I hope you get the Funny, but on your sig I currently favor Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. R is where their noses are for the orange-nosing cowardice, whereas D is for believing in various stripes of flying elephants, with or without feathers. (There's an old book by Woody Allen from back when he was funny...)

I agree with you, but I had to include the obligatory joke. The word has lost all meaning these days. Children? Graft? Socialism? Federal? Naked? Trust? Slashdot? No meaning anywhere. But let's think of the socialist children!

I've had two of each and I would say that the Oppos have outperformed the Samsungs while costing less. I know someone else who had several Samsungs but then switched to a Pixel of some sort. I could go down the list of problems with Samsung, but there are also problems with Oppo, so I would say it's mostly a matter of degree of satisfaction in this imperfect world. I've owned a bunch of other brands of smartphones over the years with various levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Two Taiwan brands come to mind as near the top for dissatisfaction. There are still improvements, but I feel like most of the big improvements were a long time ago...

In terms of brand-linked satisfaction, I think I would actually have given the prize to Huawei before they were disqualified... I bought about ten Huawei devices of various sorts over the years, but I'm down to one last survivor and do not anticipate searching for or buying another Huawei in the future. In point of fact, I bought this last Huawei in a kind of fire sale and in hopes of higher compatibility with old data.

Boycotts are \the trick that does not work in this case, though you may not even have the option to boycott any more. Maybe Zuck will have to create shadow profiles for the residual humans who decline to play his game on his turf. How else can he fill in the holes in "the members' profiles" when they refer to people who aren't there in person. As if "in person" still has a meaning?

On the boycott topic, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. The products (books) and services were mostly okay, but I saw what was being done with my personal data and it stank to high heaven and I wanted no part of it. So I stopped using all things Bezos but kept an eye on the development of the new corporate cancer. Can't see that my boycott has hurt Amazon any.

(Maybe I just have to wait longer? My first corporate boycott target was Exxon. Never managed to bankrupt them as I planned so deviously, but it sure feels like Exxon has fallen far from it's glory days. Is an ugly acquisition in Exxon's future? Oh I hope it's Chinese or Brazilian!)

Back to Zuckerland and a sort of disclaimer: My identity on Facebook was assassinated a few years ago. I had already looked at WhatsApp and Instagram and decided not to use them, but I had cured my Facebook problem with a timer. Actually two of them. The first one went off at four minutes and then I had one minute to get off of Facebook before the second one buzzed. That was my daily allotment for the last few years before my Facebook identity was murdered for reasons that Facebook declined to tell me about. I declined to "prove" myself to Facebook's satisfaction, even if that was possible without knowing my hideous crime, but I did exercise the option to download Facebook's dossier on me and I spent a while searching for any reason, but never even found a candidate. I have a theory it was politically motivated, but only Zuck knows. If Zuck has his way "only Zuck knows" may become the law of the land for the entire universe. "Domination!"

We did more or less the same calculations and decided to install ~10KW of solar panels on our place, grid-tied, no battery yet.

We're producing way more than we're using which should knock our power bill down nearly to zero if not zero.

Power isn't going to get any cheaper and even at the current pricing we're figuring roughly a 10-year payoff.

We'll probably be getting battery rack in the next year so, but we'll see how it goes.

Here in WA state the power companies have to buy excess power exported to the grid at a 1:1 cost.

In other words, if they charge us 20 cents per KWh, they have to pay us (actually credit us) with 20 cents per KWh for every KWh we send them. Credits roll over month-to-month all year long until March when they reset the credits back to zero.

They won't send us a check but our power bill should be at or near zero going forward.

We just got done installing almost 10KW worth of solar on our roof and even on cloudy days it produces more than we use- typically way more than what we consume. We've been exporting 25KWh or more every day, even on cloudy days.

The 2nd day it was installed was a nice sunny day and we generated 52KWh while only using about 5 or 6KWh total, so we're expecting our bills will be near or at zero, plus we'll have credits from the exported power to cover the times when we're not producing more than we use.

Your parent poster didn't say rogue, he said rouge.

People are being far too blase about the very real possibility of Color Wars.

The current administration is making it hard for Chinese companies to directly sell into the country. It's part of a push to start up a new cold war with China since Russia is a bust. Kinda hard to scare people with an adversary that can't invade a country 1/5th it's size...

So OnePlus is getting pushed out of the market and looking for roundabout ways back in.

This is part and parcel of how America runs it's empire so it's likely the next admin will do the same. It's over of the few nonpartisan things going on right now with the current administration. So OnePlus can't just wait it out.

You don't even know what an ad hominem attack is, since I didn't make one.

Learn what words mean before you use them, kid.

It's pretty well documented at this point that the SpaceX IPO is just a scam for them to loot our 401ks. You can look up the videos from Patrick Boyle he does explain it in detail.

The question is are you going to do anything about it or you just going to handle your money over to elon?

I see a bunch of people telling me that they're just going to make elections but for the most part you can't. You can I think in some cases take your 401K money and put it in a LLC and then become a day trader but that completely defeats the purpose of a 401k. The whole point of a 401k is you can take a bunch of money you have and put it into safe investments so you don't have to individually pick and choose stocks while making sure that you know which ones are safe. Meanwhile index funds are stuffed full of stocks waiting to explode...

So what are you going to do about it? Because you can't really escape it forever. You can't just keep letting civilization collapse and have everything be hunky-dory unless you've got the kind of cash that lets you pay for a private army. And your little 401K LLC isn't going to buy you a private army

It's the same reason Elon Musk made that stupid fucking tunnel. It's misdirection.

So this lets them guzzle down all your water and electricity so that you have to start rationing both of them while they go to public and tell the public that they have a solution to the problem.

As an added bonus Elon Musk can pretend SpaceX has a magic new customer that doesn't actually exist in order to justify the phony valuation while he extracts all the money from your 401k.

I guarantee it was an off the shelf device running their app. It's the elon phone!

If you don't hate Elon after what he did to USAID, which has killed thousands abroad elsewhere and also resulted in the screwworm showing up here, you're stupid.

Fine words from someone who has done neither.

What you're doing is called simping.

think female actors are "actors"

I love the irony of this statement.