Goronmon

Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching.

...

Except on extremely rare occasions.

I'm sorry, I just find it funny that you walked back the "I'm done with Youtube" claim in the very next sentence.

No reason the tax had to scale exactly to match the damage though. At least make it painful enough so people consider whether a larger vehicle is worth it.

I'm surprised that people are surprised that a country would favor it's own businesses versus foreign ones.

I'm also unsure of which countries act differently from this.

I don't think I've had a Pixel phone that survived much past the two year mark. They've all had various issues, either problems with the battery/charging or just dying altogether.

I still use them because you can get them for cheaper than most phones, but "longer lasting" is the last adjective I would use for them.

If the carriers it supports have poor or no reception where you live, it's not really any specific person's problem unless you somehow think that an individual is going to come with a solution on their own. Which seems excessive.

To be fair, didn’t it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.

Which other manufacturers were cheating?

You might think Epic is a terrible corporation. But their ability to affect meaningful change on your daily life is effectively non-existent. Unless you are making a living being a Steam evangelist or something.

But Google has a massive amount of control over the internet. Between search, Android, Maps, ads, Gmail, etc. The level of "terribleness" they can approach vastly overshadows even the most evil stances Epic could take.

So, this "both sides are bad" take is a bit ridiculous.

I've never had those free text numbers work for me when used this way. For any services.

How thoroughly was this tested? Because you can summarize a lot of these types of timing differences with one word.

Caching.

And from my experience people tend to overlook this when running casual tests like this.

Who is maintaining all these "unused" devices that you will want working pretty consistently? Who is responsible for replacing hardware when it dies? Who is looking into it when someone stops receiving messages? What happens when the person hosting thousands of users just stops wanting to do it? Who migrates these accounts?

Frankly, your argument sounds more like wishful thinking than anything practical. You've basically described the plan as "Magically some devices in someone's basement will suddenly start running a messaging service, maintenance free, from now until the end of time".

How does does decentralization avoid the costs that Signal laid out in the blog posts?

Decentralization is expensive too judging by some of the sentiment I've seen around running Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin instances.