I mean, it’s probably fine. I’ve just had a Pixel for long enough that my standards are too high. I have kids, and we just moved across the world, so I take a lot of photos.

Yeah, that one too.

hmm. That’s true. And dangerous, lol.

I don’t really want that much control removed, though. I just want to have a little bit more friction between my serotonin-starved brain and the cortisol river on Facebook.

I think the main purpose is probably to provide a more-usable “dumbphone” experience. I know a lot of people (myself included) who would love to doomscroll less, but need a more full-fat version of Android for work or family. Using Digital Wellbeing and the like gets part of the way there, but not the whole way. With this, the weird aspect ratio means that pretty much all video is going to be letterboxed to a crazy extent, which could be enough to make bypassing those controls feel pointless. And then they used that extra space for a physical keyboard, which is genius. If this thing had a better camera, I’d be all in.

“sigh No, I’m Terence Shrewsbury-McEllen-Smith-Harper-Thomas-Capote. You’re looking for Terence Shrewsbury-McEllen-Harper-Thomas-Capote-Smith.”

“No, we’re not related.”

We knew about them while they were still walking the earth. That was a willful choice, and the change represented a change in values.

Yes, signage costs money. But it also has to be replaced from time to time anyway. I don’t think there are any schools changing their name annually; they probably print new signs up memorializing tournament wins often enough that they can just get it added to an existing print run.

I’m happy to use it to memorialize someone who is long dead (like, at least a century; long enough that we can be pretty sure what kind of person they were in life), or to mark a notable feature or plant or animal in the region. Even an institution (College Park, Museum Way, High School Rd). Not everything has to be purely functional. And if the local government has to pay for the signs to be printed anyway…

It’s just not as useful as the rear-facing camera on a phone or tablet. You can’t aim it easily, so it’s stuck pointing slightly downward at the surface it’s sitting on, unless you’re interested in making your screen harder to see.

Plus it’s more expensive for a feature that few people would find useful.

Or with water, frankly. Is the only option for the switch inside the bathroom literally in the sink basin? There shouldn’t be that much splashing in a work bathroom.

No, that’s the problem! That and the volts.

Fantastic work. Really charges me up.

I have a bag of batteries that need to go to the tox drop, thanks for the reminder.

I labeled them “BAD-tteries,” though. My daughter did not think this was very funny.

I’ve been ad-free for long enough at this point that I feel physically assaulted when I see one (at a friend’s house or whatever). It’s insane that we ever thought that was ok, and it’s become worse.

At this point, adblock is a survival measure. Piracy is self-defense. The first presidential candidate who campaigns on legalizing graffiti on billboards and mandating their eventual removal gets my vote. Burn it all.

Definitely a fair point. But for the most part, being in the country that collapses is going to be worse than being in a different country.

This is just me, and I’m no expert. But I kind of think that, if you’re legitimately worried about your country’s currency collapsing, you might want to consider leaving your country. Any sort of collapse that leads to hyperinflation or the large-scale elimination of financial infrastructure is probably going to be difficult if not impossible for the average person to survive, gold or no.

That said, precious metals are a niche enough market that I can’t imagine it not being rife with predatory sellers; companies that aren’t offering scams per se—you’ll probably pay them and receive what you pay for—but companies which are counting on people not knowing anything about the market and accepting a terrible price or poor quality goods.

Again, not an expert. But my end-of-the-world investment would be in shelf-stable food, easily-stored seeds (for planting), medicine, hand tools, high-quality camping gear, books, that sort of thing. If there is a collapse, those sorts of things will be immediately useful and also tradeable.

I already talked you through it in the linked comment, and honestly if you don’t get it I don’t think I can make it any simpler.

In any case, I’m not taking homework from you. I know how I arrived at this conclusion, and you’re free to believe me or not. Have a good night.

But how does including sources make that world? How does it move from point A to point B?

I addressed that very objection at the beginning of the conversation.

You haven’t thought of that at all. You’re applying reasoning to positions you hold, not reasoning to reach positions.

That’s particularly hilarious since the comment I’m talking about was from fifteen hours ago.

I’ve been thinking about media literacy for decades at this point. I’m not naive enough to be certain that this is some foolproof magic bullet, but I think it’ll help, and it’s definitely not going to hurt public discourse.

Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.

Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.

You’re contending that sharing sources online won’t accomplish anything because people are resistant to changing their opinions. Yes, that’s currently true; and while I see a benefit in the current world to sharing sources, why not also imagine a world in which it actually does change opinions? There’s no physiological or psychological law that makes opinion change impossible. People can change because people do change, so why don’t we do what we can to make that more common?