Trucks (In the USA)

I’m in this FB group that does financial advice with a little sarcasm and jokes mixed in. Suggest that someone should downsize to a car or get rid of their gas guzzling truck they have no real utility for and it’s like you’ve insulted their religion. Never seen such a group of grown adults throwing temper tantrums like that in my life.

Part of my job still is to help people connect their work email to their personal smartphones, if they want to. Many buy Samsungs because their carrier’s store still sells them up front compared to other brands of Android. Though it’s mostly A-series phones.

The problem with it is that Samsung doesn’t put the access to the features in convenient or intuitive locations so many users just get used to not using them anyway. The only feature, I as a Pixel user envy over Samsung is the right side menu thing. But anyone with iPhone experience or experience using an Android that has gesture nav enabled by default, wouldn’t think to try it even with the spen because that is the gesture to go back.

Ofc Pixels can do multitask yet many don’t realize that because you have to click the app icons at the top of the recent apps screen to access the menu for it. So I guess I don’t have room to talk about that aspect as a Pixel user.

But Bixby? I honestly think it’s a waste of resources for Samsung when they could have just used Google Assistant like other brands. I mean Bixby is okay but still lacks in some areas, but Samsung invested a lot of resources and effort into it just to come up with something that barely keeps up with Google’s Assistant.

Also I’m not a huge fan of their app drawer still. I guess I’m more of a “I just want to see an alphabetical list of all apps” on the app drawer type of person.

You’re the only one I’ve heard of who was happy with it. One of the guys I worked with, traded a new at the time Galaxy S-series phone back into his carrier to exchange for an iPhone because it was very laggy. After seeing one in action I didn’t blame him. It was laggier than my cheap Moto G series, which had a lot less processing power and slower storage. And this was back in 2017, so not too awfully long ago. But maybe things have changed since then.

Tbh, might not be a bad time to do it as long as you don’t sink yourself into debt too much or have to take out high interest loans. Because if the crash happens while you’re studying and by the time you graduate things might start recovering again. I guess we’ll see.

Sadly I don’t think greedflation is an official term. Stagflation was the closest I know about anyway.

Samsung isn’t on planet earth with their prices. I was avoiding them anyway because I believe TouchWiz is an inferior interface than stock Android. Just way too much bloat.

Good phones used to be around 400, taking me a few days to think about it and say yes. Now they are beyond 1000

I’m not sure what you mean by a “good” phone. Like yeah, they came up a bit. A Pixel 7a costs $499, and if one wants wireless charging and a better camera they can go with the Pixel 7 for $599. Regular non-Pro iPhones are around the same price.

Like yeah, folding phones are well over $1,000 in most cases, but personally I think that’s a gimmick, my hot take. But for me and 99% of the people I know, we’re sticking with our slab smartphones.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

This is a sign of an upcoming recession if we aren’t already in one. People are starting to run out of their savings due to stagflation and are looking for areas to cut. Buying a new phone every year or every other year and replacing laptops every 5 years are among the first things to go in anyone’s budget.

So currently the only people refreshing their devices are the people who NEED new devices.

Capitalist economies always need spends out of desire and not just necessity.

Worst part is instead of reversing the gouging these companies will probably just go ham on the planned obsolescence.

I’m a client-side technician working in a predominantly Windows environment for the last 8 going on 9 years.

Out of all the issues I have seen on Windows, filesystem issues is rather low on that list as far as prevalence, as I don’t recall one that’s not explainable by hardware failure or interrupted write. Not saying it doesn’t happen and that ext4 is bad or anything, but I don’t work in Linux all that much so me saying that I never had an issue with ext4 isn’t the same because I don’t have nearly the same amount of experience.

Also ext came about in 1992, so 31 years so far to hash out the bugs is no small amount of time. Especially in terms of computing.

Since I have a Kindle if I feel like reading anything paid, sometimes I’ll subscribe for a month or two to Kindle Unlimited, read it, then unsubscribe.

Nope, some of the ones I have seen the “base” version is $70. But to get a good experience or have a better chance at beating it, for the in-game upgrades one has to go for the “deluxe” or higher which is usually $80+. When I bought Riders Republic the cadillac tier of that game was like $140 or something.

I’m not completely against licensing, especially software. I’m against companies licensing buyers away from being able to use what they bought.

So if a license states “You own this as long as you don’t make and distribute copies to other users. Also some lingo allowing for reasonable backup copies.” 100% good in my opinion.

But a license that states “You paid for it but we can take it away for no good reason, such as a few months of inactivity.” BS IMO.

I haven’t bought a triple A game brand new since like 2014 or something. I wait until they have some sort of sale on them first. Literally didn’t buy Cyberpunk 2077 until very recently when they finally knocked it down to $30 a few weeks ago. It actually shocked me to walk by the games isle recently and see that triple A titles including yearly sports games are like $80 now. Crazy IMO. I might go back to reading books.

Yep. We need a law that says “a person owns any item or service they buy for a one time fee. No ‘licensing’ them out of ownership” or legalese for the same thing. Only loophole should be if it’s outright advertised as a subscription service.

Then another law that guarantees access to schematics and repair parts for reasonable fees. No loopholes. Schematics or die, that’s how I roll.

Some of it has to do with the audio equipment too.

Like I can hear the difference on my high quality headphones when connected to a decent USB audio interface device or my Denon home theater system with Technic speakers. Barely, while a difference is there. But can’t tell on my gaming headset or PC speakers.

And my ears are messed up. Had two sets of ear tubes when I was a kid and have some scar tissue on my eardrums which resonates with odd frequencies sometimes.

Now I’m even more glad to have ditched the streaming sub model to buy music instead. Of course new releases may follow and go up by $0.10 per song.