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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • If/when it happens, so be it - I’ll eat crow. But for the time being, Apple at least has long set/surpassed the standard for support lifetimes.

    At some point, you just have to have a little bit of faith that not every company is going to immediately screw you over the first chance they get; otherwise you’ll never end up buying anything (new or otherwise), with the fear that the moment you do - they’ll drop support.

    I mean, some companies do deserve that level of scepticism - but honestly, for all their other faults Apple is not one of them.








  • I’ve used similar services to this in the past; not because I couldn’t afford something up front - but because I wanted to amortise the purchase across a pretty short (8 week) period.

    Why not just use a credit card? I did. As a semi-regular user of the service, it was set up in such a way that it would bill the first 25% of my purchase after 2 weeks, and again every 2 weeks after that.

    So not only was I getting an additional interest-free time stacking the 2 week period with my CC’s billing cycle; but I was earning loyalty/rewards points with both programs simultaneously.







  • I recently visited China, to meet my wife’s extended family.

    Let me tell you, the sheer amount of single-use plastics that are consumed by any individual throughout a regular day in a metropolitan environment, is absolutely and mind-numbingly depressing.

    Given that there are 1.3b people there, and that no matter how much we in the US/AU/EU reduce/reuse/recycle - we will never be able to truly offset that sheer amount of plastic pollution produced.

    Now I’m not saying this to be a doomer, but more-so to say that individuals can’t enact sufficient change to save this planet, we need Government and corporate incentives to shift towards sustainable alternatives, and punitive policies to disincentivise plastic production globally.





  • Big sums of one-off money are a great spectacle, but they have negative short-term impacts (likely to cause another spike to inflation) and negligible long-term benefits as once the funds are spent it’s just a return to the status-quo.

    A more aggressive tax-cut for the lowest band, as well as a boost to services offered to those same people (rent assistance, dietary stipends to promote healthier foods etc.) funded by the top-end of town are the best long-term solution- but they don’t cause anywhere near the same level of media ‘splash’ as a “free” $1K would.