Humanius

Google is not offering me a no-cost battery replacement.
I’m not eligible for any replacement or refund according to their own support page

Edit: Here’s proof.

On the one page they are talking about “impacted devices”, but on the other page they say I’m not “eligible” for a refund of repair.
So they do not confirm whether my phone is unaffected or not. They only say I won’t get a refund.

I’m highly skeptical when a massive corporation uses inconsistent language like this. Especially when they don’t clearly define what they mean with the terms “impacted” and “eligible”.

Are there situations where impacted devices may not be eligible?

I own a Pixel 6a, and I’m not happy about the whole situation for several reasons:

• The update is mandatory and instant the moment it is received. You don’t get a choice in the matter.
• The only reason I am aware of my battery being nerfed is because I had read this article and because I paid attention during the update. There is no clear indication after the update that they might have nerfed my battery life.
• Google is not communicating clearly whether my phone is one of the so-called “affected devices”. There is a tool that allows you to check “eligibility”, but it only reports eligibility for a refund. My phone is not eligible for a refund, so does that mean my phone is not an “affected device”? It doesn’t say.
• After calling support Im not much wiser. All they told me is that “if my phone gets warm sometimes, or the battery drains too fast” that might mean my device is affected. But clearly they should know whether my device is affected otherwise they wouldn’t be able to determine whether I’m eligible for the refund.

This is also not the first time Google burned me with a bad quality battery. This just strengthens my resolve that my next phone won’t be a Pixel. Which is a shame, because I like these phones otherwise.

The Fairphone is looking quite interesting.

Pro: It’s radical and cool and you get to shoot your gun! Pew! Pew!
Con: You occasionally have cases of innocent minorities getting shot by racists

The “racist” between quotes in the headline just means that that one word is a direct quote from someone or something, wheas the rest of the headline is paraphrased. In this case it’s a direct quote from a coroner’s inquest by Judge Armitage.

I’m not a fan of this style of quoting, since writing singular words between quotes could easily also be read as insincerity or sarcasm. But it seems to be pretty common in English language media.

Edit: Judge Armitage also writes that this police officer being racist isn’t just incidental, but rather that the police station he is working at apparently has a work-place culture that has normalised racism (as per the article)

They would, but eventually their competition will overtake them and they will start losing customers and market share. They have to innovate at least a little bit if they wish to stay in the dominant market position that they are in.

For context, before people jump to conclusions:

Russia is not party to this landmine treaty, and Ukraine having to adhere to this treaty is essentially forcing them to fight against someone who plays dirty while having their arm tied around their back.

Other countries that have announced that they will be withdrawing from the Ottowa Treaty are: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (Coincidentally all bordering Russia or Belarus)

So that sounds to me that Americans should use a VPN to pretend they are accessing the website from Europe

I’m not sure if buying American equipment is a good way to rid ourselves of our dependence on America.
It allows America to control our supply of spare parts and software updates, and it doesn’t bolster the European defence industry.

But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.

Converting that to a yearly inflation figure:

1.015¹² =~ 1.196

So about 19.6% yearly, assuming it will stay at 1.5% monthly for the next year.
By Argentinian standards that is honestly not too bad

In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement

Not all of them.

I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.

Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.

But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.

Then by all means keep that momentum going. I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.

Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

Failed wheat harvest which caused a bread shortage.
Bread was a staple food in 18th century France.

I’m not quite sure if it is similar to the rice shortage in Japan today however. When the French couldn’t eat bread in the 18th century they went hungry, but when the Japanese today can’t buy rice they can just buy a different carb.

Its the difference between barely scraping by on bread, and being inconvenienced by not being able to buy cheap rice.

The problem in this case is the Google Play Store, not Android.

Google is blocking Nextcloud from updating their app on the Play Store unless they remove this vital permission. But nothing is stopping Nextcloud from making their app available on third party app stores with the approriate permissions.

If you download the app from F-Droid instead, it should work correctly.

That is not to say that what Google is doing isn’t monopolistic. I’m just pointing out that you can bypass this restriction by not using their app store.

Would be a noble goal to bring obligations closer to something voluntarily taken and not just obedience.

It may be noble, but it is also a bit out of touch with reality.

When you participate in society (even if it is something as simple as buying groceries at the supermarket) then you have to follow the rules of that society that you participate in. We have decided together as a society, democratically, what those rules are.

You can’t then say “I’m not playing by the rules” and expect people to just accept that.

Edit: Fixed a typo