It's not the only thing. I prefer Android, but a lot of the charging ports on some of my phones got janky after a few years. Also, the batteries stopped working. Yes, you can get those fixed, but it's often easier to go ahead and upgrade instead of getting it fixed. My current phone is a Samsung that's probably been on the market for three or four years now. I paid extra for wireless charging, so I would have a way to charge it if the port went out on me.

My son used Apple phones for most of his phones. He was always complaining about the battery not holding a charge.

That's not even mentioning broken screens. I've been pretty good about not breaking them, but I have probably cracked two screens over the years.

Living forever is a bunch of crap. However, it's only a matter of time until someone finds a way to get an extra five to ten (good) years of life.

We need to be dealing with this now, or we are going to have to deal with a 105-year-old Mitch McConnell.

Even the US Army is testing an anti-aging drug right now:

https://www.popularmechanics.c...

I did an impulse buy at Barnes And Noble a few weeks ago. At the register, with tax, a paperback book from an author I had never heard of was 20.00 bucks with tax. Looked it up on Amazon when I got home. The paperback was a similar price, but they had a hard cover for about 8.00 cheaper.

Since then, I ordered some used books from eBay. I can get four books from people I have actually heard of for about $15.00. And these books get really good reviews.

Now, I routinely pay 15.00 for an audiobook, and I'm happy to do so, but I also routinely get sale books because of this monthly fee from anywhere from 1.99 to 8.00. They also frequently include two books for one credit. I've gotten 12 hour (or more) audiobooks that I loved from 3.00 to 5.00. You can even get free books just for being a member.

Needless to say, I won't be buying any more new paperbacks anytime soon.

I have been saying to do this for a long time. On March 17th, I posted:

I would offer a version of 7 or 10 that only got security updates and charge for the updates.

If people want to run a cutting edge version of Windows, that's fine. The business world just needs a 7 or 10 that just stays the same.

I worked for a place where I was on call about a week or two out of a month. It was pretty rare to get called out, but when you did, IT SUCKED. It might mean a three hour trip, one way, in the middle of the night. That's toward the top of my list why I no longer work there.

And even if you weren't on call, you might still have to deal with things locally or be available to help out the person on call.

I would offer a version of 7 or 10 that only got security updates and charge for the updates. The business world needs a version that just stays the same. Why do they *have* to keep making it worse? If they could make money from keeping it secure, money is money.

Now if the gamers want a cutting edge version, fine.

I worked at Walmart in an area that got hit hard during holiday seasons. The management would wait until a few weeks before the holiday to throw some help our way. The new people actually slowed us down, because not only were they not up to speed, they slowed you down trying to help them out and get them trained. Just about the time they were even remotely helpful, the holiday was over and they were gone.

Don't think for a second that everyone in the private sector is so much smarter just because they are in the private sector.

I recommend you take the time to read this book: Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, By: Shanna H. Swan,

There are a lot of issues with falling sperm counts, even if there are still plenty of babies being born at the moment. For one, the children being born have health issues.

I worked either in or adjacent to a WISP for longer than I care to think about. It was rough because the backbone was provided by people we were competing against.

I guess it is probably better for the market than no competition, but the deck was fully stacked in the favor of the backbone provider. They made money either way, but had very little of the end-user support, as you say. Just about the time you got enough users to be making a little profit, you had to up your bandwidth to keep up with demand. This tilted things back in favor of the backbone provider. It was a vicious circle, and ATT wasn't going to come out on the losing end, that's for sure.

And the whole time they are using your money to build more towers that they will someday use to take your customers.

If Amazon would let me use a U2F key instead of the current authenticator apps they allow.

https://www.extremetech.com/ex...

AOptix started off as a US defense contractor, creating a laser-based system that allows for 10Gbps air-to-ground networks over a distance of 200 kilometers (124 mi). Now it wants to bring this technology to the consumer market, supercharging mobile backhaul links (connecting carrier towers to each other, and to the main backbone) and financial trading. By combining adaptive optics and beam steering (to account for swaying towers), AOptix says its laser links work in all weather conditions. AOptix hopes to roll out some short-range laser links in the US and UK, and then follow up with a London-Frankfurt laser link in the future.

I was asked about using AirTags to track some rental equipment. Don't see much of a way a thief wouldn't get an alert if they were traveling with it. You just have to try and put them somewhere not easy to get to.

Had a guy say he buried one in the dash of his car. Well, a bunch of people hop in his car to go to lunch and that's an alert. That's not an edge case, either. Where I work, it is 90% iPhones.

Also, real gps trackers usually have an API so that you can build reports for a dispatcher to monitor locations. Not happening with AirTags, that I know of.

And, rural areas get less frequent updates. The equipment we are talking about here was way rural.

Still, the monthly is much better on AirTags, so I understand the desire to use them.

> In 2018, Amazon fired four employees in India who were allegedly connected to the bribery scheme.

I like India, and I like Indians, but I despise their bribery culture.

If anyone is ever interested in a good look into what goes on there, check out: Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom,
By: Katherine Eban

They will kill people for a bribe. They have, and they will.

My life would be very short in a bribery culture. I would just kill someone and that would be the end of it.

They don't really have good reason to embrace it fully. They make a lot of money from search and all those ads at the top of each search. AI answering questions is a lot more expensive than traditional searches. It's going to face some backlash from advertisers, because if it just answers a question without handing out a link, then advertisers will now see google as competition.

If it did happen to take off in a big way, the irony is that the answers it hands out probably came from scraping the web pages they aren't sending anyone to anymore.

The AI version of cultural appropriation...

You can also get some really decent refurb systems for pretty cheap. Quad cores with 16 gig of ram and a SSD drive between 100 to 200 bucks. I have several of these and they have worked very well for several years now. Fit the bill for what I need, and if one dies, no need to cry about it.