OpenStars

In a very realistic sense that has happened already.

First, the actual smart ones (or those who listen to smart advisors, same difference) - I'm talking about the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos - have adapted to get ahead no matter who wins the election. These will utilize whatever advantage their robot/lizard brains can concoct. We hear about these, but they have successfully managed to train society to not think about them all that much, especially in conjunction to words like "politics" or "inflation", despite being very much active in both. e.g., FaceBook ~~facilitated genocide~~ was bad - oh uh... well uh... haven't you heard, FaceBook is dead now, while we are "Meta", didn't you know!?

But both the Musk and the Donald have their own proprietary social media platforms - Xhitter and [Alternative]Truth Social, respectively - and they have already eaten out the heart of most of the former conservative party. i.e. before the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz) could eat out the GOP from the inside out, the Donald overtook that process and was so "successful" at it that a lot of people - us and them even! - call it the "GQP" now. The Kings of Old, aka Moscow Mitch, now have to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached former reality TV personality, while ignoring the sounds & smells of shatting (it pains me to think that the latter part of that sentence I mean literally! and then arguably even worse figuratively, e.g. how Trump makes fun of their wives in public but they have to swallow their pride and praise him or else their own supporters will boot them out as fast as McCarthy was).

Anyway, Trump is not a "tech bro", but the likes of the Musk look up to him all the same, and also there's a fantastic argument that FaceBook helped elect Trump to be President in the first place, much as Twitter is trying to get him back in for a second term, so the tech bro culture is very much ingrained in the heart of the conservative party even now.

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences - that should definitely help people!:-)

I wonder if they perhaps have some QA issues, so you got a lemon, or maybe the design itself is just that bad. You wouldn't necessarily know, I'm just musing out loud!:-P

One thing I do want to ask if you don't mind - b/c I don't know how to interpret the specs and I no longer trust paid reviewers - is how smooth does it handle? Like, noticeable lags or no? If it is basically a cheapie smartphone for a sub-flagship price, I might even be okay with that but wanted to know before getting into it.

That is literally the top feature I am looking for: skimp heavily rather than go all out on the camera, so basically the exact opposite of a Pixel. Whatever amount I pay for a phone - $100-$500 - I want the camera to be perhaps 20% of the price, not well over half as tends to be the case these days. OnePlus especially the "flagship killers" used to be the most similar to that (or at least you didn't pay the Premium for Pixel while getting significantly lesser specs), but after their cofounder left when they enshittified I simply don't trust the company to ever purchase anything from them again.

They would not keep doing it if it did not keep working.

There are a great many similarities to this and all of Trump's many & varied trials - when the rewards (of rape, bribery, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and so many other things) FAR outweigh the risks, it would be the height of stupidity to expect that nobody would ever even so much as dream of taking advantage.

And by stupidity, I suppose I mean Mitch McConnell, who more than any other singular individual that we can see decides e.g. which and whether judges can be appointed to their seats, and which and whether government programs may get funded - e.g. watchdog organizations that used to prosecute law-breaking behaviors, way back in ye olden times. (Mitch's partner in this is not worth mentioning bc that role is played by a rotating cast of characters - now it's Mike Johnson, before it was Kevin McCarthy, maybe next it will be Matt Gaetz, who da fuq knows.)

Every time we hear about another tech bro that gets a slap on the risk, while e.g. a black person gets shot just for walking/running/jogging/working/breathing/sleeping, we should remind ourselves: this is on purpose (or at least deemed "acceptable losses", "collateral damage"). Those laws were supposed to be ours (Of/For/By The People) to make as we wished, and were, before this country was taken over from the inside by a silent coup, more than a decade prior to January 6. Now, an increasingly smaller minority runs the entire nation - e.g. less than a handful ousted McCarthy - and we seem to have collectively decided that we will do nothing about it.

Even conservatives should be against this, bc getting your way is not the same thing as doing things properly, and maintaining a stable ~~democracy~~ system of governance (who am I kidding, we've been a plutocracy since basically the beginning) is something that is required for us all to continue to exist. Example scenario: I am a father and two of my teenage children are having a birthday celebration, with both of their hearts desires set on sushi, and my wife wanted Chinese food but is okay with sushi. However, I don't like sushi, hence we are all going for barbecue (despite one of the birthday teens being vegetarian except fish), and that's final - sound familiar? Winning an argument is not the same as "winning" at life.

TLDR: expect more of this kind of "tech bro" nonsense over time rather than less, bc we have more foundational issues that are leaking out to cause / allow them.

Sorry this is a lot of words - I think sometimes we oversimplify so wanted to keep all these details, this time.

Is fair phone (review) that? Its camera and battery are sub-par for the money, but it says that it makes up for it in many ways, like longevity and ability to swap out components that in other phones can mean almost getting a new one. It sounds kinda perfect for my use case but I've never owned one so can't be positive. When my current phone dies, this is something I'll heavily look into.

What bothers me the most about that is how they use double-speak to try to have it both ways - like Samsungs are both supposed to be "great", and also those features are claimed to be "optional", but when you try to go without an account... suddenly you find that much of the phone isn't "great" anymore:-(.

Also, why not allow downloading of such a 100% "free" app without needing an account?

Also, why need an app at all to stop the phone from getting hot just from holding it in your hands and trying to surf the F-ing web with it!? I mean, even if I had an account, that's still effort and more importantly attention I have to expend to make the phone minimally viable...

I'm more used to Apple product I suppose, which truly do "just work" right out of the box. Or replacing the OS on an Android phone, so trying to use it like the former when I clearly should do the latter I guess is my fault. But it also does not absolve them from gatekeeping their product behind a "store" concept, which they clearly are trying to suck me in with the promise of a few freebies and then hope that I stick around to purchase more and more products. The commercialization of it all just turns my stomach.:-(

In any case, thanks for the links! If I take the time to register in the store those sound helpful.

Samsung Thermal Guardian

No - I never created a Samsung account, so I am much to blame for my phone's lack of performance, though at the same time I also blame it for not creating that right from out of the box, for such an expensive device:-).

True dat.

I also have a Samsung Galaxy, a S22, and kinda regret it. Somehow it's always hot, like just having the screen on is enough to make it hot, and it literally hurts my fingers after a few minutes. Maybe it's my fault somehow, but I definitely researched a lot before buying and all the text and video reviewers swore that the cooling was adequate. I'm so done with big expensive phones.:-( One day I may buy a cheapie and when I have an adequate daily driver play around to see what a custom ROM could do to improve the experience. Basically I miss my Nexus is what I guess I am saying:-).

A super-long time ago I got a Nexus, b/c they were awesome, and Google was still thought of as being somewhat awesome for offering those.

Nowadays I have been dreading the thought of a Pixel - I'd more likely get a Fairphone I think - but whatever I get, it's sad to think that a custom ROM is probably going to have to be the default for so many people:-(.

But these rules only seem to apply to apps that follow the rules. Or perhaps on an OS that does so. Hence a custom ROM would be able to bypass it, or connecting the external storage to a computer via USB or some such? At which point it seems needlessly restrictive. But, I am no expert, and it would indeed increase security for a naive user, so likely that's what they are aiming at.

Thanks for sharing!

Oh wow, so much going on there.

What if a malicious app decides to place child pornography or a crypto mining whatever onto your device - but since its space is "private", can unethical people now legally do that, and simply blame that Google wouldn't let them see into the space, hence they "did not know that it was there"? This would seem to open the door to so very many problematic issues...

On the other hand this seems related solely to "external" storage - I haven't used external storage on an Android for... actually I've never used it iirc. For this Netflix case, would they disallow downloading onto your device unless you have an external SIM? Also, if you used external storage, then how da fuq could they control you popping that external storage into some other device entirely, like a rooted device with a custom ROM!? It would have made so much more sense for internal storage... or possibly I am missing something there.

In any case, that sucks that Google seems more and more to be buying into the "walled garden" philosophy - you know, "for your convenience", aka selling YOU as the product to the investor class.:-(

A quick search seems to suggest there is no known way around this, except to use an older Android OS:-(. I would hope that this would absolutely wake people up to realize why Google cannot be trusted - as if what happened to searching wasn't enough on its own.

That's why they will lose... but the authoritarians still keep trying, it's just how they are built. They really aren't intelligent enough to understand any other way, and those few who might seem not to care, being greedy enough to get what they can while they can, letting others deal with the fallout.