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.
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.
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.
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.
No that never happens /S
I used to work with a supplier that hired a former Monsanto executive as their CEO. When his first agenda came out I told their sales team he was an idiot and to have fun looking for a new job a few months.
The CEO bailed after 2 years to start his own “consulting business.”
1 year later the company lost 75% of their market share and was laying off people left and right. They are still afloat barely.
After a couple years “consulting”, the CEO went to another company in 2023. He didn’t bounce fast enough and got caught on this one. He was fired 2 weeks ago and the company shut their doors except for a handful of staff to facilitate the firesale of the companies assets.
The court’s decision also introduced the concept of systemic failure, which holds providers liable when they fail to adopt preventive measures or remove illegal content. Now, platforms will be expected to establish self-regulation policies, ensure transparency in their procedures, and adopt standardized practices.
Pretty sure this would cover Lemmy and most traditional forums as long as they have a written policy and standards that are consistently enforced.
In 2025 it would be anything above 3.6 million. It’s a ton of money but here’s a list of a few people that hit it.
https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos
Now if they added in a progressive tax rate for corporate taxes as well… Say anything over 500 million in net profit is taxed at a 90+% rate. That would solve all sorts of issues. Suddenly investors of all these mega corps would be pushing hard to divide up the companies into smaller entities.
Wealth tax in the modern age could be an inheritance tax. Anything over the median life earnings of individuals could be taxed at 100%. So median earnings in my area is $65K * 45 years (20-65k) = $2.93 million.
Taxes can go either way. It depends on how they were written.
The tax code after the Great Depression allowed for massive expansion of public projects in the U.S. It was 63% for the top earners. During WW2 the top tax bracket was at 94%.
When the boomers were all born the tax bracket was above 70% for the top earners. This high tax bracket is what fueled the creation of a large middle class, public infrastructure, schools, research, space exploration, and the massive military buildup and wars. It also acted as an effective anti-minopoly/oligarchy system because the tax system discouraged it.
Then in the 80’s Reagan slashed the taxes for the top earners down to 28%. its never gotten above 40% since then. Most high earning companies have so many exeptions today that the real tax rate is often 0%.
Because of it the infrastructure built during the 50’s-70’s is degrading and falling apart. Public services are declining and the middle class is shrinking as people become more impoverished.
I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.
I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.
Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.
Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.
City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.
Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.
A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.
The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.
I have the same issue. I have a 10 year old laptop that I use as well. My solution was to dual boot Linux mint & Win10. Most of the time I use Mint on that computer and load the windows only when playing that game.
Tech tends to goes through stages:
A need or idea is created. Usually by a small independent entity.
A proof of concept is developed and starts to gain ground.
Investors pour money into the concept to an extreme degree. Tech grows in functionality, matures and develops into a useful tool.
The the investors demand a return on the investment and the money dries up.
Company either goes bankrupt or their product goes to shit.
Then use the library for the rest of the series if needed. :-).
Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.
Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.
Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.
Keep paying them but use it less = more profit.