them from Verizon. My coverage wasn’t as good, but my bill was a small fraction of what it had been, and I’m usually on wifi so the pay for what you use model was great for me. I also really enjoyed taking it with me to Mexico on vacation. Sweet deal since my average data use was like 1GB/month.

Then like a year ago, I did some digging and found that I could have a very similar experience with Mint, except unlimited data for about the same price. Plus the price was locked in because you pay for it up front. It took maybe an hour to swap our phones over, and we kept our phone numbers. There was a little bit of hassle getting voicemail to work properly, but that got figured out.

My favorite thing about these types of services are that you can buy a pretty cheap, unlocked phone, use eSIM, and you’re not locked into your service provider. I am a fan of the Pixel a series of phones since they’ve got plenty good capability at half the price of flagship phones, but with good support. Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why I personally should go to the trouble since I don’t see enough of a benefit for my use case. But that’s neither here nor there. I just like unlocked phones, and my 8a and my wife’s 6a were cheap and they were easy to transition to another provider; look into unlocked phones the next time you’re shopping for one so you can have that kind of freedom.

Right now, I’m working a ton (72 hours per week) and my wife is working and going back to school, but every Tuesday is an entire day together. We just started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time, and we look forward to it all damn week lol. We started like a month ago, but we’re still only just now wrapping up the goblin camp. We both were already really familiar with 5e DnD, so a lot of the mechanics feel pretty intuitive to us. I have gripes with the camera (PS5 version) but overall it’s a fantastic experience.

Before picking this up on sale, we were passing the controller back and forth through Astro bot. Also amazing! We rolled credits, and I’ll probably aim for the platinum trophy at some point without her. There’s truly not much left before we snag that, so she’s not missing out.

Ahead of its time, predicting the consequences of tariffs like that.

Combined cycle natural gas plant operator in the US here. Bridging the gap between low demand and high demand times is a big part of why it’s so challenging to try to reduce fossil fuel power solutions. The grid is basically a pressurized pipeline, and it’s only reliable if that pressure is maintained no matter how many “faucets” get opened or closed. Green energy solutions aren’t really able to raise that “pressure” unless we build significantly more than we need and keep a bunch of them off most of the time until peak conditions demand them. Nuclear is extremely slow (relatively speaking) to (safely) alter output to meet demand, so its best usecase is for baseloading as much as possible. But with a natural gas plant, I can put my foot on the gas pedal, figuratively speaking. It’s fucking terrible for the environment, but that’s the cost of everybody insisting on consuming so much goddamn electricity all the time. If you don’t like it, stop supporting power hogs like data centers by using AI bullshit and cloud storage and web hosting and media streaming.

This is a complicated problem, and complicated problems almost never have simple solutions. I wish we could minimize the problem of what happens when 100M+ EVs get plugged in at 7pm on a Tuesday by already having put together a strong public transportation infrastructure that people feel comfortable and safe using, but the time to start doing that was probably during the gas shortage in the 70s when we saw how overly reliant we were on cars. It’s probably not too late to start, but it’s gonna be a challenging transition now no matter what we do.

What’s the best alternative software to gear up to transition to? I’m pretty pissed because they finally got decent integration for PS5. I was playing Space Marines with a couple friends, one of whom is playing on PC, so we’ve been able to crossplay with voice chat.

This, starlink regarding Russia invading Ukraine, and I’m gonna guess spacex regarding government contracts? Idk about that 3rd one being investigated but it’s definitely one of the many conflicts of interest.

This. Conservatives have poor media literacy. They don’t understand that they’re the punchline in stuff like that. They miss the point of stuff like RoboCop and Starship Troopers and unironically like those movies for the action and don’t even recognize the social commentary. They watched Team America and guffawed into their 24 packs of light beer at every shallow joke without recognizing that the jokes were intentionally shallow to point out what an idiot would think is a good joke. It’s like the TV show in Idiocracy. The real joke is below the surface.

I for one believe that the question of whether a food service establishment has rats is very relevant to the business.

The character of the staff and clientele as well as the financial state of the staff as a direct result of how stingy their employer is can also be very relevant. Do you want to eat somewhere if the people preparing your food there will sell their morals and decency? Kinda seems likely that I could pay somebody there $100 to put their pubes into your quarter pounder.