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Comment Samsung is the only one you have a prayer (Score 1) 95

Of getting a battery for. You can get a cheaper off-brand Chinese one but good luck getting a replacement battery when the battery inevitably goes. You basically have a slab of ewaste at that point unless you're going to play around with the electronics of it and wire up your own power supply.

As far as the rest of it make sure you have at least 8 GB of RAM and they're all basically the same at that point. You might want to get a high density display which I think Samsung has a model for if you're going to do stuff like play vector games on it

Comment So it got you thinking (Score 1) 69

So it's not a thought terminating cliche numbskull.

A thought terminating cliche exists to end debate by dumping a simple and wrong statement.

You are already thinking about the implications of whether or not it's possible to be happy with a 40-hour work week. That's thinking you're doing is why it's not a thought terminating cliche. And if you had any self-awareness you would have figured that out all on your lonesome

Comment Re:*some* games (Score 1) 93

Oddly enough at least last I heard Marvel rivals is fully supported. It can best be described as playable just because it's a relatively modern game and the steam deck is getting long in the tooth but the company does actually support it and when it's broken they've fixed it.

Comment Re:Who asked for this (Score 2) 93

Um... People that want to play PC games in the living room that's who.

There are tons of games that never get released on console that people like to play or that have inferior versions on the console.

The biggest issue here I think is going to be that the console only has 16 gigs of main RAM and I think it has 8 GB of video RAM.

It is at least upgradable but I think you really want 32 GB of RAM.

The Xbox and the PS5 for example have several strategy games that basically grind to a halt 2/3 of the way into the game because it's just too much for the CPU and RAM on the Xbox or the PS5.

Also if you already have a large library of games this is a convenient device that may be affordable with the price of RAM and hard drive skyrocketing because of AI bullshit.

Comment The problem is any attempt to change it (Score 0) 15

And the private insurance companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars convincing the public that you're going to kill grandma

When there was a possibility of a public option in the affordable Care act the private insurance company spent $750 billion dollars that we know of to shoot it down.

I get pissed off when people complain the Democrats didn't give us a public option back then because what the fuck are they supposed to do in the face of nearly a trillion dollars of propaganda?

I don't think you can directly fix the healthcare system which you need to do instead is have a federal jobs guarantee that gets everyone used to the idea that healthcare is a right and then you can gradually start moving in the direction away from the parasitic insurance companies.

Also we need to get comfortable using the word parasite again. We get really antsy about that because fucking Nazis use it. It's a word and a concept we need to reclaim.

Comment So the US healthcare system costs $500 billion (Score 0) 15

More than it needs to because it's a private health care system. So yes the employer gets taxed to pay for healthcare along with the employee but it is substantially less because you don't have the bloated parasite of private insurance.

The problem isn't that your company is paying for your health care, the problem is your company isn't paying for your health care it's paying for the profit margin of the private insurance company it is forced to do business with.

Comment Just a reminder that if you enforce antitrust law (Score 1, Insightful) 15

You get a lot more job opportunities. Every time these companies merge they fire somewhere between 10% and 40% of their staff.

That means fewer job opportunities for you and that means supply and demand kicks in and lowers your wages.

If you're American you are also losing out on jobs to countries like Canada and Germany and United Kingdom where they have universal Health Care.

That's because as an American every company that hires you needs to budget at least 10,000 a year to pay for your health insurance on top of your premiums. Assuming you're not working at some place like Walmart that just tries to put you on government programs because they pay you so little...

It's all connected. We need to start thinking about how these systems are lowering our pay and costing us our jobs.

Comment Re:They can do whatever they want (Score 1) 111

Because decades of market consolidation means your options are very limited.

Fortunately things are not as bad over here in Europe, there's still loads of competition. That being said, Ryanair as an ultra low cost carrier specialises in flying from smaller airports to an airport somewhere near somewhere people want to go (I.E. "London" Isle of Skye airport) so for many it is their only option apart from driving a few hours to a major airport.

I doubt they'll try this as EU and UK consumer laws will have some rather strong things to say about it. O'Leary has a history of saying outlandish things to get free publicity in the press. Things like charging for lavatory use or dropping one pilot and training the cabin crew to fly in emergencies.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 111

Fun anecdote: I visited the Philippines in 2022. I flew Cebu Pacific Air for a few domestic flights, and they had just setup an abundance of these self-check-in kiosks at their airport check-ins. While prior visits to this particular terminal would see six to eight staff working check-in counters, this visit only had two: one assisting with the kiosks, and one checking baggage. Wait times were long, kiosks were confusing, and people were agitated, but we all got through.

I just returned from another trip now in 2025. Flew Cebu Pacific Air again for my domestic flights. This time the terminal had only three self-check-in kiosks, they were shoved up against a wall aside from the check-in counters, and nobody was using them. Everyone was waiting in line to deal with a human. (In the consideration of both sides of this human-vs-machine argument, perhaps the reason why kiosks didn't succeed in the Philippines is because human labor there is very cheap.)

Regardless, the moral of the story is that airline travel is agitating. Companies that try to nickel-and-dime passengers (even budget airlines like RyanAir) by removing mature, reliable, human & paper & analog components from that experience in place of new, untested, anxiety-inducing digital counterparts may discover that the total cost is not worth the savings.

I too have had the pleasure of flying Cebu Pacific and travelling in the Phils, generally they're not a good example of how to do things and Filipinos, as lovely a people as they are really tend not to do things the easy way.

In Europe, even here in Colombia almost every airline will have automatic check in machines with manned desks as a backup in case the machines fail. 99 times out of 100 it makes things faster and easier as well as allowing for more people to check in simultaneously.

I didn't realise how much until I had the misfortune to fly on the same day as the Collins Aerospace cyber attack. Qatar Airways had to check in 2 full 777-300s manually which meant both flights were delayed (mine by 3 hours) which meant a great many people including me missed their connection. I've no doubt that Qatar would have pulled in every warm body they could to help on that day too.

Comment Re:Almost 100% is not equal to 100% (Score 2) 111

"Almost 100 percent of passengers have smartphones, and we want to move everybody onto that smartphone technology"

Corollary: "Less than 1 percent of passengers don't have smartphones, and we don't want them to be our customers anymore.

Ryanair's O'Leary is well known for making outlandish statements that never come true in order to get his name and his airline plastered all over the news and generate faux outrage for free publicity. Would bet this is just another such stunt.

Almost every airline that lets you check in online also sends you a PDF that you can print out. I'd be very surprised if this was not already industry standard if not law in Europe. Even if they get rid of printers at the airport I suspect this system will remain for people without smartphones or those who simply want a paper copy with the boarding QR code on it.

Finally I strongly suspect that if they actually did try to force people to download their shitty app... the EU will step in and say nein, non, no y fuck off in 3... 2...

Comment So the problem with the bubble (Score 1) 55

Isn't all the infrastructure and hardware. That stuff's going to get used because the goal of AI is to replace white collar workers and that tech does work. Not perfectly but it's improving every day and it already does quite a bit.

The problem is that the nature of llms means that when things shake out we're going to be left with just a couple of big players. That's because the only people who are going to be able to stay in the game are the ones who have access to training data from real human beings and that's basically going to be people that own a platform. Basically Microsoft Google Apple and Facebook.

The real problem though is banks are loaning out money to anyone who so much as sneezes making a noise that sounds vaguely like AI.

A lot of those loans are going to be bad, they're going to collapse and the banks are going to go with them.

When that happens we have basically two options.

First we can nationalize the banks to prevent a global economic collapse. Let's not get ourselves we're not going to do that. We have been programmed that is socialism and socialism bad, m'kay.

The other option is a massive 2008 style bailout followed by mass layoffs as companies boost their stock.

There isn't a single economist who doesn't know this is coming and I'm guessing most of the people here even know it's coming but we can't do anything to stop it because our thinking is too constrained to come up with any other solutions besides letting the corporations fire 25% of us, praying that we're not in that 25%, coping with the very real possibility we will be in that 25% by convincing ourselves we are the ultimate badasses that the company couldn't possibly live without...

I'm open to other solutions but I literally do not know of any. Voters around the globe simply will not accept the correct and well understood solutions of regulation and short-term government control. And if there's a third solution nobody has come up with it

Comment So what about active directory? (Score 2) 26

I'm asking out of ignorance I really don't know how well it works but you really need to be able to easily control access to logins and such.

Like with my company I've got single sign on for tons of apps and they seamlessly integrate with multifactor authentication apps.

That's all just kind of built into active directory and it's all plug and play and just kind of works (as much as anything works with modern computing).

As much as Windows 11 sucks because it's so incredibly user hostile you still need the administrators to be able to cheaply and easily set up all the permissions and logins and all that. Otherwise it's a cost of administering the devices goes up it defeats the purpose of saving money by buying non Microsoft software and hardware.

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