BubbleMonkey

This is really catchy and upbeat :)

Are you also upset when they do a donation drive and have a pre-article header literally asking for money?

Keep in mind that all of these could be more or less stopped if there was any real desire to do so.

But there isn’t.

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/phone-companies-can-filter-out-robocalls-they-just-arent-doing-it/

I’m enjoying the idea of someone looking at the picture, looking at their cords, looking at the plugs, and then working this out as a solution rather than sending a picture of the plug end and port and asking for clarification.

Like this person probably felt really stupid needing to sort out what’s going on, because it was just unclear, and I enjoy where they ended up all the same. It’s totally wrong, but it’s creative problem solving for sure.

I had a physics teacher who died of alcohol poisoning a couple years after I graduated.

He has the red nose of alcohol abuse and everything in class all the time. I thought that was bullshit but it isn’t!!!

Well that’s disappointing. But I did a bit more looking and at least it looks like it needs to be actively plugged into something to get information out of. This model year/trim package doesn’t really have, like, stuff? Just Bluetooth, and looks like that’s not useful for anything but audio.

Definitely wish I could entirely disable it, but… is what it is I guess, and at least it’s not phoning that info home, or sending to anyone else.

This is what I found from 2014, so before every car was a full service internet infotainment spyware system on wheels.

https://www.edmunds.com/car-technology/car-black-box-recorders-capture-crash-data.html

How would someone go about finding out if their older car has this?

I have a 2012 Honda civic coupe and I can’t find anything about telemetry, but I doubt that means anything.

If you think your insurance company isn’t selling your data to other companies, you are in for a surprise.

My insurance company, for example, requires so many permissions for their app, just to show my insurance coverage. I refuse to use it because they don’t need my contacts, calendar, use details, phone information, location, network status, and whatever else they are asking for. They have no use for this information, so why would they collect it? Oh right, because they are greedy and consider customers to be multiple revenue streams.

Part of the privacy policy for using the app is agreeing to be a product for them. Hard pass. I give them more than enough money considering they have never paid out a single fucking penny for anything (tho we’ll see how I feel tomorrow when the adjuster comes out to inspect the storm damage to my roof - probably the same.)

If a scammy company like insurance is doing a thing, you can bet they are not being benevolent. They are taking whatever you give them and it will fuck you eventually.

The vpn doesn’t block ads or do really anything, it just routes all my traffic back to my home network so I’m using my pihole for DNS.

I’m not about to install even more crap to do a half-ass job when I could just renew my certificate and pass it along for config, and be done with it and never get ads in any app, home or not.

I’m just lazy, and it doesn’t really come up all that often.

I usually have a private vpn. It’s just isn’t always up. And I can’t be bothered to have it maintained most times because I’m not in control.

I’m considering setting it up through my router which has a built in option, so I don’t have to rely on my third party, but honestly I almost never leave pihole protected networks. So not a priority.

As long as the ads don’t federate in an un-blockable way, they can do as they like. I wouldn’t make an account there, I’d rather donate actual money than have a degraded experience (which for sure works out better for everyone), but I get the drive to monetize.

And they should absolutely -not- be allowed to federate ads, for any reason, since it goes against the vibe. But inevitably there will be “sponsored posts” (probably already are), and I think those instances/users will see themselves fade to oblivion, as long as new users are brought to understand that they could just chip in $2 and never see an ad.

It’s so weird, I don’t even notice the lack of ads most of the time (pihole, never leave home, so it’s roughly the same experience I’m used to)

But when I go out? Oh man fediverse is the only site I’ll use because I know it’s safe from ads. The other privacy/user-focus stuff is just a bonus.

(I don’t have any friends around here, so just sort of go out to be out, and usually for food)

Bet those sovcits would be cits real quick in that situation ;)

That’s a legitimate complaint, but if you bought it within the last 5 years or whatever, it’s possible they saw error and changed, assuming that’s the same part they used.

Or maybe, and I find this much more likely, the one you got on Amazon was disguised trash like everything else from Amazon and it’s not actually the OEM parts causing the issue since it’s always the same shitty part that fails. You got unlucky with the oem part, then bought trash on Amazon (basically everything on Amazon is knockoff, nothing is quality) and have been replacing it since.

If you bought the replacement pump from an OEM part supplier or other official supplier for replacements, and continued to have the issue, sure, but at this point you are giving an extended Amazon review as a review of the machine itself. And that’s not remotely fair to the unit, because Amazon is trash and won’t even let you post negative reviews anymore (try it, good luck).

What do you define as “constantly”? Once a year, every two years, twice in 20 years?

Anecdotal, but I’ve had my lg washer, dryer, dishwasher, fridge, and gas stove for about 10 years and none of them have had any issues at all. I didn’t get them because I was super into LG, they were cheap - open box, dented, or floor model - and it just worked out that way, but still, zero issues with any of it.

Maybe it’s just that model tho, and that’s legit. Sometimes there’s just a shit offering, but the rest of the line is decent.

But a lot of times, parts fit multiple brand’s machines, or multiple models within the same brand. Especially something like a drain pump, which is super basic and could be used in dishwashers as well as literally all of their brand washers, for example. Solid chance the reason for the large number of reviews is compatibility with other models rather than lg sucking that hard for that model. But without knowing the exact part I can’t say.

The design is breathtakingly stupid.

And here I thought their shitty TVs were breathtakingly stupid and over complicated (seriously there are like 6 different fucking menu screens in different places, and best of luck remembering which one you need for something stupid simple like sleep timer…)

Then again, I’ve been avoiding Samsung since the tv incident 10 years ago… apparently for the best…

As opposed to the US model of arbitrarily changing based on your employer, or whatever plans they choose to sponsor for you for a given year? Oh yeah, that’s in addition to whatever party’s in power tinkering with availability/access (look at mifepristone for an example)

What’s your point? “Your system isn’t perfect, reeeee!!!” Ok, and? How does this add anything, anything at all, to the conversation?

Yet if you want to start with well, it’ll always change itself to we’ll. Because of course. (Which I had to go back in and edit twice to make it read how I wanted, because it’s aggressive and will do what it wants even several words later, so be real fucking careful.)

Same with Wed (like Wednesday)/wed and we’d (which I originally wrote in the opposite order but when I wrote the second one it decided I wanted to change the first to match… so fun!)

But one can’t turn off autocorrect because that’s a disaster too… impossible to hit the right letters.

I made a similar comment to this several days ago.

It takes 46 hours to go from Chicago to Seattle by train, and only 30 by car, for a difference of a whopping 16 hours. Even stopping to sleep for the night, you can get there faster driving. If you don’t get a sleeper, it’s decently cheap at like $120. But still, double the time isn’t appealing to most anyone, especially when actually comfortable accommodations for 2 days are wildly more expensive.

I’d love to travel by train, but it’s just too slow to be practical, even if you really don’t have much going on (if you have pets, for example, that extra week for travel can really get cumbersome). If it was equivalent time to driving (or faster would be great) I think you’d see a lot more people adopting it. Even if it doesn’t replace all the air travel, to just have it cut down cross-country driving would be great. Unfortunately that means a huge investment in rail infrastructure, and a lot of time, to bring the network up to speed.

Personally I also hate driving, so I’m sort of with you on that (tho for me, unless it was a trip where stops are the point, I couldn’t see adding almost an entire day to a trip that’s barely over a day to begin with, but I also wouldn’t be doing that sort of trip solo, and driver swapping helps a ton), but I find people have 2 modes typically and neither one of them does all that well with the current rail infrastructure.

First mode is “get there as fast as we can so we can enjoy the accommodations/ locations we are traveling for”, which most people fly for, but many will drive for if they need to move a lot of people or equipment. You can do that on a train, assuming one stops anywhere near where you intend to go, but when you have multiple people to switch off driving and don’t stop, that extra time matters.

The other mode is the “journey is the destination” with frequent stops to get out of the car and do stuff… but then we typically just call those road trips. I’ve done several of those where most of the trip is traveling between stops. Trains don’t do well for that currently since they have so few stops and run so infrequently, so the journey isn’t particularly exciting. Busses are better for this sort of travel, with the present infrastructure, but not a very comfortable trip. Busses would also very likely take about the same time as a train, since they make a lot of extended stops.

Very few people seem to fall into the grey area between these two things, where they both don’t care to stop anywhere, and don’t care how fast they get there. And I think this is largely because most people don’t have time for leisurely travel. Most people get extended-weekend trips and maybe one week-long vacation a year, so 4 days round trip of just traveling but not being able to stop anywhere would ruin most plans for people, unless they just want to ride the train.

But if we invested in high-speed rail, you could both get there faster than driving -and- have a better experience than driving, which would get many people to switch right quick. It shouldn’t have to be a “pick one or the other” situation, when literally the only barrier is infrastructure spending which would be great for the economy, and it would be better for literally everyone to have it. Amtrak is a private entity, technically, but the US government is the majority shareholder, the board of directors is appointed mostly by the president of the US, they get a lot of funding from state and fed government, and thus govt has considerable power to make that happen.

It just really sucks that the only significant passenger rail options we have now are designed to be slow scenic trips, a gimmick where the whole point of them is the leisurely trip. They aren’t really meant for actual commute use, and that’s just super short-sighted and wasteful. And I think until they get faster, with more routes and stops along the routes, we aren’t going to see people adopting them in the numbers we need them to.