I almost wish I hadn’t looked; knew my area had paper mills and wood processing, they’ve been dredging the waterways for PCBs (chlorinated organics) for decades.

I work with electronics and have heard from multiple older gentleman that when they were young, they saw old high-voltage transformers from power poles being replaced which would be leaking off the backs of the trucks until empty or even purposely tipped into the storm drains. Why is healthcare so expensive? 🤔

No apologies for being politics-adjacent in the Gaming community, billionaires aren’t keeping their hands out of anything either. Keep rewarding Valve and the good companies and shitting on the bad ones!

Nah. News… Uh, in an adjacent saga, billionaire Kanye West is selling swastika t-shirts. So that’s where we’re at with these people…

Hear, hear. It fucking sucks that we created these monsters. At least I did, for simply wanting to use eBay.

Now you got me started on X… 😂 While true, Musk is no fool and bought such a simple and recognizable domain back from PayPal in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.

He’s a successful businessman, no doubt. Problem is that billionaires are pulling up the ladders behind them as wealth inequality is increasing (power is concentrating).

Twitter was well-known to be infested with bots when Musk purchased it. Turns out, that made it more valuable to someone rich who wants to sway elections…

Shop local, use smaller local services (credit unions), drop services owned by or purchased by billionaires (Too busy ranting and I haven’t actually read this article yet 🤣)

Decentralization, power to the people and not just the few, as the founding fathers intended. To our European viewers… He’s coming. (You know who. Not talking about Jesus who the churches have replaced with culture war nonsense.)

It’s an early specimen of “unregulated bank”, founded in part by Trump buddy Peter Thiel and merged with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000.

They have a history of locking accounts under false pretenses and seizing the money. It’s screwed over many a Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Early in Minecraft history, Notch lost access to over half a million dollars. They’ve failed to pay rewards in their software bug bounty program.

Edit: The usual antics for Musk and friends for 20 years.

Also, I checked my records. I’m biased (a word that the current US administration is erasing from all government documents) because of an early Amazon third-party seller plus PayPal experience; the item I was sent was wrong and 5% of the value of what I ordered. Returned sealed cheap item, seller wouldn’t refund. PayPal ruled in the seller’s favor and Amazon did not care because of third-party seller terms and conditions. A young person out a few hundred bucks doesn’t forget that.

Braintree, Honey, Paydiant, Tradera, Xoom, and Zettle all owned by PayPal.

Valve applying a bit of regulation (the right way) and still making piles of money, weird how that works.

I’ve been saying for years that if we want healthy economies, compare to human health. When the factors keeping growth at a controlled rate are disrupted, you end up with cancer.

Rant is related although covering hardware manufacturing rather than software:

Commodore manufactured in the USA and Europe some of the best-selling personal computers ever under lack of regulation. When the market became dominated by IBM-compatibles and Macintoshes, Commodore folded and left Superfund sites all over. (Superfund is basically EPA disaster declaration allowing for taxpayer funds release for large-scale cleanup operations.) Privatize the profits and socialize the losses. (lack of regulation led to the wrong way)

Trump “University”

Yet, somehow Google Glass was reason to beat up its nosy users.

I had one recently where my Wikipedia app failed to refresh. It had biscuits & gravy on a terrorist bombing article and of course I deleted the screenshot yesterday while cleaning out my files.

The general consensus seems to be “buy a dumb TV or at least the dumbest ‘smart’ TV you can find and never connect it to the net” and then “buy the media box that behaves the way you want.”

Where I am, cable and satellite TV providers still have you rent a box for their service.

Edit: the lone review on this page suggests there is an “old” TCL TV app. Another but they don’t have good reviews…

$ sudo usermod -l root susudio

$ su susudio

# ohh

Don’t do this, it summons an angry Phil

As a selling point, photo backup used to not count against Pixel owners’ Google account data storage maximum… then Google apparently sold enough Pixels to rescind the offer.