Quill7513
it rewards it in my view. it conditions us to be selfish
Not about being in the us specifically. But about keeping your manufacturing near your entire supply chain.
But the uncertainty of what will come soon for tariffs is
From a business perspective: more control over the manufacturing process and less risk of getting hit by tariffs
I stopped buying keyboard phones when the manufacturers stopped selling them to me. They don't actually care what the market demands, they care about what the market will accept with the highest profit margins. A mid-spec phone with a keyboard coming in under the price of a flagship should actually be a feasible product, but by creating that product, you're reducing your profit/unit just that little bit...
The modern flat icons are actually… A little insidious in their conception. They're based on industrial psychology and mid-century modern propaganda. They make your phone just that bit more addictive. It's not someone convincing management it's a recreation of the Mona Lisa, it's management coming down to the graphics department and saying “You need to make it more addictive”
The main concern is going to be hardware reliability from wear and tear. That's the value of buying refurbished, for which there are several reputable retailers online (some of which selling degoogled phones with their own OSes). On the software side, since I'm presuming the focus of this discussion is installing grapheneos, its not really a concern since you're going to be reflashing the device
Go cheap, and go second hand if possible
Proton, Tuta, Mailbox.org, Posteo
All are equal in terms of their overall quality of service, just different in what advantages they offer (except for Mailbox.org and Posteo. They're just offering standards compliant email servers without any bullshit and let you roll your own encryption)
In a word: enshittification
A single corporate entity wanting to gatekeep our collective knowledge of the things we love is intrinsically a bad thing. It was easy to ignore back when its functionality was basic and the ads minimal. These days the website is bloated with third party cookies and scripts, and it is one of the worst offenders outside Big Tech / FAANG when it comes to implementing surveilance capitalism.
Personally for me its about the double standard. When we perform small scale "theft" to experience things we'd be willing to pay for if we could afford it and the money funded the artists, they throw the book at us. When they build a giant machine that takes all of our work and turns it into an automated record scratcher that they will profit off of and replace our creative jobs with, that's just good business. I don't think it's okay that they get to do things like implement DRM because IP theft is so terrible, but then when they do it systemically and against the specific licensing of the content that has been posted to the internet, that's protected in the eyes of the law
vaultwarden