Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.

Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.

The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.

And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.

Looks like the future country of Cascadia is finally starting to make some moves.

The agreed-upon future name is Cascadia.

Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.

As a security professional… yeah, nope. Nope, nope, nope.

Win11 has many usability issues, and Windows seems to accumulate more with every design decision, but reaming your arse open for someone else to bugger you via an exploit run under your own account is not one of them.

But getting vaccinated doesn’t really prevent you from spreading it, it just prevents you from not dying from it.

LOLWUT is this antivaxxer shit? Go back to your anti-reality, anti-evidence, anti-facts hellhole, bud.

Yes, vaccines can prevent you from spreading disease to others, though the degree of prevention varies by vaccine and pathogen. By reducing the likelihood of infection or the severity of illness, vaccines lower the amount of virus or bacteria shed, thus decreasing transmission to others. High vaccination rates within a community further limit the spread of diseases.

#Here’s why:

##Reduced Infection Risk:

When you are vaccinated, your body is better prepared to fight off the pathogen, making you less likely to get infected in the first place.

##Lower Viral Load:

If you do get infected after vaccination (a breakthrough infection), the illness is often milder, and you may shed less virus, which makes it harder for you to transmit it to others.

##Community Protection:

When enough people in a community are vaccinated, the chain of transmission is broken, protecting those who cannot be vaccinated or for whom the vaccine is less effective.

Therefore, getting vaccinated not only protects your own health but also contributes to the health of the entire community by helping to stop the spread of infectious diseases

They key point is density. The denser the population, the more people need to be immunized for herd immunity to be effective, because the more people the average person comes in close contact with even only in passing.

It’s like the difference in walking six blocks in a sleepy town vs six blocks in downtown Manhattan. Even in “rush hour”, with the sidewalks at maximum typical capacity, the former might net you a dozen close encounters while the latter could easily net you 1,200 close encounters. If you are immunocompromised, the same level of herd immunity in the general population makes the former a much safer environment than the latter.

And in general, Europe tends to be much more densely populated than almost any other part of America short of the major metro regions, and they make their cities far more walkable and pedestrian-friendly, increasing the amount of potential interactions someone has; even just passing interactions.

Statistics can be wild.

Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.

This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Absolutely.

The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.

You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.

Thank you for that link.

Honestly, I don’t know why Lemmy doesn’t pester people to use Archive links when posting, or use an internal API call to auto-convert any link to an Archive link. It could make linkrot a thing of the past for this site.

• Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
• You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
• You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.

Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.

“Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets.”

Every year, Microsoft gives me more reasons to permanently leave their products.

Unfortunately, due to compatibility with financial and other Windows-only software I still need to run Windows, but I am down to two rigs and it might go down to one in the new year.

CEOs are invariably the parasites in virtually any company where they earn more than 10× than their median employee.

Nothing that can be done inside the business can justify compensation like that. Ergo: parasitism of the profits, of siphoning away more and more value that the workers produce just for themselves and those of their fellow parasites.

Yyyyyup.

The Socratic Method tends to be effective in many cases so long as the other person remains open to reason and logic, especially the requirement for evidence.

Brainwashing gets increasingly easy the younger the subject is. Children, in particular, have an evolutionary need to automatically trust adults and what adults tell them, as they don’t yet have the cognitive tools to handle the world around them. Trusting adults have been baked into that part of childhood development because, historically speaking, it gave a distinct evolutionary advantage. Those children that listened to adults had a much stronger probability of surviving until adulthood.

It’s why religions so strongly proselytize the young – get them young, get them for life.

All you have to do is make it illegal to expose or proselytize religion to anyone under 22, and religion would likely die out within 2-3 generations.

When you have been raised as a rationalist and know, at a fundamental level, the bullshit detection system called the Scientific Method, you need to have some pretty powerful mental illness in play to willingly grasp at religion.

Conservatism needs its masses of ignorant and near-illiterate electorate who cannot think for themselves and cannot use critical thinking to realize how badly they are being hoodwinked. This hollowing out of the educational system has been done on purpose to bulk up the Republican electorate.

And with the dismantling of the US Department of education, things are going to get a lot, lot worse.