I read it as when America is committing it’s greatest sins, e.g. committing slavery and genocide, are examples of it failing to live up to its progressive ideals. Still a wild American exceptionalism take

On Linux at least low enough power chargers will get rejected and won’t do anything. Idk what the cutoff is but USB a phone chargers won’t work.

I’ve been on the pixel A train the past few years, and wait until they offer me >$300 for a trade in. I got a 3A for I think ~$300 or so in 2020, and a 6A for $150 in 2022. Almost jumped to an 8a which would have been like $200 I think but there’s no reason to really besides shiny new toy so I’m holding out for another year or two in hopes a 4a-style size reduction comes again

It’s definitely not a perfect system and you’re absolutely right that it significantly favors people with strong support and safety nets, especially those of a financial nature.

That being said it’s a very easy shorthand for a company to take and is reliable enough to keep using it, just like how financial institutions in the US use SSNs as private identifiers because it’s easier and cheaper than running and supporting their own systems/assessments and mostly works well enough

Depending on what you’re trying to avoid, even 18 year old cars had OnStar gps that could in theory always track you unfortunately

It looks like you’re planning on using windows, in which case I would strongly caution against only 8 GB ram. I have a 4 year old windows laptop with 8 GB RAM, and unless you do a lot to optimize things/kill processes it quickly becomes slow to a very frustrating point. The last thing you want is to open a new tab to look up something the professor said while running a note taking app and have the whole thing freeze for a few minutes and not be able to take notes. RAM is relatively cheap, so I would bit the bullet and either get 16 GB or run Linux.

A lot of advanced analytical tools in biotech at least are developed to be compute cluster compatible, and thus work best on unix-like CLI, e.g. Linux (or Mac with a bit of tinkering)

All these dumb companies chasing the wrong high margin class imo. Tesla did it right, start with the sports car: the EV powertrain plays well to its strengths, their big advantageous use case isn’t 600 mile road trips, and they don’t need to tow. Starting with the mom-mobiles and dad’s pavement princess puts you on the worst footing by needing obnoxiously large amounts of the most expensive component, needing to meet road trip or towing standards, and catering to a market that by definition has other big spending priorities, e.g. their kids or whatever they want to tow. If Ford’s first electric mustang had been a cobra equivalent rather than a sportier electric escape I suspect they would have had a much better time.

I think that’s part of the point? The twitchy zoomers aren’t on?

Just sounds like the first episode of community with less context and more soapboxing

Definitely not my genre, but you could try The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion? It’s fairly comedic but I think checks all your boxes pretty well, including the last two (maybe not quite hate but definitely don’t view each other as romantic prospects)

Tariffs in general aren’t inherently bad if they protect domestic interests, especially against a foreign power that is subsidizing production as part of an economic power play. If Trump had limited his tariffs to China and Russia not included all of our allies I would have agreed with him. If we didn’t desperately need more EVs and if US automakers weren’t such colossal assholes about making good cheap EVs I’d agree with this one

As I understood it, VPNs don’t work in this threat model because it’s essentially routing traffic through a compromised router before it ever reaches the VPN, so the VPN acts normally but there’s a snooper before you ever connect to it

And I think Dr Who before that, although the Borg are certainly more known for it

The point is that iPhone users are locked into (or strongly penalized for not using) Apple services like Apple wallet and storage and other apple devices like apple watches or earbuds, rather than competing openly. My partner has an iPhone and the hoops we have to jump through to get some–not all–google photos, Fitbit, and Klipsch headphones features working is mindboggling. Apple watches also straight up wouldn’t work without another apple devices to phone home to last I checked. That’s the anticompetitive lawsuit

“We need you to stop making a good product forcing your customers to only use your version so your customers can finally move away from it.” Fixed it. Non-apple watches, for instance, can’t use GPS from an iPhone or cause it to emit sound to local lost phones, despite being previously able to, demonstrating no technical limitations just a walled-garden limitation

Anything with OnStar capability can definitely track you, which I know started at least as far back as 2006 in Saabs

Is this AI written? I’m pretty sure The Thief Lord doesn’t have a mysterious disease amywhere

A bit of a long shot but is it maybe one of The Seven Fabulous Wonders series by Katherine Roberts, maybe the Colossus Crisis?

Hell a roof rack on my 20 year old 3 series and a ton of rope has moved sofas, plywood and pallets, and one memorable trip 5 bikes