No.

This is where you provide a streaming link file like m3u8 or a link to such a file and watch streaming content provided by others. For example NASA has a channel like that, so does CNN, and various other ad-supported TV network streams. There are also paid providers that require a subscription for example to access content.

This move makes sense if you plan on decoupling from China and accelerating global warming to destroy the rest of the world to enshrine your hegemony for the rest of this century and next by being one of the few livable, somewhat insulated places that can be a viable climate fortress.

You need China to make things like solar with batteries viable. But if you know you’re going to war with them, decouple from them, etc you want to be on dirty things like coal you can just use entirely locally. All while helpfully poisoning those unnecessary workers you’re positive that AI and robotics will replace.

Discord.

Doesn’t matter whose. They’re all shit. They’re not a substitute for forums for support yet everyone uses them as that. They breed power-tripping children (and man-children) who think they’re super special because they mod some server. They’re made for churning out drama. They aren’t searchable from search engines. I mean they were made for GAMERS and then spread out to the rest of the toxic internet.

Third party anti-fraud database providers that have access to private databases with info on people. Things like public records, private records, data brokers, etc.

Presumably given they’ve all been released in the past few years and are still getting updates the manufacturers would release an update disabling the functionality to comply with law. Same with end user devices removing the functionality via software update.

You’d have a small percentage of holdouts who have auto updates off and also refuse to apply it manually and who also have non-updated computers or smartphone. They’d leave it up to whoever buys the spectrum to locate illegal use like this based on detected interference in their usage, report it to the FCC and they send you a nasty letter followed by debilitating fines and a legal order to seize your equipment if that fails.

In practice people who go out of their way to avoid the updates that disable it will probably see no consequences but decreasing benefits as well and will eventually update or replace devices.

Those are the ones that actually work, yes! It’s just most of the buns aren’t that and even some of those aren’t so good.

• Mustard, lots (none of that Frenches garbage, either a good dijon or spicy brown),
• diced raw onions,
• finely diced garlic
• dill relish,
• peppers (cayenne or jalapeno)
• sauerkraut
• chili sauce (optional overload topping)

It’s a real challenge getting hot dog buns that can accommodate all those toppings, I swear the manufacturers either expect really skinny dogs or hate toppings. Only a few premium brands seem to carry buns that will bear it all, the store brands and things like ballpark are hopelessly inadequate for more than mustard and one other topping at best.

Not even a choice.

If you choose over 100F you will see electronics failing more often, working harder, less efficient, working badly, etc because the heat is causing them to throttle in various ways. In the modern world it is far, far easier to heat up a space with a house full of electronics and humans than it is to keep it cool. The energy required to raise the temperature from say 5 degrees F to a more comfortable 40 degrees (35 degree change) pales in comparison to the energy required to keep yourself and your devices cool a mere 10-15 degrees less to around 90 degrees which is still uncomfortably hot and sweaty.

I’ll note that a constant 100 degrees is more than hot enough to cause various foods, medications, substances to break down and go bad. Check your medicine cabinet, most of your pills including over the counter are only rated for storage at up to 86 degrees. Your medicine will lose efficiency or go bad in some, perhaps many cases. Your food outside your fridge will spoil more quickly, mold and bacteria will grow more quickly and readily. Your fridge itself will work harder and die sooner.

The tap water will run hot or warm most of the time meaning a shower won’t necessarily cool you off much.

The colder temperatures are cheaper all costs considered, feel better, can be negated at a moment’s notice with socks, a jacket, and a blanket.

It’s easy to insulate a home against extreme cold and just retain heat you generate inside including by your body and devices. It requires a lot more effort to keep the inside cold when both the outside and things inside are generating heat and trying to warm it up.

This is a reason why climate change is a nightmare not just for human comfort but on so many levels. Our electronics are going to operate less efficiently in a warmer world and draw more power to do so.

• He used to follow (probably still does) open white supremacists and Nazis of the Richard Spencer/Lauren Southern type and got called out for it and privated his follows on twitter. That was many years ago but given he’s never done a u-turn and say started attacking gamergate and other reactionary gamer politics or loudly supporting broad coalition progressive politics I think we can assume he still holds those politics and more importantly he dog whistles and is part of a pipeline of radicalizing young men, specifically gamers into hate.

He also used to follow a ton of open white supremacist NAZIS on Twitter like Laura Southern and that guy who got punched in the face. People screenshotted it and he noticed and privated his follows. That was many years ago. But you don’t follow open Nazis if you’re just some gamer dude (if he was some sort of respectable journalist you could have an excuse of having a newsworthiness angle but he followed them because he liked their posts because he is a NAZI).

I think he’s more greedy than committed to bringing about Nazi goals so is somewhat careful about not exposing too much of that part of himself but he’s part of the white supremacist gamergate to white supremacist streamers pipeline and should be called a Nazi until they day he 1) admits he was a Nazi, 2) disavows that. 3) disavows other Nazi gamer streamers who exist in his “edgelord space” 4) becomes openly progressive and goes out of his way to denounce and attack fascists and white supremacy. Until that day he should be assumed to still be a Nazi.

And Syria took a decade to crumble after Obama started in on it.

The US didn’t give up in Vietnam until it had been involved for over a decade.

I remember Fox News talking heads (that judge guy in particular I think) yelling about Obama “acting like a king!” and that was their kind of attack on him for a bit so it’s just a rehash of that in a way.

Why not “no dictators” or “no to fascism”? Or something about civil rights or upholding the constitution. Kind of sus.

Apple TV: No ads. Been around for over a decade.

Google TV: homescreen ads for a decade+ and even pushed onto Nvidia shield owners who originally may have bought the devices because Nvidia made a premium customized version without ads until they got tired of that and put ads in.

Apple has problems but ads aren’t a big one.

Neither big company is your friend. They both exploit workers and are both bad.

It’s just Google tends to be better at cutting edge bad like enabling genocide with their products and stuffing ads down the throats of people while Apple tries to maintain a crunchier appearance and vibe and is fine reaping 30% App Store fees on all transactions and making side loading very hard.

Apple rips you off on low storage and high costs to upgrade compared to Google/Samsung it’s definitely true.

It’s impossible to de-google or meaningfully remove unwanted stuff from Smart TVs while keeping them usable for streaming purposes.

What you want to do is factory reset, don’t connect to the internet, go into settings and turn off whatever you can, and then use a streaming box.

Yes it’s an additional cost but it’s BETTER. The processors and memory in those TVs are lousy, the apps are often sluggish, the experience is simply not great. Frankly the hardware was built not to be usable for you, they are data collection platforms that include minimal low quality streaming experiences in order to collect data. No software is going to fix that.

Want something that “just works” and supports all the major streamers? Get an Apple TV 4k. It’s pretty private but importantly no ads, clean interface, powerful hardware. Is it maximally private? No. But it is easy.

Want to put in effort? You can get either a Dune-HD box (some have dual-OS without reboot where one is Netflix certified to get you full resolution while passing DRM checks while another is unlocked bootloader which you can install all kinds of things like Plex and Kodi on) or get some other Android streaming device of your choice (Walmart’s Onn brand 4k devices used to be very good and cheap though you might need to check as I heard rumors the latest devices can’t be unlocked).

You’ll have a better experience on more powerful hardware and will never want to go back to the bad on-board TV experience.

Wait until you find out they offer apps with ties to:

• FBI
• US military
• CIA
• NSA
• The most awful fascist ghouls on podcasts and youtube
• The “israeli” state and its war criminal institutions.

Curious then you pick on vague ties to China to fearmonger.

I mean FFS Microsoft and Google are actively abetting the most documented genocide in a century. Where is the outrage from these garbage people over that? Where’s the push to help boycott and pressure them to stop assisting the slaughter? Children are being killed right now in Gaza with the help of these American companies and where are the stories encouraging people to stop using them?

Because she knows there will be another stronger case in the future that she won’t have to recuse from and that case will therefore be much more air-tight when she votes to allow it. No one will be able to attempt to undermine the ruling by claiming it was invalid on the basis of someone voting who should not.

Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.

This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.

IMO focus on purchasing physical content from creators or distributors who NEED to get paid.

It’s one thing to foolishly throw money at these big companies for blurays of an already very successful series while they’re throwing their old libraries in the trash or ‘the vault’ or just shoveling most of their money towards low quality reality garbage.

It’s another to buy a Criterion or BFI or Vinegar Syndrome bluray of something out of print that they need to recoup the costs of restoring and scanning.

If someone buys a bluray of an MCU movie they are a chump, firstly for liking that stuff, secondly for giving Disney more money for it when those things already earn piles of cash in theaters and that alone would be enough to keep them paying salaries and producing that stuff.

Spend money on independent film-makers/releases, on restorations, on series you like on the verge of cancellation.

Sadly I think the conclusion is already written, physical media’s days are numbered, the big companies are going to shut down the overwhelming majority of bluray and dvd production within 5-10 years is my feeling because why sell you for $20-$30 a copy of something when they can get your rent in the form of streaming monthly payments for the rest of your natural life?

And best of all with the rent they can push ads which further increase their revenue. That bluray is a one-time payment, ads for watching the movie on streaming are a continual revenue stream. I predict that they will either have completely killed off ad-free tiers of streaming to push most of their audience into an even bigger and more valuable ad pool to sell to advertisers OR the prices of the ad-free tiers will grow dramatically away from the ad-supported tiers. Right now it’s a few bucks a month, I suspect within 10 years it will be 170-300% the cost of the ad-supported version.

If I had to guess it’s mainly .world accounts (and maybe feddit given their strongly pro-genocide stance). They think because Trump is scary and doing more bad things at home than Biden that Biden – the man who holds a large amount of responsibility for him being elected again (by stubbornly running again when he wasn’t fit then dropping out at the last moment) somehow deserves some respect for some reason. That and/or for them genocide just isn’t a line that once crossed makes someone bad. Little hitlerites the lot of them.

Only time will tell however I suspect this is strategic dishonesty and narrative manipulation. Specifically planting these seeds of ‘honesty’ and doubt they can reference back to in 15 years to claim they were impartial and not totally rags of the bourgeoisie and Anglo-American imperialism. They know if they get caught just being stridently wrong for years that hurts public trust in them which lowers their propaganda value to the bourgeoisie and empire planners. But if they can pivot like this, even if they don’t stick it out they can point to this and claim, oh we got that one wrong but we had dissenting opinions and we can change, we can change, which is the same kind of narrative America uses to convince its population it’s not an amoral evil empire and hasn’t been since inception. Admit to crimes in the past or when they’re already mostly done, say you’re sorry for the crimes or they were wrong. Claim to have changed and learn from them, continue committing new crimes, repeat the cycle forever and the poor saps, the indoctrinated children will believe they live in a country that can change and was flawed but constantly improving instead of just constantly inventing new crimes and victims and excuses.

This is also what is so foolish about the conservative rage about schools allegedly teaching kids to “hate America” by teaching about past crimes and atrocities. They don’t understand that it’s a relief valve. That it teaches those but also whitewashes the crimes and allows new ones by constantly apologizing for the past but never changing the present. And without that kind of valve if you have any kind of educated population you have problems as people start connecting the present to the past. Probably why they also want to gut education entirely and replace it with Evangelical fundamentalism.

So IMO, no forgiveness. This is a cynical ploy, if you weren’t condemning ‘israel’ as an apartheid occupation settler state before Oct 7th and you were in a position to have an educated and informed opinion like being a journalist then you’re scum. If 8 months after Oct 7th deep into the accelerated phase of the open genocide which has been continuing at various tempos for half a century you were not against them then you’re scum, you’re an apologist for genocide, you’re Goebbels. If you weren’t acknowledging the legitimate right of Hamas to violent resistance and therefore the legality of Oct 7th after a year you were on the side of the genocidal oppressors in muddying the waters at the least.

This is also I think part of the pivot to heap blame for all of this on Netanyahu, to basically put this all in his lap. To say yes atrocities against humanity (they’ll waffle on genocide as the right term) were done but they’re all the fault of this one guy, not ‘israel’ as a whole which has always been and will always be a settler colonial project built on genocide and land theft and religio-racial supremacy. And certainly that the west is blameless and didn’t know. Absolutely at all costs that it wasn’t the west doing anything wrong. That way once they kick Bibi out of office there they can claim the zionist project has changed because that one uniquely bad man is gone, ignoring the massive support his genocidal policies have, ignoring the massive documented racism and hatred and genocidal intent among the entirety of ‘israeli’ society. They will do this to save the greater project of ‘israel’ as a western colonial outpost by sacrificing one leader and a few other usual suspects in the sphere of public opinion condemnation. And they will do this to pretend their own hands are and always were clean and that they were just duped, misled by this scheming Jew and oh wait they’re doing classic anti-semitism but they’re allowed to do that because it’s been redefined as being against ‘israel’ and anything else including literal Nazi salutes is liable to be defended by the zionist entity and their western backers.