Just wait a few months, it WILL be the entire Western internet like this.

They are currently trying to ban and censor and block the entire internet for the entire West, by any means necessary.

Too many users on too many platforms have been noticing about who actually controls the West and banning individual accounts or entire platforms is not going to curb that anymore. So they ban the entire internet for the West.

Corporate culture x boomer mindset.

Boomers usually buy the cheapest thing if it is generic, but boomers recoil in existential horror from dropping a trusted brand name.

Corporate culture amplifies that risk aversion 100x so that even other gen people fear making a switch like this somewhere.

Try getting a person over 60-65 to change their phone or ISP contract, drop cable or landline, buy a car from a different brand or whatever. They will protest loudly and probably refuse to do that.

And that generation currently owns the most money.

Vendors have recognized that and are now bleeding them dry before they finally leave the corporate offices for their retirement.

Tire particulate
Microplastics small enough to breathe them (broken and rubbed off from all the plastic products all around us)
Microscopic particles (printer toner, very fine dust)
Inorganic materials with very sharp points (of which asbestos, glass and rock wool are the main sources)
Pet and animal dander
Fine organic particles and soot (of which cigarette smoke is the main source, also coal dust, coal and wood smoke)
Radioactive particles (of which radon gas is the main source outside of catastrophes and war)

People are hugely, insanely UNDERestimating the effects of radon gas on their lungs. 80% of people you tell this never even heard of radon gas and 15% of them might only know it's a colorless, odorless, radioactive noble gas, but only about 5% know or think about how this gas simply seeps out of the ground, collects in basements and ground floor sleeping areas and is almost as dangerous as smoking for lung cancer.

Because lung cancer awareness campaigns always focused on smoking, people did more or less disregard other highly dangerous lung carcinogens over decades. Radon is the main carcinogen beyond smoking and asbestos - and after that comes the group of all organic dust, soot and very fine particle sources. That is: coal and wood fires, barbecues, coal dust, grain dust, printer toner, plastic particles, particles from normal tire wear on public roads, dander from animals.

Breathing in anything except air is more or less carcinogenic, and normal air can contain radon gas or ozone from natural sources.

Get a radon detector and estimate your exposure to radon gas in your sleeping area over a few months. If the results are low risk for your area, you can sell it second hand. If the results are medium risk or higher, you know that it's necessary to take precautions and renovations for your home to avoid that. Sealing the ground in your home or against radon is possible or at least ventilating the basement and sleeping areas to prevent build-up of radon.

Avoiding tobacco and radon means avoiding two thirds of all lung cancer cases.

Pin-pointing a laser onto a moving target is getting progressively more difficult the faster the target is. Targeting optics need to be progressively faster and more precise to hit the object for the time needed to have the intended effect. And all the effect the laser it has is proportional to the energy it deposits per square centimeter onto the target. With more air passing by the object, even more energy is dissipated and with the faster speed, the total flight time in range of the laser is progressively shorter.

That's what makes hypersonic weapons so dangerous. They're too fast for defensive missiles to counter. There's less time for detection and identification overall, less time for a friend-or-foe decision, less time to align the laser spot on the target, the laser will be less accurate on the target, depositing less energy per square centimeter and second, the while the projectile dissipates more energy per second to the air around it and the laser system will have far less time anyway to destroy the incoming projectile before it impacts the thing it was supposed to defend.

Look at the few leaked videos of hypersonic missile impacts. These missiles are so fast that there's barely a 1 or 2 seconds between the missile appearing and impacting. Current lasers have AT BEST a 10km engagement distance and that doesn't include the plasma shield that air forms around the HGV due to air friction at that speeds. At Mach 12 and ideal conditions, the laser will have less than 2 seconds time to deliver all its energy, through all atmospheric distortions, follow the HGV's potentially unpredicable flight path without instantly and permanently blinding all humans near and around the defended area.

Atmospheric dust and smoke will quickly render that even more impossible than it already is. So even if the first few defense shots MIGHT be effective, every subsequent shot will become harder and harder because there will be more and more dust and smoke in the air around the laser. If lasers become too effective in the future, then you will see the attackers firing whatever they can find to increase smoke and dust in the atmosphere around the laser or reengineer their HGVs to release insane amounts of smoke when targeted or destroyed so you can at best destroy the first few of them until there's far too much smoke around to do anything with lasers against the next wave. Or they wait with their attack until there's fog or dense clouds over the target, forcing the defense to use MASER or similar things that could penetrate clouds more easily, but who knows what disadvantages that brings. And the Chinese leveraging their most prominent strengths, you can be absolutely sure their HGVs will be mass-produced in ridiculous numbers and through economies of scale become ridiculously cheap as well. They will then simply spam them over the target so that no amount of laser technology will be able to counter them, because you can't reasonably concentrate the amount of energy needed to defend against all of them. Even if you had 100 or 10000 lasers of the required intensity (1MW or more), there simply won't be enough Watts / Joules around to feed them all.

There is very little defense against mass-produced, reasonably cheap gliders at speeds above Mach 4. The attackers can distribute production and stockpiles of gliders over their entire country and produce and stockpile for years, and mass them on any single target. The Joules needed to produce them can easily be transported to the factories, because there's enough time to do so. The defenders would have to place enough lasers near all potential targets to counter a massed attack on any of them. The Joules needed to fire the defense lasers would need to be transported immediately from everywhere to any one target area or stored everywhere in a way that's currently totally unfathomable to us. And even if we managed to do that, HGV production would profit from these advancements as well, bringing more and cheaper HGVs down on the target, immediately nullifying that advance right away.

In short: defending against cheap(er) mass-produced HGV gliders is literally, physically, theoretically and even ontologically impossible.

If you want to read further, look up "Hobbesian trap", "Fermi paradoxon" and "Dark forest hypothesis".

The first thing that ages in all laptops is the thermal interface material between heatsink(s) and processor(s). Once the TIM begins to dry / age / pump out / degrade, it sets off a positive feedback loop where the chip gets hotter with TIM aging, which in turn gets the chip hotter still and aging the TIM even faster and so on. A little lint and dust in the heatsink will kickstart this even higher.

LCDs didn't have a CCFL backlight prone to aging in a while, and they also mostly avoided OLED so far, so they don't have the other age-prone display technology.

If the laptop is of any value whatsoever, it is built in a way that allows the heatsink / fan to be replaced by a service tech in one hour or less. Most gaming laptops are built that way and many business line models, too. Business laptops have enough spare parts available for cheap, so they win in that regard.

The published MTBF for a part are rarely relevant for laptops and you shouldn't rely on that. Since laptops are carried and used in the full variety of human behavior through the full variety of human environments, their wear levels are varying wildly. For a server HDD, you can assume server room environments with controlled temperature and vibration. For laptops? No way. Some were used stationary in air-conditioned offices, never moved and not even typed directly on them and some were trotted around every day on construction sites in the desert.

Temperature matters a lot for components and laptops usually max out their component temperature limits quite a bit.

If I had two identical laptops with a similar age and wear, I would immediately choose the one that has seen more hours at higher temperatures, although it would be difficult to formulate this in such a way that it can be used mathematically or algorithmically. Laptop A has operated 1 hour at or above the allowable CPU temp of 100 degrees Celsius and 9799 hours at idle with barely higher CPU temps than ambient - vs. laptop B that has never been above allowable CPU temp, but logged 9800 hours above 70 degrees Celsius. Who knows which one is the better deal?

But on a qualitative level, "operating hours x temperature ~ wear" and thus the usage history of the device is relevant for its used value.

That's only true since 2017. Prior to then, lots of folks itemized. Post-2017, with itemized deductions for regular people limited to the charitable deduction, the (capped) mortgage interest deduction, and the (heavily capped, to punish blue states, and not adjusted for inflation so it's less useful each year) SALT deduction, yeah, basically only singles with new mortgages or those who earn and donate a lot of money get anything from itemizing, but that isn't a permanent and automatic state of affairs. It could happen next year if the One Big Beautiful Bill fails, because all the changes to deductions and the standard deduction were officially temporary, and failing to extend them means the old deduction regime returns.

At the same time he was talking about "undoing some mistakes", he was also talking about gutting the regulations, and regulatory agencies, that fixed those mistakes of the past. A phrase that rings true is "Every regulation is written in blood." No, it's not 100% true, but it's the case for many, many regs. The regulations on food safety, water quality, removing lead from the environment, etc., are all there because people died. When you say "I want to cut regulations (in general)" as opposed to "I oppose these specific regulations as being poorly targeted and in need of improvement", you're saying "It's okay if we kill some people if it saves money." And that's exactly what we're getting.

Capital-L Libertarians lately haven't been all that distinct from Republicans. Sure, they tend to be more marijuana friendly. And they claim to want to cut spending or balance the budget, but so does almost every Republican, and 95% of them, given the right environment, e.g. single party control of all branches of gov't, immediately unbalance the budget further, barely cutting spending, if at all, and handing out even more unsustainable tax cuts. And you'd think, given the whole "personal autonomy as guiding principle" thing in little-l libertarianism, they'd be pro-choice, or at least "we may dislike it personally, but the gov't has no business getting involved". But basically every prominent Libertarian politician and thinker either is vocally anti-choice, or, even if they claim to be pro-choice, glaringly avoids criticizing massive steps towards anti-choice policies at both federal and state level.

I'll take the Libertarian party more seriously the moment they clearly decide that bodily autonomy, the single most basic human right, trumps (rather newly invented; within the last 100 years, most churches tended to go by quickening, not conception, as beginning of life) religious beliefs about non-conscious entities. For now, they're basically NRINO (Not Republican In Name Only).

Gaming via VPN sounds like a lag clusterfuck. You could do it, but for real time games, you'd be at a huge disadvantage.

Have you used it in the last, say, three years? They made massive improvements. I run with uBlock Origin, uMatrix (probably not for most folks, but I'm a paranoid OCD control freak), Greasemonkey with a dozen installed scripts, and Facebook Container, and it's lightning fast. They went through a bad spot 5-10 years ago, but for the last several years it's been as fast as Chrome for me, and unlike Chrome, doesn't constantly try to break ad-blocking extensions.

New York is the epitome of everything that's wrong with the west.

It is the epicenter of the occupation and exhibits everything all at once.

Look at the list of the 100 worst NYC landlords if you want to know who it is. Look it up, it's online and official.

I'm being lazy and you can pick this apart all you want, but the evidence is that it worked and was very well into statistical significance range:

Interpretation
Our results showed that US counties with higher proportions of persons 12 years of age fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had substantially lower rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths—a finding that showed dose response and persisted even in the period when Delta was predominant.

From:
https://www.thelancet.com/jour...
County-level vaccination coverage and rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States: An ecological analysis

That person is asking people to hide any hint of sexual emotion for 8 hours a day every day forever. And then judge them for not having sex.

Only a feminist woman could argue like that: sex is their unit of value and only they would be so moronic to ask someone to not be sexual and then insult them for not having sex.