pgm_01

I feel like this device should also be Gluten Free.

Meh. Lee was not particularly bad, it just was a very wide storm, and the areas that got hit are used to dealing with even stronger winter storms.

Message sent. One of the cosponsors of this madness is one of my Senators. We need universal healthcare. Instead, we get a proposed universal tracking system for people to access the internet. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

I have used SanDisk cards for years, without issue. They are a huge manufacturer of flash memory, which is why their prices were always good. It is certainly possible and even probable that the quality has gone down. All kinds of companies lower their product’s quality and reliability to make them cheaper to increase profits.

That’s not good at all.

That’s the point of the “culture war” that is currently manifesting as a war against “wokeness.” As long as conservatives are distracted into hating LGBTQ and minorities, the working class will be split and will not have the ability to fight against the people truly responsible for the mess we are in.

The indoctrination works exceeding well, too. I have a relative who voted for Al Gore because of his stance on the environment. Fast-forward to now, and she is posting things on Facebook supporting the overall Republican agenda (Not supporting Trump or DeSantis, but still very conservative.) Basically, a bunch of family stuff including prolonged illness and eventual deaths made her a much more unhappy person, and the right-wing propaganda is designed to pick up people like that and bring them into the machine.

It is unclear how long Amazon will continue to support their assistant in the future. Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

People use exactly as you are, to control various smart devices, but that doesn’t pay for the infrastructure that makes Alexa run, and people are not using it to buy stuff from Amazon as envisioned.

Google’s products are getting worse as they are now deep into the enshitification process, and making investors happy takes precedence over users. I would welcome an improvement in Google Assistant, but it will probably manage to make things worse.

Firefox for general browsing. Firefox Focus when I want privacy (it can help get around some paywalled news sources.) If I need to use a Chrome based browser, I use Samsung with an ad block.

Fear of barely known candidate x is the new “democrats in disarray.”

I love how Google’s original intent of simply cataloging the net has now turned them into a net nanny whose job it is to prohibit vile copyright scofflaws from infesting others with their demented thinking.

You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.

What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn’t denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless “unmask our kids” groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.

A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a “Democratic” candidate 🤦‍♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn’t that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.

The submarine company is also an example of this. Why listen to material scientists or engineers when you can cut corners to save a buck? Submarine experts told the CEO it was just a matter of time before the carbon fiber went pop, and that would be really bad for anyone inside at the time. But they saved so much money!