Sadly the key to avoiding becoming a victim of these tactics is to spend a significant portion of your time shopping around for everything. No retailer can be trusted. I preferentially order stuff from manufacturers webpages or compare multiple distributors before I buy anything.

I also utilize VPN services and a secondary browser if I think they are playing games. You can avoid this shit but it’s not easy.

I also try to completely avoid known companies who’s business model relies on these tactics.

Windows 11 UI is a downgrade from XP.

Windows 11 is also deeply unstable. I haven’t had this many program crashes, errors, and other bullshit since Vista and ME. Windows 10 had it’s annoying quirks but it was at least relatively stable.

I have saved myself the headaches with UI changes since the Win8 clusterfuck when installed a 3rd party taskbar/menu.

Trade takes time and effort to develop. There is infrastructure to build, relationships to form, cultural conflicts to overcome, and systems to develop and optimize.

Trump has tossed his big old poopy diaper into the middle of a century of effort. Its not a system that will collapse overnight, the 5-10 year plan of all trading partners today is “How to fuck over the U.S. without fucking over ourselves”.

The U.S. is heading towards decades of economic depression and stagnation.

Honestly most of the issues with OneDrive are from one setting:

Files On-Demand - it’s turned on by default. It uploads all the files in the drive to the cloud and then deletes them from the local computer. Its absolutely, fucking stupid and should be banned.

AI hardware is a sales pitch without a clear product. Consumers have no clue why they would want to buy something with AI on it.

For most consumers AI is a webpage that kids cheat on homework or adults attempt to cheat at work with. It makes ugly fake pictures with all sorts of weird errors. Its also the annoying as fuck answering services that you have to yell at 4 or 5 times to get to a real person.

Why would an AI PC be desirable?

It’s worth $30 more per year. Aka it’s a subscription rate hike.

They hiked up all of the subscriptions. Then made it confusing as fuck to subscribe back to the one that you had.

The real solution would be for the EU to mandate an standardized open source connection platform that all car companies are required to support.

I currently use android auto on my truck. I had to make a bunch settings modifications to make it semi-functional. It took me months to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted, when I wanted it

The studies are repeating stuff that we’ve known for 50 years. Higher CO2 levels = plants grow faster due to more efficient photosynthesis. They are able to produce more carbohydrates in the same amount of time. CO2 burners/generators are standard in many high tech greenhouses because of this. We’ve been artificially increasing the CO2 levels in production greenhouses for decades.

The conclusion that the higher CO2 is going to decrease food nutrition overall is complete bullshit. It shows a complete lack of understanding by the researchers of agricultural practices and the market requirements they sell into.

So the question these researchers are not asking is “What else affects the nutritional quality of food?” The answer is pretty close to everything: genetics, nutrient availability, pest pressure, disease pressure, relative humidity, temperature, light intensity, soil type, soil pH, soil salt levels, soil microbiome, fruit load, plant architecture, storage conditions, storage time, storage temperature, and a shit ton more.

Due to all of these variables, quality standards have been developed to facilitate equitable trade. Every crop has quality standards enforced by government regulation, international treaty, or industry standards in most regions of the planet. Although most of these standards were created without nutrition being a primary concern, they do enforce a surprising amount of regulation by accident.

Rising CO2 levels is one more variable that the growers will have to adapt to maintain their quality standards.

I left out the hosting part for just that reason. The company has to activately do something to gain the liability. Right now the big social media companies are deliberately prioritizing harmful information to maximize engagement and generate money.

As for enforcement hosters have had to develop protocols for removal of illegal content since the very beginning. Its still out there and can be found, but laws and mostly due diligence from hosters, makes it more difficult to find. Its the reason Lemmy is not full of illegal pics etc. The hosters are actively removing it and banning accounts that publish it.

Those protocols could be modified to include obvious misinformation bots etc. Think about the number of studies that have shown that just a few accounts are the source of the majority of harmful misinformation on social media.

Of course any reporting system needs to be protected from abuse. The DMCA takedown abusers are a great example of why this is needed.

Its a very simple fix with a few law changes.

1. The act of promoting or curating user submitted data makes the company strictly liable for any damages done by the content.

2. The deliberate spreading of harmful false information makes the hosting company liable for damages.

This would bankrupt Facebook, Twitter, etc within 6 months.

Keep paying them but use it less = more profit.

How about today’s, random complete freeze. Had to hard reboot then spend 30 minutes watching it trying to “fix the issue”. It then failed to find anything. So I had to force it to reboot to windows. Then it worked fine the rest of the day.

While it was down, I was working on my 11 year old, budget laptop running Mint.

Yep I did it. There is still some annoying bits of it floating around that you can’t get rid of.

The phones in the midrange are getting to be better than the top end ones in my opinion. Decent enough build quality for the phone to last 3-4 years. Expensive enough that the bloatware is reduced. If the company does do a modified launcher it’s generally pretty clean.

I am liking the OnePlus 13R I picked up. Stable UI, decent battery life, and not a bad price. The stock launcher does a pretty decent job.

For my work phone I have a Pixel 8. I really regret buying it. I had to disable 30 different bloatware apps. Plus I have 4 apps that I have rejected all updates because they can’t be disabled. I also installed a launcher because the stock pixel UI is trash. The hardware is solid and works well once you clear out the buggy bloatware

Apple made a major fuckup with IOS26. I upgraded my iPad and felt nauseous from the blur effect almost instantly. I can’t completely get rid of it, just make it less horrific. Their “new” multitasking options I am not even bothering to turn on or try to use yet. This is like their 10th edition of multitasking. Let’s see if they get it right this time. Then I will bother to learn their “simple” process that usually involves having to read a manual and remember half a dozen new commands. Fuck it still takes me 2 or 3 attempts to get the the home screen without a button.

There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.

Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.

Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.

Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.

This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.

Assuming human intelligence naturally follows a normal distribution model plus add in confounding factors like: malnutrition, chemicals, abuse, etc. that are known to degrade human reasoning. Reasoning is further restricted by limiting access to education and extensive false propaganda. These factors flattens and shift the distribution curve to the left.

The millions of people who voted for him are morons what are easily manipulated by their ignorance and fear.

This has always been the Achilles heal of a democratic systems.

Once Pandora went in the shitter, I moved on to self-hosting. So I have never used Spotify. As long as you take a little time once in a while to discover some new bands and add them to you collection its great.

I have “purchased” thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It’s a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

This one is extremely difficult to fix as well. Ad companies bribe politicians with reduced price advertising for political campaigns to prevent laws being passed to regulate them.

Missed a big one.

The U.S. is mostly a net importer of beef. The herd size normally does not satisfy the market and it requires significant imports to make up the difference.

The U.S. herd size is cyclical and historically relatively easy to predict. So producers/exporters/importers had a good guess roughly a year or more in advanced when prices would climb or fall.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance

Toss in some dumbass who fucks up trade with tariffs and the exporting counties can no longer predict the market. Then TACO happens or doesn’t happen at random. Uncertainty in the market trend means that producers are unwilling to increase their herd size to adapt, anywhere.

The safest bet is to sell down their herd size at the high prices to capture the margin now. Then maintain a smaller herd for the duration of the uncertainty.

Dairy farmers are pretty much the only ones that are doing quite well right now. Feed inputs are low, butcher prices for their cows is high and sexed semen means they can cross 1/2 their herd with beef breeds to maximize their profit. Day old 1/2 bred calf’s are selling for astronomical prices right now. Selling off their herd and retiring early is a viable option right now as well.