So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

Nobody stops you from rolling your own with init.

And a distribution choosing different software eight years ago isn't the same as a private company intruding on your personal computer to change software without consent. And no, EULAs are not consent.

I'm not giving Mark Zuckerberg money so he can violate my privacy in order to manipulate me into buying more junk at my expense to further stuff his wallet.

Most podcasts take the form of a bunch of people at a table, each by a mic, who talk about ... stuff. It's unscripted. Unplanned. Shoot from the hip. And, unsurprisingly, it's also very boring. Contrast that to Rogan, who runs a podcast I despise, but who at least has a producer plan set ups to surprise his guest with something about them or their past they'd rather not talk about. To create tension or conflict. Better, think of This American Life, which follows documentary radio format. A subject is chosen for each episode. It's broken into two or three segments with a matching theme. Producers go out and interview people in the field who have something to say and the quotes curated so you get the interesting bits and not a bunch of wandering commentary. Then there's scripted VO to tie everything together.

Podcasters have conflated disorganized talk with produced and informed commentary. And people got better things to do than listen to boring nonsense even if they're stuck in traffic. I mean, there's always music!

I did not buy this on Ebay. I'm the same person who registered the account all those years ago.

Wait. Are you calling me old?!?!

Yeah. Guilty as charged. lol

Notice how the focus of 'Birds Aren't Real' is that robot birds are engaged in mass surveillance. Which is ridiculous, but with a tinge of plausibility since actual prototype robot birds have been created. But that's not the point. Forget birds. The point here is to dismiss robot birds as replacing all real live birds and in the process diminish or demean the concept of mass surveillance. Which IS REAL. I mean, we're all carrying phones with GPS tracking our every move, audio recording (which has been subpoenaed in the past) , and leaving video records these companies analyze for whatever reasons they choose.

The birds, not so real. The mass surveillance part, very very real. And I get the sense this movement benefits surveillance capitalists more than it debunks fake conspiracy theories.

GraphineOS. Requires a Pixel phone. Is pretty secure.

I have an old Google Pixel 2 which I regularly mount to my Yamaha motorcycle handlebars and I've never had a problem. Camera works fine! Use it with a PacTalk to bluetooth stream music or Google Assistant from the helmet. Would definitely choose an old or cheap phone with enough oomph to do maps and spotify over a mere GPS. Would not buy a $1000 iPhone anyway. $300 will get you a perfectly good last gen phone that will last several years. And if you break it, buy another and don't shed a tear.

China has deployed a one million volt DC electric grid transmission system which, is efficient at several thousand kilometers. They are deploying solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear as fast as they can. And not focusing on storage but instead a national transmission grid. Solar in the northwest where it's still light and transmitted to the south east where it's dark in summertime, especially for hvac cooling. Invert that for winter.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chin...

We could do the same thing. And in fact we desperately need to upgrade our electric grid anyway.

A wallet is nothing more than software and a unique crypto key. There's no way to verify identity of wallet holders unless the owner registers a wallet to an official exchange. The blockchain will record chains of transactions to keys, and regulators are welcome to trace those transaction records as much as they like. But it won't get them identity of key holders or the location of a transaction anywhere in the world. Which means, in what jurisdiction did that transaction take place?

Want cash for bitcoin but don't want regulators to know? Trade bitcoin for dirty cash from drug gangs. You get dirty cash and they get bitcoin. They use the bitcoin to buy large quantity drugs. You use the dirty cash to pay fake rent for an empty apartment to get it into the local banking system. This is at least one way bitcoin is used for money laundering. And it won't go away with a mere law. Because bitcoin (and most every crypto currency) is unregulatable at the protocol and intended to be that way.

Liberals play by the rules because to do otherwise is to reinforce the very lawlessness and kleptocracy they oppose. Gaming the system ultimately breaks the system.

Maybe all that bitcoin money laundering of stolen sovereign wealth from Chinese mega projects and then expatriated out to buy residential properties in coastal cities throughout the world might slow down. Go crash crash. Could be a bad time to buy a flat in Vancouver or Sydney right now.